Note: An update to this story is published here.

FOR FOUR YEARS I've been chasing a ghost.

I've been told by some people to leave the ghost alone, while others have all but berated me for not pursuing him harder. This story is almost certainly going to make some of them mad and some of them happy, and probably many more who knew nothing of the details very sad. I expect I'm going to get hate mail from people who will read nothing more than the title and ask how dare I write about this. At this point, I don't have any choice.

But let me start at the beginning.

Spencer Kincy was giant in Chicago's House Music revival - part of the second wave of younger DJs and producers that took the music of the early 1980s, rubbed it up and dropped it in places like 500 West Cermak, Medusa's and the Vault. A lot of people who are now superstars of the scene - Mark Farina, Sneak, Derrick Carter, and dozens of others - were a part of that movement, too. Spencer released a number of tracks on Relief, Planet E, Cajual, Peace Frog - labels representing the classics of that era - and he usually recorded under the name Gemini.

And as gritty, as grimy, as jarring and noisy as his productions could be, he could also make them sing. His collaboration with JT Donaldson, the Duality EP, wasn't just a play on his DJ name. A track like "Changing Times" was deep, controlled, almost gentle, presaging some Deep House currents by nearly a decade. And he could follow it up with a jarring track of completely abstract sounds - a thunder that would shake the 16 inch reinforced concrete walls of a warehouse. He could work with live musicians or filter a disco loop, pound it into the ground and make it more inspirational than any gospel choir, as he did on "Stand Up" (Relief). The output was eclectic, and sometimes it missed its mark, but he always pushed the envelope forward.

Gemini: Stand Up (Relief)

At one point, he had four full length albums in stores - two, In and Out of the Fog and Lights and Imagine-A-Nation - released at about the same time on two different labels. That isn't so rare today, but at the time it was almost unheard of.

Gemini: What You're Gonna Do?

But I don't think any of those recordings captured the genius of Gemini behind the decks. As a DJ, he operated in his own space - I'm sure he could play for a room, and sometimes did, but the unrestrained madness of a Spencer Kincy DJ set had to be heard over several hours to appreciate. He could blend a sleazy disco track into hard acid, downtempo into a punishing Armani track, jazz into Detroit techno and so on. It wasn't technically brilliant or tricky, but the selection was exquisite. He cued up a record and let it rip - almost like he was rolling a tire downhill, aware of the general direction it was going but unsure of just where it might end up.

It might not have been for everyone, but Spencer had a pretty devoted following. And a number of figures from that era still list him as an influence, even as they're guessing, just like I have been, what happened to him.