Electronic dance music didn’t begin with house or techno. It began in the 1970s, when disco producers and a group from Düsseldorf started letting machines keep time, and it took roughly ten years of new synthesizers and unwanted drum machines before anyone in Chicago or Detroit pressed a record we’d now call house or techno. This post covers those ten years and stops where house starts.
Electronic music itself is older than that (the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was making tape and oscillator pieces from 1958), but none of it was built for a dance floor. Disco was.
Disco built the dance floor
Disco grew out of New York parties in the early 1970s, and the people on those floors were largely Black, Latino and gay. David Mancuso held the first of his Loft parties on Valentine’s Day 1970, playing records for invited guests in his own home. The habits of every later dance genre were set in rooms like that one: a DJ instead of a band, and records blended so the beat never stops.
Disco also changed the record itself. DJs wanted longer versions with room to mix, so labels began pressing 12-inch singles. The first one sold commercially was Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on Salsoul in 1976, in a mix by Walter Gibbons that ran more than nine minutes. That’s the ancestor of the extended mix DJs still rely on.
“I Feel Love” and the all-synthesizer record
In July 1977 Donna Summer released “I Feel Love”, produced in Munich by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Until then, disco was played by rhythm sections and orchestras. On this record nearly everything came from a Moog synthesizer borrowed from the composer Eberhard Schoener, whose assistant Robby Wedel showed the team how to lock the parts to a click track. The exceptions were Summer’s voice and the kick drum. The Moog couldn’t produce a convincing kick, so drummer Keith Forsey played it.
The single spent four weeks at number one in the UK and reached number six in the US. David Bowie later recalled Brian Eno running into the studio in Berlin to say he had heard the sound of the future. Listen to the bassline: a sequenced pattern that repeats without a human player’s small variations, with a very human vocal floating over it. Most dance music since has worked on that contrast.
Kraftwerk, synth-pop and Italo disco
Kraftwerk, formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, came at it from the other side. They weren’t making club records. Albums like Autobahn (1974), Trans-Europe Express (1977) and Computer World (1981) treated the machine pulse as the whole point, and musicians in other cities borrowed it. In 1982 Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force built “Planet Rock” on pieces of “Trans-Europe Express” and “Numbers”, with the drums programmed on a Roland TR-808.
Synth-pop carried the same sound onto the radio. Gary Numan, Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Human League and Depeche Mode made synthesizers ordinary to a generation of listeners, and in 1983 New Order’s “Blue Monday” put a drum machine and a sequencer at the front of a seven-minute single. In Detroit, the teenagers later known as the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson) were listening to Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Depeche Mode alongside Parliament and Prince. May’s description of techno, years later, was “George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator, with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
Meanwhile, Italian producers kept making disco after the American mainstream had moved on, with synthesizers and drum machines in place of string sections. Records such as Kano’s “I’m Ready” (1980), Klein + M.B.O.’s “Dirty Talk” (1982) and Doctor’s Cat’s “Feel the Drive” (1983) were sold in West Germany under the name Italo disco, and import copies found their way back to American DJs.
Three Roland machines nobody wanted
The instruments most associated with house and techno were commercial failures first. The same Roland engineer, Tadao Kikumoto, led the design of all three.
- TR-808 (1980 to 1983). An analog drum machine that launched at $1,195. About 12,000 were built. Musicians who wanted realistic drums preferred sample-based machines like the Linn LM-1, and the 808 sounded synthetic next to them.
- TB-303 (1981 to 1984). A small bass synthesizer with a built-in sequencer, sold as a stand-in for a bass guitarist. Bassists didn’t think it sounded like one.
- TR-909 (1983). About 10,000 were built in roughly a year. It paired analog drums with sampled cymbals and hi-hats, and it was Roland’s first drum machine with MIDI, the standard that arrived the same year and let machines from different makers play in sync.
Because they failed, they turned up cheap second-hand, which put them within reach of young producers with no studio budget. The 909 kick is still the sound a lot of house and techno kicks are modeled on, and I’ve written separately about getting kick and bass to sit together.
Where house and techno take over
By the early 1980s the pieces were in place. In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles, a DJ from the Bronx, had been resident at the Warehouse since it opened in 1977, playing to a crowd drawn mainly from the city’s Black and gay communities. He re-edited disco records, extending intros and breaks, and around 1983 he bought a drum machine to run under them. Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979 is remembered as the moment the American mainstream turned on disco, but in clubs like the Warehouse DJs kept playing it and kept reworking it.
In Detroit, Juan Atkins and Rick Davis recorded “Alleys of Your Mind” as Cybotron in 1981. In Chicago in 1984, Jesse Saunders released “On and On”, made with a TR-808, a TB-303 and a Korg Poly-61, and often named as the first house record. From there it’s a different story, the one about how dance music went from underground clubs to global festivals.