A prominent artist of Chicago’s 3rd wave of House music, Change Request aka Andrew Emil, is a respected fixture and familiar face in the city's vibrant and diverse music scene. A concert-trained percussionist since age 11, he earned a chair in his native Kansas City Symphony before moving to Chicago in the late '90s to commence a thriving relationship with the city's ever-evolving House music aesthetic.
As a traditional musician, Andrew has worked as a keyboardist, arranger, and orchestrator on recording sessions and productions, cutting his teeth at the former Chicago Trax Recording Studios under House music innovator Vince Lawrence. Credited on over 250+ recordings, Andrew's composition and studio productions range from concert works and sound design to film scoring stages and hundreds of releases of electronic music productions. In recognition of his contributions, he was invited to join the Chicago chapter of The Recording Academy’s New Member Class in 2024.
Andrew's Change Request moniker is the existential summation of his musical range - the sonic embodiment of his chameleon self. It is an avenue for the personal re-working of Soul, Jazz, and beyond – augmented with contemporary danceable and introspective music - a modern vernacular expression of urban stories via subtle, dance-inducing sounds...
K: How long have you been in the music scene?
C: My life in music started at 12. I studied percussion in middle school, and I studied with a teacher. I got a chair in the Kansas City Symphony and played percussion. And in the midst of all that during high school, at the same time (as) playing in the orchestra, I was playing drums in punk rock bands. And, when I did undergrad, I studied music composition and acoustical engineering.
K: What were some of the punk bands you played in - are there any recordings?
C: Area 51, mainly. No, recording was too expensive in the '90s.
K: Oh OK.
C: During high school, I started playing jazz piano, my primary instrument. The DJing also started around the same time. I began buying records when I was about 16 or 17. That was my first introduction to being involved in electronic music — around '97 — and when I got pretty serious about buying records. I moved to Chicago in the late 90s to do music and to go to school at Columbia College).
During college, I interned for a guy named Vince Lawrence at Slang Music out of Chicago Trax on Larrabee and Chicago Avenue, where they recorded a bunch of Industrial—Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Wax Trax!, the Matrix soundtrack, and more. R. Kelly had a whole second room on that floor, where we worked down the hall.
K: Yeah.
C: I worked late nights there for six years, working for Vince. And he taught me a lot about the business of music and some stuff about recording, too. And so I kind of cut my teeth at Chicago Trax there - learning the business and the art of making records and been making records ever since, and DJ'ing.
K: Wow. That's cool, man. Were you working with Screamin' Rachel while you were over at Trax?
C: No, as Chicago Trax Recording is not the label Chicago Trax, and they are not even affiliated. Chicago Trax Recording was a studio run by a guy named Reid Hyams, and it was mainly a commercial studio. Nice rooms, consoles, and location, but absolutely no affiliation with the label Chicago Trax. It was just a small unmarked building right on the corner of Larrabee and Chicago - back when Cabrini Green was there.
K: That's cool. Do you still collaborate with Vince Lawrence?
C: Yeah, Vince and I have worked together ever since then in certain capacities. He's been making records in the city for a long time and he comes from a really interesting legacy. His Dad ran Mitchbal Records, so he grew up in the record business. He was in a band called Z-Factor and he made "the first House record ever" with Jesse Saunders, (On and On). His Dad just passed recently, so condolences again to him and his family.
K: Right. Yeah, condolences for sure, man.
C: Bringing these two stories together — Vince started the label Chicago Trax with Larry Sherman and Jesse. They ended up getting cut out of the picture and Larry just took it and kept going. Many years later, Vince actually did sue to get the rights back. He worked to get all the rights back - exactly 40 years later - a sort of reparation of rights for the recording artists.
When I first started working for Vince, I learned how to shop music to A&Rs. I would front-load what I considered the hot stuff or my best work, and then I would give them options — like 10 or 12 songs on a demo instead of just 2 or 3 — because I have a lot higher chance of them saying, "Hey, I like tracks 4, 5, and 9. Let's do an EP." I learned that trick from Vince back in the day.
“Music is a sacred art that connects our species across lands, languages, time, and space. The magic in the math of music and its residual spirituality are powerful forces of human evolution and wonderment." - Change Request
K: You moved to Chicago when you were 18, right? Where did you move from?
