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 […]
Most scenes fight over who started them. Bristol spent the 1990s fighting over what to call the thing at all. The genre the wider world settled on, trip-hop, was rejected by nearly everyone who supposedly invented it. Massive Attack disliked it. Tricky disliked it. Portishead distanced themselves so firmly that they preferred to talk ab
Most instruments are designed, then learned. The Roland TB-303 was designed, abandoned, and only then learned, and the learning had almost nothing to do with what its engineers intended. That gap between purpose and use is the whole story, and it is a lesson every producer eventually absorbs. The technique can outlive the function it [&
For most electronic subgenres, the music comes first and the dancing follows. Chicago footwork ran the other way around. The tempo, the stutter, the way a single vocal fragment gets chopped into a weapon: all of it exists to answer a body moving inside a circle. Strip footwork of the battle and you have removed […]
Ask most people to explain the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they will point at a pedalboard. Fuzz, reverb, chorus, a delay or two, stacked until the guitars melt. It is a tidy story and it is mostly wrong. The thing that gives Loveless its seasick, underwater tuning is not a box on […]
There is a version of synthesizer history where the good stuff comes from sculpting: hands on filter cutoff, patch cables, a producer chasing a sound through a hundred small decisions until it belongs to them. Then there is the Korg M1, which sold roughly a quarter of a million units on the opposite proposition, and […]
Most genres have one origin myth. Belgian new beat has three, and they do not agree with each other. In the most repeated version, a DJ known as Dikke Ronny was working the booth at the Ancienne Belgique club on Kipdorpvest in central Antwerp when he mishandled a changeover. The pitch fader was already parked […]
Every heavy guitar tone you love owes a debt to a design brief that fit in a single sentence. In 1969, Mike Matthews, who had founded Electro-Harmonix in New York a year earlier, asked a friend for a circuit that would sing forever. That friend was Bob Myer, a Bell Labs engineer, and the answer […]
Rock is not dead, but it is not in charge either. An honest look at a genre that keeps growing its streams while losing its grip on the culture.
