Most techno origin stories point at a machine. Basic Channel points at a room, a record shop, and a mixing desk treated as a living instrument. Between 1993 and 1994, two men in Berlin released nine 12-inch singles under a smear of aliases, put almost no information on the labels, and quietly wrote the grammar […]
A two minute instrumental with no words, improvised at a 1957 Virginia sock hop, gave heavy guitar its two founding techniques. The lineage of Link Wray's Rumble.
Most electronic acts hide behind a logo because a logo is easier to market than a face. Drexciya hid because the hiding was the work. For a decade, two men from Detroit released some of the most physical, forward leaning electro ever pressed to vinyl, and they did it while building a fictional nation so […]
Ask most people to explain the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they will point at a pedalboard. Fuzz, reverb, chorus, a delay or two, stacked until the guitars melt. It is a tidy story and it is mostly wrong. The thing that gives Loveless its seasick, underwater tuning is not a box on […]
Dubstep was not born on a record but in a dark Shoreditch basement. How FWD>> and Plastic People's soundsystem forged a genre Thursday by Thursday.
Most rock scenes are born from clubs, labels, or a couple of bands who refuse to sound like anyone else. Zamrock was born from a policy memo. In the first turbulent decade after Zambia declared independence from British rule in 1964, president Kenneth Kaunda paired the slogan “One Zambia, one nation” with a broadcasting decr
There is no venue in this story. Sometime in the late 1980s, in the wind-scoured flats east of Palm Springs, a group of teenagers loaded amplifiers and a gasoline generator into a truck, drove until the city lights disappeared, and played until the fuel ran out. No stage, no address, no closing time, and no […]
On December 12, 1981, a German guitarist sat alone in his Berlin studio and pressed record before heading out on holiday. He wanted something to listen to on the plane. What he captured in a single unbroken take would spend the next decade quietly rewriting the rules of electronic dance music, even though almost nobody […]
A record-store manager with a documentary impulse When Roger Shepherd started Flying Nun Records in Christchurch in 1981, he was not trying to invent a genre. He managed a record shop, he liked the bands he saw play around Christchurch and Dunedin, and he wanted a way to document them before they disappeared. That modest, […]
There is a version of synthesizer history where the good stuff comes from sculpting: hands on filter cutoff, patch cables, a producer chasing a sound through a hundred small decisions until it belongs to them. Then there is the Korg M1, which sold roughly a quarter of a million units on the opposite proposition, and […]
