A History of House and Garage Music

House and garage are two related yet distinct musical trends that have enjoyed popularity for roughly two to three decades now. Disco, the Seventies' music sensation that peaked with the silver screen's depiction of John Travolta's dance movies in Saturday Night Fever, is the precursor to house music.

The Birth of House Music

House's electronic beat driven sound was honed and synthesized in the early Eighties dance club scene. House music is thus named for its origin point in a Chicago dance culture establishment known humbly as the Warehouse. The musical style was crafted by the Warehouse's deejays who, throughout the course of spinning records for hours on end, sought to intensify the aspect of the music. Hence, the deejays made it less poppy and diversified the mix by overlaying jazz, latin, reggae, rap electro-pop and dub tracks over the increasingly machinelike drum and bass grooves. The results were usually entirely instrumental as well. The New York City club scene took a cue from Chicago as well; the former's midtempo and downtempo mixes stood apart from the latter's insistent uptempo formula.

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Forefathers of house music from the Warehouse and the Chicago scene include the likes of Jessie Saunders, Mr. Fingers, the pseudonym of Larry Heard, Knuckles — or Frankie Knuckles — and the collective called Phuture, the team of artists who are credited with the first acid house record. The acid tag's origin has been debated over time, but is less ambiguous than most think and is perhaps related to use of the drug in clubs, or rumours thereof.

Beyond The Warehouse

House music took a few years to find its place on the pop charts; by the late Eighties and early Nineties, not only had house music secured a place, but subgenres were born like seedlings that had spawned from a great tree. Acid house, ambient house, deep or garage house and — by the end of the Nineties — progressive house became the three most prominent styles, some of which were distinguished by a particular bass sound or drumbeat. While house music reach plateaued in the Nineties, the platform that had been laid down continues to be streamlined by artists like Daft Punk, Future Sound Of London, Plastikman and Coldcut.

Garage House Music

The aforementioned garage house style is an east coast manifestation, as opposed to house's birthplace in the Windy City. Like house, garage also gets its name from the club where its deejay cultivator discovered it, New York's Paradise Garage. Instead of the robotic, machinelike rhythms of other house blends, garage house is described as more organic and soulful. While initial live mixes of disco records were the key, the actual turn of the latch came about in a different club southward in New Jersey. There, deejays infused the garage sound with gospel, latin, soul and tribal influences which proved to be more popular with blacks than latins and whites. This popularity eventually found its way to Europe, where it exceeded its status in the Eastern United States.

Beyond The Beats

Born of experimentation by club deejays who sought new venues to exploit their techniques, house and garage music are much more than paint-by-numbers variations of Beats 101. From underground clubs where the seminal sounds of house were first danced to, house fused wildly different musical genres and gave the new hybrid a new identity with new rhythmic schemes. That said, all dance-oriented electronic music still owes a debt to German electro pioneers Kraftwerk, active since the early 1970s.