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 […]
Cosmic disco was never really a genre. It was a club on Lake Garda, a DJ who played records at the wrong speed, and a cassette network that carried the room far beyond its 700 capacity.
Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
Mono bass is not a law of physics. It is a fix for a mechanical problem in a disc cutting lathe, and it outlived the machine for reasons nobody planned.
Marseille has no Paris style club economy and a thriving electronic underground anyway. The reason is structural: a converted tobacco factory, a rap festival that adopted the machines, and collectives that double as political spaces.
The Paisley Underground had no shared sound. What held the Dream Syndicate, the Bangles, Rain Parade and the Three O'Clock together was a 1972 compilation and a handful of terrible clubs.
Before Auto-Warp arrived in 2005, every track in Ableton Live had to be gridded by hand, and for four years that tedium was somebody's paid job.
Most scenes are named after the fact, by journalists reaching for a shorthand. Anatolian rock is one of the rare ones that arrived with a brief. In 1965 the Istanbul daily Hürriyet announced a competition called Altın Mikrofon, the Golden Microphone, and attached a rule to it that read less like a contest condition than […]
