How Planet Rock rebuilt Kraftwerk's Numbers and Trans-Europe Express, hedged with a B-side, and settled for a dollar a record.
The Electric Eels played five shows in Cleveland, lost their last venue to a lawnmower, and became a legend through one Rough Trade single and decades of archival releases.
The Number That Moved the Snare Open any drum sequencer and you will find a dial labelled swing, usually a percentage. Most producers treat it as a feel knob. It is better understood as one of the most successful pieces of interface design in electronic music, because it reduces a drummer's lilt to a single […]
The Room That Was Built for Films Most legends about Hamburg’s Star-Club begin with the Beatles. Start instead with the building. Manfred Weissleder opened the club at Grosse Freiheit 39 on 13 April 1962, and the address was a former cinema. That detail explains almost everything about how the place worked. A cinema is a […
How Jim Jupp and Julian House built Ghost Box as a parallel Britain, from two 2004 releases to a Penguin-style grid and a hauntological catalogue.
On 29 September 1986, Iron Maiden released Somewhere in Time, and the sleeve promised a machine age: a cyborg Eddie, a neon city, and guitar synthesizers credited on the record for the first time in the band’s career. The detail worth keeping is a smaller one. The song that started life on a synthesizer is […]
In 1968 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop existed to score continuity idents, radio drama and the odd Doctor Who cue, not to make records. It had no mandate to release music and no budget line for a pop album. That did not stop two of its staff engineers from making one anyway, after the building emptied […]
In the 1930s, engineers at Bell Labs had a problem that had nothing to do with music. Long-distance telephone calls arrived thin and unnatural, stripped of the small delays and reflections a voice picks up in a real room. Their fix was mechanical: a spring stretched inside a housing, with a transducer at each end. […]
In 1965, the biggest song in Peru was about blowing up a train station. “Demolicion” was a national radio hit, its band had its own television show, and its four members were teenagers from a middle-class Lima neighborhood who had never heard the American garage bands they are now compared to. Outside Peru, almost nobody [&h
Every house and EDM track built in the last twenty years carries a rhythm inside its rhythm: a bassline or pad that visibly ducks and swells under the kick drum, breathing in time with the beat. Producers call it the pump. It is now a single knob in every DAW’s stock compressor. In 1996, it […]
