In May 1992 tens of thousands found a common in Worcestershire. Two years later the law had a definition of the music they danced to, and the sound system that helped cause it was already rebuilding the party in France.
Underground Resistance refused photos, wore balaclavas and built its own distribution. How a Detroit collective turned anonymity into independence.
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 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 […]
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 […]
How a sealed bank vault under no-man's-land became the room that carried Detroit techno into reunified Berlin.
