Thirty-eight years ago this week, on 22 August 1988, 10 Records and Virgin put out a single that had no business existing. “Big Fun” by Inner City was not conceived as a hit, not written for a label, and not even actively pitched by the man who made it. Kevin Saunderson had recorded the backing […]
The remix is now so ordinary that it barely registers as an idea. Every release arrives with alternate versions attached, every streaming profile carries a shadow discography of other people’s edits, and nobody thinks of it as a format at all. But the remix was not designed. It was the accidental byproduct of two separate [&hellip
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.
Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall. The birthday gets marked every year. The more useful anniversary is the second half of that sentence, because the label he ended up co-founding was not built out of a taste. It was built out of a postcode. A supply […]
Every retelling of the Amen break opens with the same statistic: the most sampled recording in history, thousands of tracks deep. It is a true fact and a useless one. Counting appearances tells you the break spread. It does not tell you what anyone actually did with it, and that is where the interesting lineage […]
In 1983 Roland set out to fix a machine that was not broken so much as misunderstood. The TR-808 had been dismissed as a toy, its synthetic booms judged unconvincing next to the sampled snares of the LinnDrum. So the TR-909 chased credibility: a crisper snare, six-bit sampled hi-hats and cymbals, and MIDI to lock […]
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
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.
How a sealed bank vault under no-man's-land became the room that carried Detroit techno into reunified Berlin.
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 […]
