About House: When disco fell out of favour at the tail-end of the 70s, the sound went underground. In 1980s New York and Chicago, diehard lovers of the 4/4 stomp gravitated to clubs like New York's Paradise Garage in New York and Chicago's The Warehouse, where DJs Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles (respectively) were mixing up soul and disco classics with the newer electronic sounds emanating out of Europe – Italo-disco, Kraftwerk and synth-pop – for an audience comprised primarily of black and Latino gay men. Local producers then sought to capture this melting point of influences on record, and lo! House and garage music was born.
Right back to the jazz days, the east coast of the US has favoured smoother, more soulful sounds while the midwest has tended towards more stomping beats – hence house can be thought of as garage's brasher, louder sister and vice versa. Arguably the first indentifiably 'house' record was Jesse Saunders' 'On And On', released in 1984. By 1986 house music had begun to spread worldwide, but it wasn't until DJ Pierre's 'Acid Tracks' EP in 1987, which presented an even more raw, stripped-back take on the sound, that things really took off internationally. By that time, Detroit had already provided us with its own version of the artform, techno, and clubbers in the UK and Europe fell hard for what, at that time, sounded like music from outer space.
Fast-forward 30-odd years and house, garage and techno have spawned a hundred sub-genres: within house music alone there's deep house, funky house, progressive house, tech house, tribal house and so on, and that's before you even start to consider the apples that fell a little further from the tree, such as jungle, breakbeat and EDM. It's that constant evolution that keeps the artform fresh and vibrant – yet despite that, 'traditional' house music has never gone away, because, quite simply, house is the mothership for 99 percent of the electronic music we know and love today.
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