How did this happen?

Why am I here?

How does this even work?

Why does it work?

It's not unusual for your brain to throw up questions of this ilk, or even those more deeply existential, when your body has truly relinquished its agency to the beat. But hold tight to that beat, trace it back to its source, and you might open your eyes in an old parking garage.

New York, 1979

It's a Saturday night in Lower Manhattan, and Larry Levan is enacting Disco's revenge. In the 70s, disco was being done to death. Quite literally. But with its roots firmly planted in the black and queer communities, the white heterosexual male – that ever-unrepresented corner of the population – dealt with this encroachment, this panic at the rise of two minority groups, in a manner characteristic of a majority that fears its position of privilege is under threat.

That is, with derision and eventually, violence: violence that culminated in the infamous Disco Demolition Night in the July of the year you now find yourself. Swap the heat of the crowd for that of flames as, in a manner disconcertingly reminiscent of other burnings of art and culture (1933, anyone?), a mountain of disco (and jazz, soul, funk, essentially any ‘black’ music) records are ceremoniously incinerated in a bonfire, at the centre of Comiskey Park, a baseball stadium in Chicago.

The message is clear: despite steps in the right direction over the last few decades, the door to mainstream culture is firmly shut to the black and queer communities.

A space in which these individuals could claim some ownership, where they could feel safe, needed to be carved out of the peripheries of society.

You're in that space now. Larry Levan is delivering his Saturday mass, he is playing disco records on the kind of sound system that makes the air shimmer with sonic gold. But he's not just playing disco, it is not simply a matter of one record playing after another.

You find your mind being played with. Hooks loop for longer than they should, tracks are stripped back to drums and bass alone, disco vocals overlay the percussion from hip hop breaks, sets of five or six songs tell a story, weave a narrative, before a sound bite or pause indicates the beginning of a new paragraph.

Like this.

At Paradise Garage, you find time and space distending, weekends fly past in the blink of an eye, humanity swirls around you, the air grows hotter, the drums heavier, the room darker, and at the end of one of Levan's particularly percussion heavy paragraphs, you look around to see your surroundings have changed, you're in a three storey warehouse in downtown Chicago. In front of you lies a trap door. As you open it heat blooms upwards, a muggy cloud of sweat and sound, and you descend.

Chicago, 1983

There's good reason for you to do this. Frankie Knuckles is there, tending to a petri dish of percussive grooves and wheeling bodies, the human terrarium that grew house music.

It takes a little while. The music you hear evolves and mutates, Frankie borrows drum machines from Detroit (thank you, Derrick May, Roland and the city of Detroit, who get far too little coverage in this article), records brought over from NYC, and the disco tracks become minimal, chunkier, the drive of the drum machine sits under looping bass hooks and vocal samples, the sets extend through the night and into the next morning. The music becomes relentless, hypnotic.

At The Warehouse, in the very city where Disco Demolition Night took place, you discover a space which, like Paradise Garage, is created by “an exclusion in society which is both racist and homophobic”, where “the production and consumption of this music has generated a sense of community, of belonging, thereby creating its own definitions of normality”. [Rietveld, 1998]

To distinguish itself, “this music” is born out of the constituent parts of songs that mainstream culture might find most aesthetically displeasing, repetitive, incomplete. And when Knuckles gets his hands on a Roland TR-909, he can keep that beat playing relentlessly all night long, splicing that drumbeat with loops and samples from disco records or reel-to-reel tapes.

It is in that space that you begin to feel that house music can only be truly understood within the context that it was created, in the sultry darkness of the club, a crowd of dancers responding in kind to that beat, a beat amplified by sound system technology into something that is felt, not listened to. Emphasis on low-frequencies and advancements in music technology shows the beat the door to your body.

If “understanding dance as a response to house music is about the recognition and utilisation of evolving technologies and cultures” [Hawkins, 2009], then there, as you become part of the mass that responds to the beat, you become responsible for the creation of yet more songs designed for the very space you've inhabited. People start making records that Frankie has crafted through the use of a drum machine and tapes, tracks that are percussive led, looping, minimal and raw.

A few of these frisbee out of the crowd, landing flush on the turntable platters. These are tools, crafted as minimal, percussion-led bricks with which the DJ builds his house, your house, Jack's house, whoever's house.

It mutates, spirals organically, beyond the grasping reach of corporate record labels whose requirement for verse, chorus, bridge, for beginning, middle, end, isn't satisfied by the yearning incompletion of house music. The finish line that always remains just out of sight, keeping crowds dancing in perpetuity. It is the true democratisation of music. Anyone with access to this (relatively) cheap tech and a love for the sounds they hear at The Warehouse can turn their hand to electronic music production, adding their own personal slant to the essential Chicago House sound.

The beat goes on, no break in dancing required as records blend and dissolve into each other. As you continue to ‘jack’, half-frenzied at this point, your perception of the crowd shifts. Moving in unison, you experience a “togetherness… mediated through the vitality of musical style which becomes an embodiment of dancefloor aesthetics” [Hawkins, 2009].

Who is the DJ?

Who made this track? Who's that on my left? Who am I?

The answer? It doesn't matter. You exist in a microcosm of anonymity and oneness. A warm rush courses through your body – you are the DJ, the music, the crowd, the “separation between the ‘self’ and the outside world disappear” – and in this moment at which you can truly let go to this point, you are “‘reborn’ in a world where only the music and its rhythm is the law” [Rietveld, 1998]. True escapism. The world as it ordinarily is gets left behind. You exist in an unrepeatable singularity outside of which there is nothing. You are not there, and yet you are all that exists.

But snap out of it for a second.

The World, then to now

Leave your body where it is for now, you don't really need it anyway, and step out to the fresh, clean air outside. The beat is muffled now, distant but insistent, and it echoes across the Atlantic to the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium – it hammers away across Manchester, Amsterdam, Berlin and Ibiza – fills the caverns of the Haçienda, RoXY, Shoom and Tresor – guides lost souls with tattered A-Zs to farmers fields, palm-fringed beaches, lakeside woodlands and abandoned docklands.

As the beat exploded, it fragmented into shards of sound and memory, became an ever-expanding web of genre and cliques. The unrepeatable escapism of house nights became moments designed to be captured on a screen, the singularity of the moment reflected back as flickering LEDs on a handheld device, washed out, reduced. But still, in some places the beat pulses in its true, unadulterated form.

Back in 2026 you open your eyes and a flashing strobe light renders the scene into a tableau of frantic statues, “fragmenting one's perception of movement and thereby one's sense of time giving a sense of timelessness” [Rietveld, 1998]. In the right circumstances, with the right crowd, that same trance-inducing 4/4 beat you can be threaded right back to Chicago, New York and Detroit in the 70s and 80s. The joy of timelessness is that, ironically, it helps you access those other moments that share that timelessness, it helps you travel through time.

It was Mike Skinner who probably summed this up best when he said: