In May 1992 tens of thousands found a common in Worcestershire. Two years later the law had a definition of the music they danced to, and the sound system that helped cause it was already rebuilding the party in France.
The Echoplex was built to repeat your notes. Plenty of guitarists bought one, switched the echo off and kept the preamp, and the box that was meant to be invisible became part of the sound.
Most clubs treat the floor as a place to stand. In October 1999, fabric opened beneath Smithfield Market in London and treated it as a loudspeaker. The idea was simple enough to explain and strange enough to feel: if low frequencies can be felt as well as heard, put the machinery for feeling them in […]
Athens, Georgia had almost no music business in the late 1970s. A record shop, a bulb-lit club and a heatless church built the scene instead.
David Mancuso, born 20 October 1944, built The Loft as an invitation-only home party with a serious sound system and no alcohol. Most of the modern club still follows his rules.
Spacemen 3 built The Perfect Prescription in Rugby as a trip with a beginning, a peak and a comedown, using almost nothing but repetition and tone.
In 1981 Yellow Magic Orchestra made a record around a sampler that existed in a single hand-built copy. The ideas it carried travelled much further than the machine.
Greg Sage meant the Wipers to be records without a road. The mystique never paid the bills, but the records outlived the plan.
Ten seconds of memory, twelve bits and a sample rate half that of a CD. The E-mu SP-1200 was a limited machine, and the limits became a sound.
Gilman Street opened on 31 December 1986 with a ban on alcohol and a vote for every major decision. Four decades on, the governance is the thing that survived.