C: Kansas City, Missouri - just about 500 miles southwest of here, roughly. I grew up there and got into dance music there. I had big Jazz influences, as Kansas City is a really big Jazz city. Around the time I was finishing high school, I felt like I reached the ceiling there and I wanted to be somewhere else.
K: Yeah.
C: A lot of the House music records I was buying at the time were Cajual, Prescription, and artists like Glenn Underground, Chez Damier, Ron Trent, Gemini, Boo (Williams), Jordan Fields, Derrick (Carter), Sneak, etc. Chris Nazuka, that kind of stuff, as I was a traditional musician and I played instruments.
My older brother was into electronic music long before I was; but he was really into Industrial stuff like Front 242, Skinny Puppy, a lot of Wax Trax! stuff - Lords of Acid, this kind of music. When I first heard this music, it felt mechanical with ridged grid sequenced drum machines and didn't feel really human to me...
There was a local DJ named Pat Nice in Kansas City who I'd heard play music often, and I loved the records he was playing. I was like, "Wow! This is electronic music, but it sounds like humans made it!" Come to find out, it was on labels like Cajual, Prescription, Balance, and Relief from Chicago, and I developed a strong connection to these records. Those records — all released by Cajual Entertainment, which is Cajmere/Green Velvet's label on Goose Island — are the ones that drew me to the sound of Chicago.
"Keeping an innocent, exploratory, and practical approach to the creative process, along with incrementally expansive expectations, will ensure that the transformative capabilities of this sacred art are leveraged with emotion and meaning.” - Change Request
K: Is Cajual's studio still on Goose Island?
C: It's not. I feel that it should be a landmark though. You can drive by the address, 1229 N. North Branch, but it hasn't been there for many years. Goose Island is an interesting place in the city, I think there's an interesting energy that happens there. A good friend of mine, Howard Bailey, ran an awesome club on Goose Island for a long time called Slick's Lounge, and that was a fun spot for many years, right down the street from Cajual.
Goose Island is quite a fascinating little place in the city. It's an island with only the Chicago River separating it. When you drive over the bridges on Division St. you feel like you're just going over the river and back to land again., but you're driving onto an island.
K: When I first heard the name Change Request, I thought it was like a group and I thought it was you and maybe somebody else. Then over time, I realized it's just you, but can you give me a rundown on Change Request?
C: I moved to Chicago in the late '90s, and I started making House records. I made House records for a long time, and I recorded under a variety of different names. Mainly as Andrew Emil, but also as After Monday (with Gene Farris), Broadway & Wilson (with Jeff Bloom), and Uptown Tones (with Pat Nice) as I lived in Uptown for many years on the corner of Broadway & Wilson. Pat Nice was my earliest DJ mentor and he also moved to Chicago to live with me for a bit.
Around 2011, I was getting really burnt out on making House music, as it felt like I was making the same record over and over again. I felt like I was getting to the point where I said all I had to say. It became a predictable pursuit from an artist's standpoint, personally. I was getting bored with making the same sort of thing.
I wanted to start a new project with the goal to to not have a prediction about what the music was to sound like. The idea of the Change Request project was to explore everything from downtempo and mid-tempo to acid music, film music, and more.
I refer to as "Incidental Dramatic Music". Because you kind of have an incident, there's a drama that goes away. It could be anything from that to Ambient stuff to Acid House to mid-tempo dance to whatever. Like, there's no boundaries restriction to genre. And that if I don't know what the next record is going to sound like, then no one else should have an expectation for it either.
And Change Request was kind of the container and the canvas that I put that stuff into and said, "Change Request is going to be whatever it's going to be. And I have no goals for its commercial success outside of I just want to make whatever I want to make without attaching my Andrew Emil name to it," which people know as a House producer or artist or whatever. And that this thing is (actually) a change request, which comes sort of from the idea of wanting to change the course of something; but also from the corporate world, which a change request is when you submit something to have something changed.
So I didn't do myself any SEO value by using that name, by the way. Of course, the first 10 pages of Google are telling you about the corporate understanding of the change request, which is an IT thing. It's a corporate thing.
K: Right.
C: Very common system, a function of process, right? But yeah, to me, that name resonated because that's really what it was. And I also like the idea of something being two words and a sort of a slogan or something that could look cool and fun or, you know, a tag or or a signature and that it wasn't a name and it wasn't me. And so what that ended up being was, like I said, this container that I put anything into.
