Tangerine Dream spent hours a day tuning a Moog that had no memory. The drift is on the record, and it is the best thing about it.
The Melvins did not just influence Nirvana. On 23 January 1988 their drummer played on the demo that became Bleach.
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.
Greg Sage meant the Wipers to be records without a road. The mystique never paid the bills, but the records outlived the plan.
Most dance scenes can be traced to a record, a machine or a room. The Balearic one is harder to pin down, because its founding document was a DJ’s running order, and the man who played it could not follow it home. Alfredo Fiorito, the Argentine who became the house selector of Amnesia in Ibiza, […]
Underground Resistance refused photos, wore balaclavas and built its own distribution. How a Detroit collective turned anonymity into independence.
Roland put a stereo chorus inside the JC-120 in 1975, then moved the same circuit into a pedal. How the Boss CE-1 turned an amp feature into the sound of a decade.
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 […]
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 […]
