A members-only room in a former parking garage, a custom Richard Long sound system and a DJ who retuned it all night. How Paradise Garage made the dance floor an instrument.
A cassette that sounded terrible, a TB-303 used as a funk bass and a Glasgow techno label with doubts about the tempo. How Da Funk was ignored in 1995 and then carried by DJs into a major-label deal.
How Planet Rock rebuilt Kraftwerk's Numbers and Trans-Europe Express, hedged with a B-side, and settled for a dollar a record.
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 […]
How Jim Jupp and Julian House built Ghost Box as a parallel Britain, from two 2004 releases to a Penguin-style grid and a hauntological catalogue.
In 1968 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop existed to score continuity idents, radio drama and the odd Doctor Who cue, not to make records. It had no mandate to release music and no budget line for a pop album. That did not stop two of its staff engineers from making one anyway, after the building emptied […]
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.
Chill Out was released on 5 February 1990 on the band’s own KLF Communications imprint, and it remains one of the strangest origin stories in electronic music. The record that gave a whole genre its name was not built in a studio full of gear. It was, according to its sleeve, recorded “live on location” […]
Moondog died on 8 September 1999, four months after Mr. Scruff sampled Bird's Lament on Ninja Tune. His rounds, odd metres and city sounds were loop music before the machines.