And since then, it's been four LPs - full-length albums, about 15 EPs, and a whole bunch of singles. And there are a lot of...my stuff, but a lot of it's my stuff where I feature other people. So there's a lot of different features and there's stuff - anything in there from, like I said, instrumental film music to Downtempo to Lo-Fi Hip-Hop to dance music to Smooth Jazz to Acid House, you know, and anything in between.
The real project for this was after I'd done a couple of EPs under the name, the first project I worked on was Chez Damier - was one of those. And what I wanted to do was - part of the sort of being over making House music at the time - was I decided to go on this two or three year journey where I was going to make a piece of music every day based upon whatever inspiration or feeling I had for the day. And if I didn't have one, I was going to go back to my sort of college understanding of composition, which was they teach you how to, you know when you study composition in a conservatory, they teach you how to write music through a process of writing études.
An étude is a French word for "study". And what an etude is, is it could be you've seen études on piano, you've heard them, you know, every composer who's ever written music has written a series of études in their life. And what an étude is, is it's a study into a technique or a skill to be practiced.
So, like, it could be an étude for a piano player, which is a piece of music that focuses around a certain technique that you want the piano player to be better at; but it's actually a full-on piece of music that sort of centers around a technique. A compositional étude would be like, "I want to write something that has a sort of a goal in mind to, like, practice that technique." So, for me, I did a whole series of études where I was just taking the music, writing it and putting it in a folder.
And what I would do is, if the day I didn't have a feeling or something, I would just use two adjectives and say, what is red - ominous red, you know, what does ominous romance sound like; or what is, you know, purple; you know, spooky sound like or something like this, right? And that would be the only goal of writing that piece of music is, like, does it meet those two adjectives? And so I did that for a couple of years without wanting to release any of it - to silo all of it. And I had collected about 180 pieces of music over the course of two years. And then I was like, "well, what do I want to do with this stuff now?" It's because I've got music that's all genres, all sort of moods and grooves and tempos and feelings and whatever.
And so I decided that I wanted to approach the idea of making an LP and making a full length album. And what I wanted to do was - for the full length album - here's what the plan was - I was going to write a story about what this album is about. And so the first LP I did in 2019 under this name, after releasing a handful of singles and EPs was - it was an unrequited love story with a Canadian partner.
And it was a story about this person who they fall in love. And, you know, they have this long distance relationship. And then the person breaks it off. And it's kind of a sad moment, but then they come back and realize that like, hey, that was just part of a learning process and this is what life is. That's the story.
And I wanted to highlight that story over the course of 10 tracks. So I needed to plot out, like, what emotions happen at what time. And so - but because I made all these pieces of music that were based around emotion and color - I just plotted out what emotions we need to happen here. And I plugged in those pieces of music like that. And that's how the first album came together.
So it tells a story that wasn't written from a story standpoint to begin with. It was written a silo piece of emotion, like, so what is, you know, again, red love sound like or, like, you know, purple angst or whatever. And so I took the pieces of music and plugged them into the plot. And so when you listen to the first album, it's called "RightOnRed". There's a plot behind it. And when you listen to it, you can tell that there's a story, but it wasn't written like as a linear way.
K: Right.
C: Like, it was - I pulled from these pieces of music that I'd siloed into this place and put it together like that. And then I did three more albums in the same way, different stories with different ways. And they concentrate on sort of different thing
But to me, a full length album should have, you know - I always want to make an album because I made a bunch of singles and stuff over the years. But, to me, I kind of gawked at the idea that I'd see people, you know, dance music producers, whatever, make albums. And it's like just a collection of tracks. Like it's not really what an LP was (that) we all grew up (with), right?
Like we grew up in an era where, like, an LP was a full experience and you looked at the artwork and you read liner notes. And it's like this whole listening thing. Like you listen to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd or something. It's not just a collection of tracks. It's a story, you know? And so I wanted to like - how can I make a story without the weight of, like, having to start from scratch and, like, write this music out like this? So I sort of, I don't know - I wrote a bunch of music without the intention of doing anything and then sort of put it together later. And that's been my process for making albums.
K: Wow! And you say you made three albums?
C: There's four altogether and then there's a fifth one on the way for a label in Lisbon in Portugal that will be out next year.
K: Cool. How would you define/describe your concept of "Incidental Dramatic Music"?
C: It’s like a photograph, in many ways. The goal is creating music that significantly defines a space or place that illustrates an emotional fragment captured in time. It starts off, develops into a place of focused musical drama and then disappears.
