Lou Reed died on 27 October 2013 at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 71 and had received a liver transplant earlier that year. The obituaries reached for the usual list: the Velvet Underground, “Walk on the Wild Side”, the songs about New York. Less often they mentioned the guitar trick that […]
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.
The Echoplex was built to repeat your notes. Plenty of guitarists bought one, switched the echo off and kept the preamp, and the box that was meant to be invisible became part of the sound.
Most clubs treat the floor as a place to stand. In October 1999, fabric opened beneath Smithfield Market in London and treated it as a loudspeaker. The idea was simple enough to explain and strange enough to feel: if low frequencies can be felt as well as heard, put the machinery for feeling them in […]
Athens, Georgia had almost no music business in the late 1970s. A record shop, a bulb-lit club and a heatless church built the scene instead.
David Mancuso, born 20 October 1944, built The Loft as an invitation-only home party with a serious sound system and no alcohol. Most of the modern club still follows his rules.
Spacemen 3 built The Perfect Prescription in Rugby as a trip with a beginning, a peak and a comedown, using almost nothing but repetition and tone.
Ten seconds of memory, twelve bits and a sample rate half that of a CD. The E-mu SP-1200 was a limited machine, and the limits became a sound.
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.
