The unexpected sudden loss of Frankie Knuckles last year – two days after he’d played his final set at his favourite Ministry Of Sound – hit the dance music community hard and inspired the kind of torrential grief which greets music’s biggest names. Frankie was house music’s James Brown or Phil Spector; a gamechanger who, along with Chicago’s other pioneering DJ Ron Hardy (its Hendrix), laid down the templates and defined the positive spirit which he carried until the end.
It’s a testament to Frankie’s principles that he would rather retire from making records rather than bow down to the trance monster which seemed to be consuming his baby for the sake of big bucks in the late 90s. And in the 21st century he certainly wasn’t about to get sucked into the EDM atrocities being perpetuated in the name of the music he named with his nights at Chicago’s Warehouse in the early 80s. Frankie never went to Vegas and if he did he wouldn’t have budged an inch for jugglers or a poncey light fountain. It seems fitting then that the great man’s hallowed record collection should be preserved for the general public, with Chiago’s Stony Island Arts Bank Building housing his 5000 records.
A 17,000-square-foot neoclassical edifice in South Shore, the Stony Island Arts Bank Building is the brainchild of Chicago artist and urban planner Theaster Gates bought the building from the city as a dilapidated shell for $1 back in 2012 before setting about renovating it via his his Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit organization that attempts to invigorate blighted communities by turning underused or derelict spaces into cultural centers.
The records are organized in a hybrid system with the first part of the collection arranged alphabetically by artist and grouped into one of ten genres with the rest is divided into 30 small numbered batches, which correspond to the traveling cases Frankie kept them in. A master list of the vinyl will be made available in the Arts Bank’s library and so far, the database includes artist, title, label, and catalog number. If you want to have a look through the collection in the flesh you’ll need to complete a free orientation to learn the protocols for handling the materials which to us sounds like a fair deal.
Opening October 3rd, you can find more information on the Stony Island Arts Bank Building here