This Is A Podcast About House Music

ThatPodcastGirl C.Dub
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This Is A Podcast About House Music. A deep dig into house music history by city and decade. ASMR-style storytelling, spoken slowly and in a moderated tone, built for long listening sessions. The kind of show you put on autoplay while you work. -ThatPodcastGirl C Dub. All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com   Reach me at ThatPodcastGirlCdub@gmail.com

  1. 17h ago

    S4 E2: The Missing Twin: Chicago, Belleville, and the Boys that Built Techno (in the 80's)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Season 4, Episode 2 "The Missing Twin" Hello house fans, it's ThatPodcastGirl Cdub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. For years, this story got told a certain way: house came first in Chicago, and then, a little later, techno showed up in Detroit — almost like a colder cousin arriving late to the party, borrowing a sound that already belonged to somebody else. I want to tell you right now: that version is wrong. Because at the exact same time Frankie Knuckles was reshaping disco on Chicago's West Side, something else was happening less than a day's drive away — in a bedroom outside Detroit, on the same kind of drum machines, powered by the same kind of hunger to make something nobody had heard yet.  This is Case File Number Two: The Missing Twin. Case note one: the family tree was filed wrong. Here's the lazy version of this story, the one you'll hear if you only read one paragraph about it: house came first in Chicago, techno came later in Detroit, so techno must be house's little cousin — house with the emotion drained out and the chrome painted on. That's tidy. It's also not what the record shows. Juan Atkins — one of three friends from Belleville who'd go on to shape this whole sound — released "Alleys of Your Mind" under the name Cybotron in 1981, on his own tiny label, out of a relationship formed at community college with a Vietnam veteran named Rick Davis, a synth expert with serious gear who taught Atkins the basics of electronic production. The record sold well locally around Detroit before most of Chicago's foundational house records had even been pressed. So this was never really a straight line — Chicago first, Detroit downstream. This was two things happening at close to the same time, in the same Midwestern corridor — Chicago on one end, a small town called Belleville outside Detroit on the other — connected less by geography than by records, machines, radio signals, and hunger. The cleaner file, the one we're opening today, says this: Chicago house and Detroit techno are fraternal twins. Not identical. Not parent and child. Born close together, sharing real DNA, raised by two different rooms. And when the family tree gets filed wrong, everything after that gets distorted — who gets called original, who gets called derivative, who gets centered, and who gets footnoted. Case note two: the DNA. Before we get into what made these two sounds different, I want to be honest about what they actually share, because the twin metaphor only works if the DNA is real. Both cities were drawing from disco and its afterlife. Both were drawing from funk and soul — Detroit especially from Parliament and George Clinton, whose influence on the Belleville Three runs so deep that Derrick May would later describe their entire sound as, in his words, something like George Clinton and Kraftwerk trapped in an elevator with nothing but a sequencer to keep them company. Both cities were drawing from European electronic music — Kraftwerk's fingerprints are on both Chicago house and Detroit techno, just pressed down with different weight. Both cities had access to the same generation of drum machines, synthesizers, and sequencers, newly cheap enough for teenagers to get their hands on — the same handful of Roland boxes showing up in bedrooms on both sides of this story, even if the exact gear evolved a little differently city to city. And both cities had radio as a lifeline. Chicago had WBMX and the Hot Mix 5, turning club music into citywide youth culture. Detroit had a DJ named Charles Johnson — everyone called him The Electrifying Mojo — who ran a five-hour show called The Midnight Funk Association on WGPR, with no format restrictions at all. One night he might play Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" back-to-back with Parliament, then Prince, then something nobody in the room had a name for yet. Same DNA. Different nursery. That's the whole case. First nursery: Chicago. We're not going to rebuild the Warehouse for you again — you already know that room. You already know Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy and the Music Box. You already know Jesse Saunders and "On & On" and the whole contested first-record argument. That's Episode One's file. What I want you to hold onto here, for comparison's sake, is the shape of Chicago's upbringing. House was raised inside a room. A specific address. A specific crowd, packed close enough to become one organism. A specific DJ reading that crowd in real time and deciding, song by song, whether tonight's version of the record worked. Chicago's question, the one baked into the music itself, was: How do we hold this room together until sunrise? That's the nursery. Bodies. Sweat. Proximity. A dance floor that could kill a record or crown it. So if Chicago's twin was raised by the room, Detroit's twin was raised by the signal. Second nursery: Detroit. Now here's the twin nobody raised in that room. