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

Most scenes are named after the fact, by journalists reaching for a shorthand. Anatolian rock is one of the rare ones that arrived with a brief. In 1965 the Istanbul daily Hürriyet announced a competition called Altın Mikrofon, the Golden Microphone, and attached a rule to it that read less like a contest condition than […]

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 […]