LECTURE 2 Flashcards
Phuture
Acid Tracks (released 1985/7)
What are we hearing?
Elements of Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’
Elements of Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’
Rhythm Part:
- 'Four to the floor' kick
pattern
- A 'Drum Track' made
with a drum machine:
Roland TR-707
Bass Part:
- Repetitive (1/2 bar loop) sequence in 16ths. - Made with an analog synth: Roland TB-303
What’s ‘House Music’ and where does it come from?
Detroit and Chicago
Techno originated in Detroit, Michigan (USA)
House originated in Chicago, Illinois (USA)
The two developed at the same time, 1980s: - same available technology - same/similar musical climate
Same general geographical location (4 hours by car)
- Direct
interaction/collaboration
between artists
- DJs exchanging records,
tracks and gear.
Same dance-oriented intentions
House wouldn’t be House without Techno, and vice-versa
The Detroit Music Scene, 1980
The first Detroit DJs came to know music via two main sources:
- WGPR Radio’s DJ Charles Johnson a.k.a. “The Electrifying Mojo”.
- Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Parliament Funkadelic and the B52s would feature regularly on Johnson’s nightly show called “The Midnight Funk Association. - Detroit dance clubs
- Commonly playing selections from NY Electro-Funk and American New Wave, but also European music such as Euro-Disco, English New Wave and European synth-pop.
Detroit - The ‘Belleville Three’?
Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson.
What can we take from the above about Techno’s origins?
“It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with nothing but a sequencer to keep them occupied” - Derrick May.
“When I first heard synthesizers dropped on records it was great…like UFOs landing on records, so I got one - Juan Atkins.
“In Belleville, it was pretty racial still at that time, ‘cos it was a decent area. You had to have a little money…there wasn’t a lot of black people there. Swe we three kind of gelled right away” - Kevin Saunderson
- Funk-inspired, purely electronic music, based upon grooves and sequences.
- Fascination with the future, science fiction and technology.
- Began as European influenced African American music.
The Europeans left us waiting. Somebody like Gary Numan started something he never concluded - Derrick May.
The real inspiration of European music was simply that you could make music with electronic equipment.
Cybotron - Juan Atkins and Rick Davis (proto-techno music)
Cybotron was formed in 1980 in Detroit
Cybotrons first three single releases were big local hits, and in 1983 they were signed to the record label 'Fantasy', producing further tracks until the mid-80s. - Alleys of Your Mind (1981) - Cosmic Cars (1982) Clear (1983) - Techno City (1984) - R9 (1985)
It’s Cybotron’s Techno City where the term Techno first appears. It wasn’t until 1988 that it was used to describe the Detroit brand of electronic music, at which time the style was firmly established.
Shortly after forming Cybotron, Juan Atkins formed the Deep Space Soundworks, a DJ company with Derrick May.
‘Disco Sucks’ Fever
-Rampant Commercialisation of Disco in the late 70s, its nadir (most unsuccessful point) being the film and smash album Saturday Nigh Fever, which brought about a backlash from conservatives and the rock generation.
Chomisky Park baseball stadium in Chicago was on July 12th 1979 the site for a ‘Disco Demolition Derby’ organised by Detroit DJ Steve Dahl.
The Disco Sucks’ phenomenon stemmed from a belief (mostly held by whites, though not exclusively) that disco was inauthentic, decadent and betrayed the true authentic American folk music, Rock & Roll.
“Disco music is a disease…The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague…” DJ Steve Dahl, 1979.
In their embrace of Disco, clubs like Chicago’s ‘The Warehouse’ and New York’s ‘Paradise Garage’ went against the tide of the dominant culture who assumed Disco to be an unfortunate mistake and well and truly over.
Euro-Disco (I Feel Love) - 1977. Donna Summer & Giorgio Moroder.
Three innovations of Moroder’s and Summer’s particular brand of disco can be seen as direct ancestors of Chicago House.
- The extended mix: I Feel Love at 8 minutes, and then even more so Love to Love You Baby at 17 minutes, far exceeding the radio-friendly 3-4 minute standard (i.e. this was specifically club music)
- The ‘four to the floor’ disco pulse rhythm (Moroder used a drum machine to simplify funk rhythms, reportedly to make it easier for whites to dance).
- It was generally almost entirely electronic.
“House didn’t just resurrect disco, it mutated the form, intensifying the very aspects of the music that most offended white rockers and balck funkateers: the machinic repetition, the synthetic textures, the rootlessness, the ‘depraved’ hypersexuality and ‘decadent’ druggy hedonism. Stylistically, house assembled itself from disregarded and degraded pop-culture detritus that the mainstream considered passe, possible and un-American..
If Dusseldorf (Kraftwerk) was the ultimate source for Detroit techno, you could perhaps argue that the prehistory of house begins in Munich. Here it was that Giorgio Moroder invented Eurodisco - written by Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash, 2013.
Proto-house - DJ Roots.
Frankie Knuckles at ‘The Warehouse’; Radio WMBX ‘The Hot Mix Five’
- Frankie Knuckles, a DJ from New York began spinning at ‘The Warehouse’ in 1977, previously working at New York’s ‘Paradise Garage’ alongside legendary DJ Larry Levan.