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson met at Belleville High School — a small, mostly white farm town about thirty miles outside Detroit. Of a school of a few thousand kids, they were among a small handful who were Black. That distance mattered. Close enough to catch Detroit's signal at night. Far enough that they weren't standing inside a Chicago-style club sanctuary at all. They were three teenagers in a bedroom, lying with their feet in each other's faces, listening to the radio until five in the morning. Belleville was not the Warehouse. There was no room packed wall to wall. No ceiling dripping onto dancers. No DJ standing three feet away watching bodies react in real time. There was distance. Quiet lawns. Car culture. A city close enough to haunt the imagination but far enough away to become myth. Detroit reached them through radio first — not as a room they were standing inside, but as a signal they had to decode. Derrick May would later describe those nights almost exactly like that — himself and Juan lying in bed, facing opposite directions, feet by each other's heads, listening to whatever the Electrifying Mojo decided to play that particular hour, and wondering what the people who made those records had been thinking about. Detroit had rooms too. Detroit had dancers too — we've spent whole episodes in those rooms. But this twin's origin story keeps returning to a different kind of nursery: the bedroom, the radio, the small town outside the city, the machine, the signal arriving late at night, telling three Black kids that the future was something they were allowed to imagine too. Juan Atkins took that signal and built Cybotron with Rick Davis — "Alleys of Your Mind" in 1981, "Clear" the year after, tracks that sound less like a party and more like a city quietly talking to its own machinery. Derrick May took the same machines and let them crack open emotionally — "Strings of Life" doesn't sound cold at all. It sounds like circuitry having a breakdown and a breakthrough in the same four minutes. And Kevin Saunderson, working with vocalist Paris Grey as Inner City, gave the machine a smile — "Big Fun" put a hook and a voice on top of Detroit's sound and sent it into the charts without losing the pulse underneath. There's a detail here worth keeping, because it says something true about how casually great work sometimes arrives: by Derrick May's own account, "Big Fun" almost didn't make the 1988 UK compilation that would end up naming this whole genre. It was the last track added, almost as an afterthought, with Kevin apparently calling it "a piece of shit" before Juan went back into the studio and cleaned up the vocals. Nobody expected it to do anything. It went on to sell millions of records. Detroit's question, the one baked into techno, was different from Chicago's. It wasn't how do we hold this room together. It was: Can we imagine another world from here? Exhibit five: same machine, different alibi. Here's the part of this case I find genuinely moving, once you sit with it. The exact same drum machine — an 808, a 909, the same circuit board, the same factory — could become two completely different things depending on which city plugged it in. In Chicago, that drum machine became something like a prosthetic for the dancer's body. A reliable pulse, built to keep a room of people locked together in the dark. In Detroit, that same drum machine became proof that the future could be programmed by Black hands. The machine isn't the meaning. The city decides what the machine is for. Chicago used repetition like a hand on your back, keeping you inside the groove until your body finally gave in. Detroit used repetition like a vehicle, taking that same body somewhere else entirely. Chicago said: come closer. Detroit said: look farther. Case note six: the naming. For a while, this genuinely was one big, messy, overlapping conversation — Detroit producers listening to Chicago house, Chicago producers making tracks that would later get filed as techno-adjacent, before either word had fully hardened into its own category. Then, in 1988, a UK dance music entrepreneur named Neil Rushton approached the Belleville Three about licensing their records for a compilation overseas. And here's the detail that matters most for this case file: the word "techno" wasn't handed to the Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    14 min

