Experience house music in its earliest, most experimental form. Born from the ashes of disco simultaneously in Chicago, New York, and to a lesser extent cities like Newark and Detroit.
This is the decade where it all started. Its roots are tangled up with the predominantly gay and black nightclubs of the era, most notably The Warehouse in Chicago. It was at this place that Frankie Knuckles blended disco, italo and electro into all-night sets that were so influential across the city that people started looking for that “warehouse music”, later on shortened into just “house music”. Its rise across the city was helped by a group of radio DJs known as the Hot Mix 5, who turned its sounds from something only known to the Warehouse regulars to something sought after across the city.
It was in 1984 that a Chicago-based producer Jesse Saunders released his record On & On. Pressed into 500 copies, it is now widely regarded as the first house record, however calling it an original track would be a bit of a stretch. It was mostly a bootleg mashing multiple other tracks, including Player One’s “Space Invaders” (1979), Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” (1979) and
and also the decade where it first spread across the world. Most notably to the UK, where it blended with the early rave scene into a cultural phenomena known as the Second Summer of Love.
While this is the decade where house music styles that we know today such as tech house and deep house gained its first steps, what was vastly more popular at the time was the sound of a discontinued Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. Produced between 1981 and 1983, it was meant to imitate the sound of a bass guitar, but it was a commercial failure. That failure made it cheap. Once electronic music producers got a hold of it, they turned it into a phenomena known as acid house.
Deeper Cuts
Beyond the anthems lay the raw, experimental experiments of the late 80s. Acid house was bubbling under the surface, and producers were pushing their Roland TB-303s to the limit. These deeper cuts represent the underground energy that fueled the early rave scene before it reached the mainstream.