In the early 1980s, no longer having a steady stream of new disco product, Frankie Knuckles at The Warehouse, would rework existing material into new forms.
Inspired by the innovations of club DJs like Knuckles, radio DJs, notably the ‘Hot Mix Five’ began also to mix live, but on radio, with DJs Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley and ‘Farley Jackmaster Funk’ among them (later DJ Pierre of Phuture).
Proto-house:
This post-disco/proto-house music was constructed largely out of existing musical material by montage, segue - essentially remixing, a more radical approach to techniques originating with disco DJs in the early 1970s.
Existing material would often be disco club classics from the likes of Giorgio Moroder or from US soul and disco music record labels like Philadelphia International and Salsoul.
The Drum Track
- In time Knuckles and others started to use a live drum machine as an extra rhythmic element in their mixes, often reinforcing them with a four to the floor kick-drum pattern.
- Most often these drum tracks were made with one of Roland’s many drum machines, such as TR-707, TR-727, TR-808, TR-909 (Knuckles reportedly bought his TR-909 from Derrick May).
Later, rather than played live, drum tracks might be recorded by DJs to reel-to-reel tape - such stock drum machine sounds as synthetic hand claps and sampled kick, snare and hihat patterns became common features.
With this final element - the drum track - the ‘house’ style emerged: re-edited, re-mixed, re-imagined disco records, reinforced by drum tracks with the ever-present four to the floor kick drum beat.
‘House’ originated as a term in the early 1980s to describe the kind of music that you would hear at The Warehouse. It was born not as a distinct genre but as a way of re-inventing (remixing) ‘dead’, mostly disco music.
Ron Hardy at ‘The Music Box’
In 1982 Knuckles opened his own club ‘The Power Plant’, the purists following him there.
‘The Warehouse’ relocated and became ‘The Music Box’, employing DJ Ron Hardy.
The two DJs playlists were quite similar, though delivered very differently:
- Knuckles’ sets served to extend the disco medium with great attention to sound quality.
- Hardy played a lo-fi, faster, more repetitive and stripped-down version, often using EQ with pronounced effect.
- The younger crowd were more attracted to the ‘craziness’ of the Music Box, here the more radical sounds of house found a home.
The First Chicago ‘House’ Records
Your Love (Jamie Principle, 1984/6) - Born Byron Walton, Jamie Principle's main musical influences were Prince, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Human League and Italo-disco music.
- Featured repeated arpeggiated synthesizer line, synthesized bass line and drum machine.
- Became very popular via Knuckles at The Power Plant, Knuckles later releasing a 12” single of it in 1987.
On and On (Jesse Saunders, 1982/4)
- Saunders, spinning at ‘The Loft’ in Chicago in the early 1980s would regularly leave his drum machine (a Roland TR-808) going and mix tracks in and out…one source he liked to use was a bootleg copy of Mach’s On and On.
- So the story goes, this record was stolen from Saunders. No longer able to play it, he recreated it using an TR-808, a Korg 61 Poly keyboard and a TB-303.
- Was released in 1984 on Saunders’ Jes Say label, one of the first home-grown artists to appear on vinyl.
“When Jamie was doing it, nobody thought of making arecord. His shit was too good….That’s what inspired everybody about Jesse. They saw somebody make it big…But not be that great…Jesse changed music, man…” - Marshall Jefferson, in Last Night a DJ Saved my Life.
The Detroit Sound mix-1980s - Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson
Atkins, May and Saunderson (and others) may have made their music in Detroit, but their outlet was Chicago, in particular Ron Hardy’s ‘The Music Box’ club.
Atkins left Cybotron in 1985, starting his own label Metroplex on which each of the ‘Belleville Three’ released singles.
- No UFOs (Juan Atkins, 1985)
- Let’s Go (Derrick May and Juan Atkins as X-Ray, 1986).
- Strings of Life & Nude Photo (Derrick May as Rhythim Is Rhythim, 1987)
Triangle of Love (Kevin Saunderson as Kreem, 1987)
By the late 80s each of the ‘Belleville Three’ had their own record label.
Explosion of the Chicago House Scene
- By the mid 1980s The Hot Mix Five had an audience of over half a million.
The Hot Mix Five shows were for many, the first introduction to live mixing- among those under their influence was DJ Pierre (of Phuture).
After Saunders’ release of On and On there was a flurry of releases as everyone realised that with a few pieces of home studio gear they too could make a track
‘House’, i.e. the music that you heard at The Warehouse, now filled most of the shelves in Chicago record stores.
“You know what, all we gotta do is make a record and put ‘house’ on it and it’s gonna fly off the shelves…And that’s essentially what we did” - Chip E, in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 2006.
In clubs, a system of patronage evolved, where a producer would construct a track for a particular DJ:
- Knuckles would favour polish and sound quality
- Hardy reportedly would play anything to get people moving, himself and his followers always under the influence of a cocktail of psychedelic drugs.