  2. 6d ago

    S4 E1: Who Built The House in House music? A Cold Case

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Season 4, Episode 1: Who Built the House? A Cold Case Hey my sexy listeners, it’s thatpodcastgirl Cdub, and This is Season Four of This Is A Podcast About House Music. And this season, we're doing something different. We're treating the history of this genre like a case file cuz ya’ll love true crime podcasts. Case file number one. The question everybody thinks they already know the answer to: Who invented house music? Ask a casual fan, you'll get one name back almost every time: Frankie Knuckles. The Warehouse. Chicago. Done. Next question. And look — that answer isn't wrong, exactly. It's the same way "Al Capone ran Chicago" isn't wrong. It's true enough to repeat at a party. It just isn't the whole file. Because the second you start pulling threads, you find other names insisting they belong in this story too. A guy named Jesse Saunders, who says he made the first house record, on vinyl, that you could actually buy. A guy named Chip E., who says Saunders is wrong, and that his record is the one that actually invented something new. A DJ named Ron Hardy, at a club called the Music Box, where songs didn't get released so much as they got put on trial in front of a dance floor that could make you or break you in real time. So here's the case we're opening today. Not "who did it" — because "it" isn't a crime. The case is: how did the story get this scattered? And what were we actually looking for when we asked the question in the first place? Let's start with what we thought we knew, because you have to state the assumption clearly before you can take it apart. The assumption is this: Frankie Knuckles invented house music at a club called the Warehouse. Here's the version of that story you've probably heard. 1977. A club owner named Robert Williams opens a members-only spot at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago. He brings in a DJ from New York — Frankie Knuckles — to run the booth. The crowd is Black, Latino, largely gay, and they are there to dance in a way that most of America's clubs were not built for. Knuckles plays disco, imports, reworked soul and funk records, stretching songs out, building the night like it's one long piece of music instead of a sequence of singles. And then — as the story goes — kids around the city start going to record stores asking for "that music they play at the Warehouse." Somebody shortens it. "House music." A genre gets its name from a building. It's a great story. It's got a location. It's got a hero. It's got an origin myth as clean as anything Marvel ever put out. Frankie Knuckles becomes "the Godfather of House," and the case, as far as most people are concerned, is closed before it opens. But here's the thing about clean stories. They're usually hiding a body. So let's actually build the case file. Because once you lay the evidence out side by side, you start to notice something — nobody's lying, exactly. They're just each holding a different piece of the same crime scene. The Warehouse is real. It opened in 1977, it operated until 1982, and Chicago's own city landmark records confirm that this was the room where Frankie Knuckles helped shape what would become house music. That's not folklore — that's in a municipal document. But here's the complication. In its early years, the Warehouse wasn't playing "house records." There was no such thing yet. It was playing disco, it was playing imports, it was playing reworked soul and funk cut up and extended for the dance floor. The Warehouse might be the birthplace of a culture and a name — but it was not, in its first years, the birthplace of a recorded genre. Those are two different crime scenes, and we've been treating them like one. Knuckles earns the title "Godfather" honestly. He came out from New York after Larry Levan — a legendary DJ in his own right — turned the Warehouse residency down. Knuckles spent years building that room into one of the most important spaces in Chicago nightlife. But — and this is the complication that keeps showing up in this case — Frankie Knuckles didn't make the records. He shaped a room. He didn't stamp vinyl. If the question you're actually asking is "who made the first house record," Frankie's name doesn't even come up first. Which brings us to our next suspect. In early 1984, a DJ named Jesse Saunders releases a track called "On & On" on his own label, Jes Say Records. It's built around a Roland 808 drum machine, and it's widely cited — including by most historical accounts — as the first house record ever pressed to vinyl. This is a genuinely different claim than "invented