Articles
Some records only make sense once you know what surrounded them: a studio, a city, a radio slot at an impossible hour, an engineer who had worked out which rules were worth breaking. This section is about what stands around the records, which means eras, scenes, labels and currents, with the dates in the right place and the sources at the foot of the page. It is not a history of music and does not pretend to be. These are partial cuts, chosen because they interest us and because they lead somewhere. No obligatory mainstream, no list of essential albums. If you finish a piece and go looking for a name you had never heard before, it did its job. When a person or a band is the centre of the story instead, the piece lives in Monographs.
No articles with these filters
Genre New wave
Steve Levine
LinnDrum
Before the metronome in the headphones, bands ran faster towards the end, and not by accident: they pushed on the choruses. A study of 255 Billboard singles pins down the year the drift died, and a British producer explains the night his machine drifted instead.
Genre Electronic
Alfredo Fiorito
Amnesia
The turntables at Amnesia had no pitch control, the DJ could not beatmatch, and the room was empty. Alfredo Fiorito moved the opening to dawn. What came out of it, England took home.
Genre Library
Jonny Trunk
Trunk Records
Jonny Trunk picked up a Bosworth LP by accident, knocked on the company's door in Soho, and ended up running a label. Thirty years later, a study built on a billion listening events explains why records like that one stay invisible to a recommender.
Genre Indie
Hamburger Schule
L'Age d'Or
A concert series in Altona turns into a record label at the end of the eighties. Around L'Age d'Or a generation goes back to singing in German, then spends ten years arguing with the name somebody else gave them.
Genre Dub
Spring reverb
Hammond Type 4
A spring inside a cabinet, put there to make a living room sound like a church. Knock the cabinet and the speakers went off like thunder, and for twenty years that thunder was a fault to be fixed.
Genre R&B
Soulquarians
Electric Lady Studios
From 1996 the studio Jimi Hendrix had built for himself in the Village was occupied for years by a group of musicians who recorded to tape, did no mixing for twelve months, and passed songs from one album to another. How the work went inside those three rooms.
Genre World
Ethiopiques
Buda Musique
A record brought back from a trip in 1984, the original masters found in Athens in 1997, and a series that was meant to run to twelve volumes and reached twenty-seven. How a French CD collection put twenty years of Addis Ababa music back into circulation.
Genre French touch
Alan Braxe
SP-1200 and Alesis 3630
A twelve-channel Mackie desk, a sampler with ten seconds of memory and a cheap rack compressor: that is what made the most famous French record of the nineties. Alan Braxe has listed the machines inside it, one by one.
Genre Library
De Wolfe and KPM
Music to catalogue
In the autumn of 1973 the best selling record in Britain was the theme to a television detective series, credited to a composer who did not exist. Behind it sits a trade already sixty years old: writing music to catalogue for whoever needs it, and never putting it on sale.
Genre World
Rail Band
Buffet Hôtel de la Gare
After independence in 1960, orchestras in Mali were founded by the president. The players were public employees, the instruments belonged to the state, and the best band of the lot worked the buffet of the railway station hotel in Bamako.
Genre Dub
British dub
Sound systems and home studios
In London dub did not arrive as a genre to import but as a trade to rebuild at home: first on the sound systems of the neighbourhoods, then in a front room in Thornton Heath with a second-hand tape machine.
Genre Disco
Italo disco
Before the name
For nearly ten years Italy produced dance music for export that had no name in Italy. A German distributor named it while looking at his shelves, and today that name means the opposite of what it meant then.
Genre Jazz
Strata-East and Black Jazz
The record stays with the player
In 1971 two jazz labels run by musicians opened in New York and Oakland. One left artists eighty-five per cent and the ownership of their tapes, the other was bankrolled by a country label. How they worked, and what stopped them.
Genre Library
Italian library
The sonorizzazioni of Piero Umiliani and Alessandro Alessandroni, made for a catalog rather than a film, became a mine for collectors and producers worldwide.
Genre IDM
Artificial Intelligence
Warp
Genre Electronic
Japanese electronic
One format, and it almost always starts from a received idea and takes it apart with dates, places and names. A scene never begins with a manifesto. It begins with a rehearsal room that came cheap, a record shop, a label that said yes to something nobody else would press.
These are among the longest pieces on the blog, and the ones where sources weigh most: every factual claim has its address at the foot of the page, and an encyclopedia entry is never enough on its own. The tags above filter by era and region, which for a scene are the two things that actually narrow it down.