K: Cool. Cool. So what do you prefer to DJ? Drum'N'Bass, House or Techno?
C: Oh, man. I mean, you know, it's like this. I mean, I get it because I've been doing House music for so long. I always get booked for House sets, which I still love playing House music. It's great. It's a part of my DNA. Has been since I was 16 years old. I'm 43 now. So it's been a huge part of my life.
But I am of the - and the thing is I have such a large taste in music that I don't get to play a lot of the music I like to play for the bookings I typically get. Because House music, as you know, is sort of, you know, when I get booked for certain gigs, it's like you get a couple hours set and whatever. But when I was - when I started when I was growing up DJing, you know, back in the day, you would usually play the whole night. It was very common.
I had a, you know, Thursday weekly residencies and stuff. I'd play for seven, eight hours at a clip, you know, and that allows you to cover the gamut of music. And I like - I love all sorts of kinds of music. So I've always been a fan of that. There's a time and a place for everything. And the course of that sort of period in a day like, you know, banging Techno at 2 p.m. on a Sunday is not the right time or place for that. But like, you know, a slow R&B song at 3 a.m. ain't the right place for that either. You know, like there's a time and a place, right? And I feel like I really love to play as long as possible so that I can cover a bunch of ground.
So when you ask that question, it's challenging because what I like to play and what I actually get to play often aren't necessarily the same things. But with that being said, what I really, really love to do is to open up a room over many hours, because then I can start from Ambient - sort of instilled dramatic music or background sort of vibe stuff, build it up through Downtempo and then leave and be done at 120 BPM around House or, you know, walk that through Disco and, you know, Smooth Jazz and all sorts of stuff.
Because then I get to play a bunch of music I don't normally get to play in a DJ set and I get to hear on a loud sound system because I'm always booked to play House gigs. So, yeah, I guess that's it. I hope that answers the question. Like, I like playing lots of different things, but I'm not always, I don't always get the opportunity to.
K: So you must have been stoked when Alfonz De La Mota invited you to spin a Drum'n'Bass set at "Bass On The Beach".
C: Yeah, man, for sure. I don't get to play drum and bass as often as I'd like to either. ) I mean it's - Drum'N'Bass has been a part of my life for a long time. And I work with, you know, one of my really - one of my best friends in the world, who I work with a lot, is a woman named Audio Angel from San Francisco. She's a bass singer, written so much music together.
We've been writing music together since I was in my early 20's, and she's been on my albums and we've done a ton of stuff together. We used to have a band together in San Francisco called Sunny Scoundrels and (we) talk together still regularly. And yeah, you know, I just I bring her up because we're still a pretty intense collaboration together.
And she has been such a guiding light with Drum 'n' Bass in my world because she is just such a star in that world. And it's just really to share that kind of stuff. And then, Fortune, you know, being from the UK, is just - has such a massive influence and the taste - and Drum'N'Bass is a part of it. And we played for Alphonse together, which was really great.
Fortune is the blueprint for the DJ I would like to be more of, as she is someone who can play everything from Trap, Grime, Drum 'n' Bass, House, Techno, 2-Step, and UK Garage in an hour and a half. And I'm just like, "Man, I can't cross that much ground". She does it in a way that's really - it's effortless. So I would, like, I could get across all that ground maybe in 4 or 5 hours, but I couldn't do it in 90 minutes. You know, that's a real big deal to be able to pull that off - that amount of ground and that amount of time. I give Fortune a lot of props for that.
K: For some reason, Jeff Mills comes to mind when you talk about her, you know - in his swift changes.
C: Sure. Definitely. I mean, it's like the part of that, too, is that there's 2 things that are important to that is one, you have to be sort of fearless in your ability to say, "I'm going to do this." And then the fearlessness comes in part two, which is you have to have a crowd that's up for it. And then you have to be fearless with the idea that if you don't have a crowd that's up for it, that's just what it's going to be.
You know, you may clear a dance floor, but your fearlessness led you to say, "I'm going to do this because I think this is what I want to do." And so this is kind of part of what DJing - the sort of give and take with DJing - is in general is, you know, DJing always, to me, is a conversation with an audience. So I always show up with a bunch of music I think is going to work that night. And then I let that conversation tell me what to play and how to play it; but, sometimes, like with her, what I was saying with Jessica, it's interesting is that you sort of have to be fearless about like, "hey, I may lose everybody here."