house." This is "made house into a product." Before Saunders, house was something you experienced live, in a room, mixed by a DJ. After Saunders, house was something you could hold in your hands and sell. But — and here's where the case file gets messy — not everyone agrees "On & On" deserves that crown. Which brings us to our fourth suspect, who has a bone to pick. Chip E. released the Jack Trax EP in 1985, featuring two tracks — "It's House" and "Time to Jack" — that a lot of historians point to as the actual blueprint for the drum-machine-driven Chicago sound. And Chip E. himself has made a pointed argument over the years: that Jesse Saunders' "On & On" was really a rebuild of an existing disco edit — not a new piece of music — while his own record, "It's House," was something genuinely new. New enough, in fact, to be the first record to use the word "house" as the name of this specific sound. Sit with that for a second. We have two men, both with legitimate claims, both pointing at the same eighteen-month window, and they don't agree on what a "first" even means. Is the first house record the first record made for house DJs? Or the first record that sounds unmistakably like nothing that came before it? That's not a factual dispute. That's a definitional one. And definitional disputes are the hardest kind to close. While Saunders and Chip E. are pressing records, across town a DJ named Ron Hardy is running a club called the Music Box — louder, rawer, more experimental than the Warehouse ever was. And the Music Box becomes something like a forensic lab for this new sound. Producers — Marshall Jefferson, Larry Heard, DJ Pierre, Chip E. himself — bring Hardy their new tracks and test them live, in real time, against a dance floor that does not lie. The most famous story here involves a track called "Acid Tracks" by a group called Phuture. By most accounts, it cleared the dance floor multiple times before the crowd finally turned around and embraced it. That's not a marketing plan. That's trial by jury. Ron Hardy didn't invent a sound. He was the pressure chamber the sound had to survive. By 1986, house has a name, it has records, it has a testing ground. What it doesn't fully have yet is an anthem — something big enough to carry the feeling of the whole movement. That's what Marshall Jefferson supplies with "Move Your Body," a track built around piano and vocals that becomes known, simply, as "The House Music Anthem." It reportedly caught fire in Chicago clubs before it was even officially released — the room deciding, again, ahead of the market. Jefferson didn't invent house. By 1986 that ship had sailed. What he did was prove the sound could hold real emotional weight — not just a rhythm to move to, but a feeling to mean something by. So here's where we are. Six suspects. All of them credible. None of them guilty of the full crime, because the crime — if we can even call it that — doesn't have a single perpetrator. Let's lay out the contradictions plainly, because this is the part your case file wants you to sit with. Contradiction one: "Frankie invented house" and "Jesse made the first house record" are not the same claim, even though they get used interchangeably. One is about a room. The other is about a product. We've been treating a culture and a commodity as if they're the same event. Contradiction two: the Warehouse gets you the name. The Music Box gets you the sound getting tested under fire. Two different clubs, two different jobs. Contradiction three — and this one's the sneaky one — "house was new" and "house came from disco" are both true at the same time. House didn't spring out of silence. It grew directly out of disco's afterlife, out of the records Frankie Knuckles was already playing at the Warehouse before a single house record existed. What made it new wasn't the raw material. It was what Chicago producers did to that material with drum machines, repetition, and a room full of people demanding something built specifically for them. Contradiction four, the big one, the one this whole season is going to keep circling back to: one person invented it versus a community made it. We like inventor stories. They're simple. They fit on a plaque. But club culture was never simple. It was bodies, money, sound systems, danger, desire, timing, and a lot of people who were not being centered anywhere else in American culture — finding a room where, for one night, they were. I'll be honest with you about something. When I started pulling this file together, I thought I was building toward a verdict. I thought somewhere in these interviews and these records and these club histories, Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    13 min

