There is a useful test for whether a record is genuinely a source rather than a product. Strip away the melody, the vocal, the era it belongs to, and see if the skeleton still walks. Play the throbbing sixteenth-note bassline of “I Feel Love” with no voice on top and you are not listening to […]
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 […]
Most electronic acts hide behind a logo because a logo is easier to market than a face. Drexciya hid because the hiding was the work. For a decade, two men from Detroit released some of the most physical, forward leaning electro ever pressed to vinyl, and they did it while building a fictional nation so […]
On December 12, 1981, a German guitarist sat alone in his Berlin studio and pressed record before heading out on holiday. He wanted something to listen to on the plane. What he captured in a single unbroken take would spend the next decade quietly rewriting the rules of electronic dance music, even though almost nobody […]
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 […]
After Sunday's race at Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, the question that earlier in the week sounded rhetorical has its answer. The F1 after-parties in Montreal are real, sponsored, and built around music, not cars. We map the venues, the headliners, and the math that proves it.
The 2026 Canadian Grand Prix is one race, seventy laps, about two hours of motors. Around it Montreal opens four full days of live music across Crescent Street, the Port of Montreal, Jean-Drapeau and Square Phillips. We tally the stages and ask what is really the headline.
A field guide to Montreal's 2026 underground rave circuit: Stereo, Newspeak, Salon Daome, Datcha, SAT/Domesicle, and the daytime brunch-rave Croissound is running out of Saint-Henri cafes.
