Most dance scenes can be traced to a record, a machine or a room. The Balearic one is harder to pin down, because its founding document was a DJ’s running order, and the man who played it could not follow it home. Alfredo Fiorito, the Argentine who became the house selector of Amnesia in Ibiza, […]
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.
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 […]
Every genre has a signature sound that producers claim to have built themselves. The hoover is the one where almost nobody did. For thirty-five years the rave stab that opens a thousand records has travelled through hardcore, gabber, jungle, hard house, drum and bass and back into chart pop, and the overwhelming majority of those [&hell
Mono bass is not a law of physics. It is a fix for a mechanical problem in a disc cutting lathe, and it outlived the machine for reasons nobody planned.
Marseille has no Paris style club economy and a thriving electronic underground anyway. The reason is structural: a converted tobacco factory, a rap festival that adopted the machines, and collectives that double as political spaces.
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the thing that could get a nightclub raided was not the volume, the hours or the drugs. It was the dancing. A 1948 Law Written for Dance Halls Fueiho, the Law Concerning Business Affecting Public Morals, was enacted in 1948 under the Allied occupation. Its actual target was prostitution […]
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