  3. Jun 12

    When The Crate Became Searchable: Beatport, SoundCloud, and the Weight of Endless Music (S3 E8)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hello, my sexy listeners. I'm ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. Let me take you somewhere. It's a Saturday. Not morning yet — that thing after morning where the light hasn't figured out what it wants to be. You're standing in a record shop. Not browsing. Waiting. The man behind the counter is watching your face while the needle drops on something he hasn't told you the name of yet. And the kick lands, and something shifts in your chest, and you don't say anything because you don't need to. He already sees it. He pulls the sleeve from under the counter and slides it toward you like a secret. That was the whole thing. That moment was the whole thing. The search had geography. It had weather. It had train rides and phone calls and handwritten track IDs on folded pieces of paper you kept in your coat. It had standing there with headphones pressed to your ears, heart doing something, nobody naming it. Before digital files filled the booth, discovery lived in physical places. Then the map changed. In 2000, Kevin Lewandowski built something that looked, from the outside, like a database. Discogs started as an archive for electronic music. But what it really was — what it became — was a memory. A living one. A place where the credits could be corrected, the aliases finally connected, the white labels identified, the forgotten pressing traced back to a person and a session and a year. House music is full of hidden lines. One producer under five names. One vocalist uncredited on a remix that became bigger than the original. One dub that circulated for a decade before anyone pinned down who made it. Discogs didn't make the music easier to feel. It made it easier to follow. That's a different kind of gift. Don't underestimate it. Meanwhile, the booth was changing shape. DJs were moving toward laptops and CDJs and digital files — and the music they actually played, the underground stuff, the stuff with feeling in it, was almost impossible to buy cleanly. You might find it on LimeWire. You might find a mislabeled rip that sounded like it had been recorded through a wall. You might find a version that cut off before the outro. You might find a folder with someone's initials and nothing else, a file you couldn't identify until you played it on a system loud enough to matter. Eloy Lopez asked a question that sounds obvious now and wasn't obvious at all then: Why can't we buy the music we love digitally? That question became Beatport. Jonas Tempel, Eloy Lopez, and Bradley Roulier launched it out of Denver in 2004. A store built for DJs. Genre filtering. Label filtering. Charts. Release dates. The bins never closed. The shipment could arrive while you were home in your pajamas. A record could go from label to folder to booth inside a week. The crate had become searchable. And I want to sit with that for a second, because it sounds like pure progress. It was, in some ways. But something else was also happening. Discovery was becoming visible. A chart wasn't just a list — it was evidence. A DJ could see what everyone else was buying. A label could see what moved. The record shop had trained DJs through scarcity. You could only buy what reached you. The digital archive was training DJs through something else entirely. Abundance. Which sounds like freedom and sometimes is and sometimes isn't. Traxsource knew the difference. Brian Tappert and Marc Pomeroy — Jazz-N-Groove, Soulfuric, Soulsearcher, Urban Blues Project, names that mean something if you know, and if you're listening to this podcast you know — helped build Traxsource as a home for real house music in the digital marketplace. The language was deliberate. Real house music. Soulful. Deep. Vocal. Afro house. Garage-leaning records. Music that still carried the fingerprints of singers, arrangers, basslines, gospel chords, rooms where the groove needed to breathe. Beatport could feel like an airport terminal. Huge, moving, all signs and categories, every genre sitting next to every other genre like they're the same distance from the door. Traxsource felt closer to the shop. Not because it was small — but because someone behind the counter still knew what you meant when you asked for something with feeling in it. Two different philosophies. Both necessary. One teaching the algorithm, one protecting the lineage. Then the blogs happened, and everything got loud and intimate at the same time. Anthony Volodkin was a student in New York in 2005, frustrated by how slow magazines and radio were moving compared to what he was reading online. MP3 blogs were posting actual songs — not writing around music, sharing it. He built Hype Machine to index those blogs, turn scattered posts into a single living feed of what people were actually talking about. For dance music, this mattered because discovery went social again — even when nobody was in the same room. A track could travel through a write-up and a download link and a MySpace repost and a forum thread and a DJ chart and a comment section and land in a folder in Brooklyn and a warm-up set in Berlin and a sunrise somewhere nobody had photographed. Artists built pages that were part resume, part demo, part diary. You could hear the song, see the network, feel the weight of who else had found the thing. The record shop had a door policy. The internet didn't have one. SoundCloud changed the texture of all of it. Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss founded it in Berlin in 2007, and what it started as — a tool for creators to share audio easily — is not what it became. For producers, it became something more intimate than a store and faster than a press campaign. A sketch could go public before it had a name. A remix could circulate before it had official clearance. A DJ mix could move without a CD, without a label, without anyone's permission. And there was that waveform. That little orange waveform trained people to look at music differently. You could see the drop before you heard it. You could see where the crowd might react. You could leave a comment right at the moment the bassline changed — a timestamp, a feeling, a fragment of all-caps that meant right here, this is the part, I felt it too. The track became a place. No door policy. No closing time. No sound system shaking your chest. Still a room. Built from links and reposts and follows and the strange intimacy of seeing who else had found the same thing at 2 in the morning. By the end of the 2000s, the shape of the DJ's crate had completely transformed. Discogs held the memory. Beatport organized the marketplace. Traxsource protected a house music lane. Hype Machine followed the blogs. MySpace connected the artists. SoundCloud let the music move before the industry finished naming it. Each platform changed the shape of taste. But here's the thing none of them could change. When everyone has access to more music than any one person could play in a lifetime, taste becomes visible in a new way. It's no longer enough to have the record. The question is what you do with the record once everyone else can have it too. Do you chase the chart? Do you trust the label? Do you follow the vocalist? Do you dig backward through the credits? Do you listen past the preview? Do you let the song breathe before deciding what it is? A chart can tell you what's moving. A database can tell you who made it. A store can tell you when it came out. A waveform can show you where the break lands. None of it can tell you why your hand keeps going back to that one track at 2:37 in the morning. None of it can tell you why a voice feels familiar before you know the singer's name. None of it can tell you why one bassline makes the room lean forward and another one only fills the air. That is still the DJ's work. That is still the listener's work. That is the part of house music that lives in the space between information and feeling — and no platform has ever touched it, and I don't believe one ever will. The danger of the digital crate was that it could make everything feel available and nothing feel earned. The gift was that it let people hear across distance. A kid far from the record shop could find a label from Chicago. A singer could upload a demo without waiting for a gatekeeper. A forgotten pressing could finally be identified. A name buried in tiny print could be connected, at last, to the sound people had loved for years without knowing who to thank. The crate got lighter. The responsibility got heavier. That trade is still being negotiated. Every set. Every selection. Every moment you reach for the thing that moves you instead of the thing that moved the chart. If you came up during any of these eras — blogs, Beatport, Traxsource, SoundCloud, MySpace, all of it — I want to hear from you. Not the platform. The moment. Tell me the first track you found online that felt like it had been waiting for you. Tell me what it opened up. Tell me if you still play it. Email me at thatpodcastgirlcdub at gmail dot com. I'm ThatPodcastGirl C Dub and This Is A Podcast About House Music. Until next time, keep the beats alive. Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    11 min