And that conversation we're having, I may stop talking to you and you may walk away until you hear something that you want to come back for. And sometimes there's, like I said, there's a fearlessness to that because no DJ in their right mind would say, "Hey, I'm up for clearing a dance floor." But a strong selector would say, "This is where I want to go with this and I'm going to do this and you're either going to come with me or you're not."
K: Right. Yeah.
C: So I find that to be intriguing, which is why, like I said, I think it's really cool to see someone cross that much ground in 90 minutes; because you really have to have a crowd that's up for that ride because that's a lot. That's a lot of moods and grooves going through in a short amount of time. And not everybody's up for it, but when you find the right crowd, man, they get really into it.
K: Yeah, for sure. Who are your other Drum'n'Bass influences?
C: LTJ Bukem, Ed Rush & Optical, DJ Odi, DJ Zinc, Soul Slinger, Goldie, Adam F, DJ DB, Roni Size, DJ Raw.
K: So let's talk about Viva Acid. That's something that you started during the pandemic. Was that a collective brainchild or what?
C: So, Luis Baro is somebody I've known forever. Luis, lives in New York, but he's from Chicago. He threw parties and raves here - one of the largest rave promoters Chicago has ever seen back in the '90s called Vibeonauts. And I used to play for Luis pretty often back then, and then he moved to New York and we still stayed in contact and he continued to throw events.
Luis had become a really good music producer and a DJ - excellent music producer - and, like I said, continued to throw events and he came to me and said, "Hey, I wanna do something again, but I want it to be different. What do you think?" And so, me and Bryan Bai-ee, who are also friends, got together - started talking about wanting to do something different.
"What would the different events look like? Well, let's have talks and workshops and sort of this thing" - and so we kind of brainchilded it together. But it was Luis' idea to start to do something different and make it about Acid House, and had the name for it, and then we all worked on it together, and so we started in 2020 - October of that year and it's grown ever since.
K: Cool man. Yeah, I think that was a major step in Chicago reclaiming that Acid House , you know, that London so often tries to claim.
C: I mean part of our goals with this were, you know - that's part of what when he came to us and said, "what does this look like"; and Bryan I started putting ideas together, you know, we wanted to be clear about what our intentions were.
And our intentions were a couple of different things - three really - stood out...and some other things - but it's really these three - is we wanted to do something more than just throw a party, because we've done that a bunch of times, hundreds, thousands maybe.
And we wanted to do something that was about reclamation, like you said, not just of Acid House but that, you know, reminding people that this is a Black (and Brown) music from Chicago, and that this is where it started and the here's the reasons why. Not just where it started but, like, here's all the people that were a part of this that you can meet in person, that we are talking to, that are telling their stories in their experience.
And do that on camera so this is documented because we felt like that was part of what was missing was, like, a true sort of documentation of some of the stuff too. And then, third, we wanted to make this as an engagement opportunity for people who are under our age bracket to learn about this stuff and define opportunities and to explore creativity.
So that's kind of what fed into the sort of, talks, topics, conversations, workshops; and then, sort of, how the artists are curated for it was a cross-generational thing that's really sort of a handing-off of this stuff to a youth culture from people who are stewards of it, like ourselves, for so many years. And then reminding people that this is a Chicago thing that came from Black communities in Chicago; and it grew from there, you know - grew into it is, but that this is, you know, that's the story.
K: How do you differentiate Acid House culture and House culture?
C: Well Acid House - that's really interesting - you know, I think how we define it is very much so that...Acid House culture and Acid House, in general, is really truly the original Chicago House music. Like House music and House music culture existed before House music records were made. Like the culture that led up to Jesse Saunders' On and On or a bunch of records that came out in '83 and '84 were produced by a culture of people playing music in a certain way at a variety of venues - also the street parties - and whatever, you know.
But when the actual music started to being pressed on records - what defined the actual music to be Chicago House music - was something that was different than the dance records that were being made before or that were being played at the Warehouse and Music Box; and that's when Acid house comes into place because that is the original Chicago House music on-record genre sound.
Like Jesse Saunders' On and On is an Acid House record - maybe the first House record - whatever you want to debate about all that, but what is absolutely true is that all of the stuff that came after that - that was really, actually, became defined as Chicago House either has a leaning towards tracks or beat tracks or some of the harder acid records that were coming out when they started incorporating this; and that is still to this day, you know, an absolute legacy of the Chicago House music sound, you know?
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