Every style of dance music I care about started in a particular room. This post follows the rooms: the clubs, cities and fields the music passed through on its way from small, dark clubs to festival main stages. The people have their own post, on the artists who took dance music from raves to radio.
Chicago and Detroit after disco
House grew out of what Chicago DJs did with disco in the early 1980s. Frankie Knuckles, who was from the Bronx, moved to Chicago in 1977 to become the resident DJ at a club called the Warehouse and stayed until 1982. DJs in the city began reworking disco records with drum machines to give them a harder, more mechanical beat. The name “house” is often traced back to the Warehouse, though people who were there tell the story a few different ways.
A few hours away, three school friends from Belleville, Michigan were doing something related. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson combined the machine sound of Kraftwerk with what they heard from the Chicago house DJs, and the result was Detroit techno. Atkins’s 1985 track “No UFO’s”, released as Model 500, is generally treated as the first techno record.
Both were local scenes built around a few clubs and DJs. The records travelled further than the people who made them. By January 1987 a Chicago house track, “Jack Your Body” by Steve “Silk” Hurley, was number one in the UK.
Ibiza, London and Manchester
The next step happened on a Spanish island. DJ Alfredo had been resident at Amnesia in Ibiza since 1983, playing the loose, mixed-up style that came to be called Balearic. In the summer of 1987 a group of British DJs on holiday heard it and came home wanting to recreate it.
Within months London had Shoom, run by Danny Rampling, and Spectrum, run by Paul Oakenfold and Ian St Paul. Manchester had the Haçienda. 1988 and 1989 became known as the Second Summer of Love, and the parties quickly outgrew the clubs. Promoters moved them into empty warehouses and then out to sites around the M25, the motorway that circles London.
The government noticed. A 1990 law raised the penalties for running unlicensed parties, and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 gave police specific powers over raves. It went as far as defining the music in law by its succession of repetitive beats. I can’t think of another genre that has been described in a statute.
Berlin and the rest of Europe
Berlin’s version came with a historical accident attached. The first Love Parade was a small street party in West Berlin in July 1989, a few months before the Wall came down. Afterwards, underground techno parties spread through East Berlin. Tresor opened in March 1991 in the vaults of a former department store and became a regular stop for Detroit producers. Techno had found a second home, a long way from the first.
Trance took shape around the same time in Frankfurt and spread across Europe through the 1990s. The Netherlands became one of its strongholds, and Dutch DJs like Armin van Buuren and Tiësto are a big part of why I make the music I make.
The festival era
The festivals that now define EDM for most people started smaller than you’d guess.
- Electric Daisy Carnival. Insomniac held its first EDC in 1997 at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. It was at the LA Memorial Coliseum from 2007 to 2010 and moved to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011.
- Ultra. It began as a one-day event on Miami Beach in March 1999, held alongside the Winter Music Conference.
- Tomorrowland. The first edition took place in 2005 in Boom, Belgium.
I’m based in Los Angeles, so the EDC story is the one I think about most. One of the biggest dance festivals in the country began as a party in an expo hall here.
The staging changed along with the scale. Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella set, played from a large LED pyramid, is the show people still point to, and the tour built around it is widely credited with bringing dance music to a wider audience in North America. After that, the visual production became part of the act. Steve Aoki throwing cake into the crowd is the cartoon version of the same idea.
What changed on the way up
A club and a main stage reward different things, and I think that’s the most useful thing to understand about this whole history. A dark room with one DJ playing for hours rewards patience: long blends, slow builds, tracks that take three minutes to show their hand. A festival slot is shorter and the crowd is bigger, so the music gets more direct.
I came to all this late. I made loops in FruityLoops in college in 1998 and didn’t return to production seriously until 2016, when the festival era was well established. What I write is progressive house and trance, which are club forms at heart, and that’s a large part of why the extended mix still matters to me.
If the names of the styles are a blur, I’ve put together a plain guide to EDM subgenres and where to start. And you can listen to my music on Spotify.