  4. Apr 22

    Beatmatching and Sound Checks: Richie Hawtin, Len Faki, and Digital Changes Everything (S3 E7)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. When the Beat Matches Itself: Richie Hawtin, Len Faki, and Digital Changes Everything Hello, my sexy listeners. I'm ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. The booth is quieter now. Not in volume. The system is still loud. The room is still moving. But inside the booth, something has settled. A pair of CDJs. A mixer. Sometimes a laptop. A USB drive no larger than a keychain holding thousands of tracks. The weight that used to sit behind the DJ, the crates stacked against the wall, the physical archive of a person's taste, is gone. We talked about how that happened in our last two episodes. Tonight we talk about what the rooms did in response. Because when the constraint leaves the booth, the room has to answer. And different rooms answered very differently. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, a DJ named Richie Hawtin started doing something that made club owners genuinely uncomfortable. He would arrive before the club opened and ask for a sound check. Not a line check. A full sound check. He needed time to plug everything in. At the time this was unheard of. DJs showed up, played records, left. Hawtin was showing up with a laptop, a mixer, controllers, and a vision of what a DJ set could be when the system held the tempo steady and the DJ used that stability as a launchpad rather than a destination. Hawtin had built his early reputation in the Detroit techno world, coming up through the Windsor, Ontario underground in the late 1980s and crossing the river into Detroit's scene. By the 2000s he was performing what he called Decks, EFX and 909 shows, sets built around looping and layering in real time, treating Traktor as a live instrument rather than a playback device. He and his partner John Acquaviva saw so much promise in digital DJing that they famously invested in Traktor's development and wound down their own record pressing operation to go fully digital. The club owners who argued with him about sound checks in 2001 were watching the future arrive and not recognizing it yet. His 2005 album DE9: Transitions took that philosophy into the studio, breaking down hundreds of tracks and rebuilding them into new ones inside Ableton. It was documentation of a shift that was already happening live, in booths, every weekend. What Hawtin represented was one answer to the question the digital era had opened up. When the system holds the tempo for you, when drift is eliminated and cue points are stored and loops are quantized, what do you do with all that freed attention? His answer was to intervene more. Reshape more aggressively. Move through ideas faster without losing control of the underlying rhythm. The stability of the system became permission to push harder against its edges. But there were other answers. And the rooms where those answers lived tell you as much about the music as the technology does. Fabric opened in London in October 1999, built inside the renovated Victorian underground space of the Metropolitan Cold Stores on Charterhouse Street in Farringdon. It took three years of structural work to get it ready. The founders, Keith Reilly and Cameron Leslie, had both been part of warehouse party culture and wanted something that went against the grain of the superclub era that was dominating London nightlife at the time. No spectacle. No celebrity DJs as the selling point. Sound first. Room One had something almost no club in Europe had at the time. A bodysonic dancefloor. Four hundred and fifty bass transducers embedded under the floor, emitting bass frequencies directly into the bodies standi Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    13 min
  5. Disco Demolition Night, 1979 and House Music is born in Chicago (S1 E1)

