Where it came from
While the South Side was making tracks designed to wreck a room, Larry Heard was doing something else with the same equipment. A trained drummer who came to house from jazz fusion, he wrote chord progressions that would have been at home on a Herbie Hancock record and put them over a drum machine.
The results - Mystery of Love, Can You Feel It - are built almost entirely on a Roland Juno-106. The chorus circuit on that synth, a simple bucket-brigade delay, is doing more work than any other single component. It is why those chords sound like they occupy physical space.
This is where house stopped being purely functional dance music and became something people listened to at home.