On 4 August 1947, in a Berlin still boxed in by rubble and occupation zones, Klaus Schulze was born to a ballet dancer and a writer. He would grow up to be named among the founding fathers of synthesizer music. The detail worth marking on his birthday is stranger than the title suggests: when Schulze […]
There is a particular kind of band that history files under "influence" rather than "fame," and few earned that footnote more thoroughly than Budgie. Three men from Cardiff, a name borrowed from a pet shop, and a catalogue of riffs that turned up, decades later, on multi-platinum records made by people who were toddl
There is a useful test for whether a record is genuinely a source rather than a product. Strip away the melody, the vocal, the era it belongs to, and see if the skeleton still walks. Play the throbbing sixteenth-note bassline of “I Feel Love” with no voice on top and you are not listening to […]
For most bands, an underground reputation is a phase, a rung on the way up. For Les Rallizes Dénudés it was the entire architecture of a fifty-year career, built on refusal. No studio album. No interviews. No sanctioned records for decades. A frontman, guitarist Takashi Mizutani, who dressed in black behind dark sunglasses and receded
On this day in 1973, the largest paying rock audience ever assembled walked into a Grand Prix racetrack in upstate New York, and rock history has spent the last five decades pretending it barely happened. The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen drew roughly 600,000 people on July 28, 1973, a figure that held the Guinness […]
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 […]
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 […]