    Apr 21

    Disco Demolition Night, 1979 and House Music is born in Chicago (S1 E1)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hello sexy listeners, it's ThatPodcastGirl Cdub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. In this series, we're embarking on a journey through the origins of house music—a genre that's been the heartbeat of dance floors for decades. As someone who's always been into reggaeton and Afrobeats, I'm excited to delve into the rich history of house music, especially after a friend's enthusiasm piqued my curiosity. So, let's explore this together! Our story begins in the late 1970s. Picture this: It's July 12, 1979, at Chicago's Comiskey Park. The event? 'Disco Demolition Night.' Organized by radio DJ Steve Dahl, fans were invited to bring disco records to be blown up on the field. What started as a promotional stunt quickly spiraled into chaos, with thousands storming the field, setting fires, and chanting 'Disco sucks!' So why did Steve Dahl do this? He organized this event after being fired from his job at WDAI radio station when it switched from rock to disco. Feeling spurned, he channeled his frustration into an anti-disco campaign, culminating in this explosive event. While some saw it as a pushback against disco's mainstream dominance, many felt a deeper sting. Disco was a haven for Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities—a space where they could express themselves freely. Vince Lawrence, a young Black usher at the event, later reflected, 'Basically, if you were Black, gay, or sympathized with either of the above, you were being punished.' "From this turmoil, a new sound emerged. Marginalized communities, feeling sidelined, sought refuge in underground venues where they could dance without judgment. One such sanctuary was 'The Warehouse' at 206 South Jefferson Street in Chicago. Established in 1977 by Robert Williams, this club became a beacon for many. At the helm was DJ Frankie Knuckles, often dubbed the 'Godfather of House.' He didn't just play tracks; he reinvented them. By blending disco classics with European electronic music and layering in drum machine rhythms, he crafted a sound that was both nostalgic and revolutionary. This fusion laid the foundation for what we now know as house music. Knuckles was known for his innovative use of equipment. He utilized reel-to-reel tape machines to extend tracks and create seamless mixes. Additionally, drum machines like the Roland TR-909 allowed him to add unique percussive elements, giving his sets a distinctive and mesmerizing rhythm. Another iconic spot was the 'Music Box,' where DJ Ron Hardy ruled the decks. Hardy was renowned for his experimental mixes and electrifying energy. He once said, 'I don't play what's popular; I play what's good.' I like that. His fearless approach pushed the genre's boundaries and inspired countless artists. Hardy was a pioneer in manipulating tracks to create a unique experience. He often sped up records, added effects, and wasn't afraid to play unconventional tracks people had never heard. His use of the reel-to-reel tape recorder allowed him to edit and loop tracks live, creating a hypnotic and energetic atmosphere that kept dancers on their toes. So that’s the 1970s. Moving into the 1980s, the house music scene continued to evolve. Larry Heard, also known as Mr. Fingers, emerged as a pivotal figure. His track 'Can You Feel It' became an anthem, characterized by its deep basslines and emotive melodies. Heard's background as a drummer influenced his production style, bringing a rhythmic complexity to his music. Heard's use of synthesizers and drum machines, like the Roland Juno-60 and TR-909, allowed him to craft lush, atmospheric tracks that stood out in the burgeoning house scene. His music bridged the gap between the dancefloor and introspective listening, adding a new dimension to the genre. Meanwhile, in New York, Larry Levan was making waves at the Paradise Gar Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    7 min

