Before it meant IDM, Warp Records meant bleep and bass: how Sheffield and West Yorkshire producers built British bass music out of steel-city sub-bass and Detroit futurism.
In February 1978, a 22-year-old on Van Halen’s debut album spent one minute and 42 seconds rewriting what a guitar was allowed to sound like. “Eruption” landed like a piece of alien technology, and for a generation of players the two-hand tapping that powered it became synonymous with one name. The problem with origin
A Solo That Wasn’t Supposed to Survive In 1960, inside the low-ceilinged Nashville room known as the Quonset Hut, engineer Glenn Snoddy was cutting a Marty Robbins country ballad called “Don’t Worry.” When the session reached its instrumental break, the part Grady Martin was playing came back through the console
Most scenes announce themselves. They get a club, a compilation, a name coined by a journalist who needs a headline. Louisville, Kentucky did almost none of that, and somewhere in the gap between roughly 1985 and 1995 a handful of teenagers from the same river city quietly assembled the vocabulary that math rock and post-rock […]
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 […]