  6. Apr 12

    The DJ Booth Without Crates: CDJs, Serato Scratch Live, and Goodbye to Heavy Crates and Vinyl (S3 E6)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hello, my sexy listeners. I'm ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and I’m back. This Is A Podcast About House Music. I want to say hello to a few places I’ve really been seeing lately—London, Liverpool, Dublin… and Melbourne. Wherever you're listening from tonight, I'm really glad you're here. Let’s get into it It's the mid-1990s. A DJ named Sasha is standing in a booth somewhere in England, probably Manchester, probably late. He's playing a set that will last six or seven hours. He has a crate of records behind him and another one on the floor. He knows every groove on every disc. He knows which tracks need to run long and which ones can be cut early. He is reading the room with his whole body, one ear in the headphones and one ear open to the floor, and he is doing something that looks effortless and is anything but. What nobody in that room is thinking about is what it cost him to get there. The weight of those crates on the flight over. The negotiation with the airline about a second bag. The way touring DJs in that era were essentially porters of their own sound, carrying the physical weight and evidence of their taste across borders every single week. That tension, between the intimacy of the booth and the logistics of moving through the world, is where this episode lives. A serious touring DJ in the mid-1990s traveled with between fifty and a hundred records. At roughly 180 grams per record, that's close to 40 pounds of music before you add sleeves, cases, or the crate itself. International bookings were increasing because budget carriers in Europe were making air travel genuinely cheaper. Ryanair launched its low-fare model in 1991. EasyJet followed in 1995. The geography of a DJ career was expanding fast, and the weight of the booth was not keeping pace. Pioneer had been trying to solve that problem since 1992, when they released the CDJ-500. It was the first CD player designed specifically for DJ use. It had a jog wheel and pitch control. It was also widely ignored, because the jog wheel felt nothing like vinyl and the culture was not ready to give up the feel of wax for the convenience of a silver disc. The CDJ-500 sat in booths mostly unused, or got pushed aside when a serious resident came in. What actually moved the needle was the CDJ-1000, which Pioneer released in 2001. That machine had a larger jog wheel with genuine resistance. It had stored cue points, which meant a DJ could mark the exact moment in a track where the first kick lands and return to it instantly, every time, without hunting by ear in the headphones. It had a display that showed you where you were inside the track in real time. And it had a pitch range wide enough to match tempos across the full spectrum of house and techno. That display changed something quietly. When you play vinyl, you read the record. You watch how much groove is left on the side to sense how much time remains. You develop an eye for it over years. It becomes second nature, the way a cook learns to read a pan. The CDJ-1000 replaced that with a number on a screen. More accurate. Less embodied. DJs felt the difference even when they couldn't always say what it was. The transition didn't happen overnight and it wasn't clean. Through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, booths held both formats at once. Some DJs used CDJs for promos and unreleased tracks, things that weren't pressed to vinyl yet, while keeping their main sets on wax. Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    15 min

  7. Mar 11

    Inside the DJ Booth: Technics 1200s and the Long Set Night (S3 E5)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. I’m ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. Let’s get into it. Somewhere along the way, the DJ booth stopped being a place where records were simply played. It became something else. The people inside it were no longer just selecting songs for a crowd. They were shaping the movement of an entire room — stretching time, bending rhythm, guiding the emotional arc of a night that might last eight hours or more. And that transformation began in rooms where the booth was barely large enough to stand in. ⸻ Ron Hardy is already deep into the night. The booth at the Music Box is cramped, the mixer wedged between two turntables, record sleeves stacked wherever there is space. By three in the morning the air inside has warmed from amplifiers and the heat rising from the dancefloor below. The crowd moves like a single organism under the low ceiling. Hardy drops the needle on a record the room hasn’t heard before. The rhythm is stark — a drum machine pattern pushing forward with very little melody attached to it. For a moment the dancers hesitate. A few people stop moving, trying to understand what they’re hearing. Hardy watches them quietly. Then he lifts the needle and plays the record again. Same track. Same groove. He does it again. Somewhere between the third and fourth pass the room locks into the rhythm and the entire floor begins moving together again. The record is “Acid Tracks,” produced by Phuture. Years later DJ Pierre recalled that Ron Hardy kept replaying the track until the dancers demanded to know what it was. From the dancefloor it looked like stubbornness. Inside the booth it was something else entirely. Hardy had realized that the DJ could guide a room toward a sound it didn’t yet know how to hear. ⸻ Across the city at The Warehouse, another booth was quietly shaping the mechanics of that idea. Frankie Knuckles stood behind two turntables and a mixer, his headphones resting partly over one ear while the other stayed open to the room. Certain grooves on the dancefloor worked so well that dancers didn’t want them to end after three minutes. Knuckles began experimenting with ways to stretch those moments — extended drum sections, tape edits, percussion layered across records so the rhythm never dropped away. The floor around him was often scattered with white-label records sent over from producers hoping to hear their track in the room before it was officially pressed. Small pieces of tape sometimes marked the label of a record — a cue point DJs used to see exactly where the first kick drum began. When the lights dropped low enough that the grooves were hard to see, a small flashlight clipped to the mixer illuminated the vinyl just long enough to place the needle. From the dancefloor the night felt seamless. Inside the booth Knuckles was constantly adjusting — nudging the vinyl forward with two fingers, easing the pitch slider until two kick drums aligned perfectly, blending the bass from one record beneath the percussion of another. The DJ wasn’t simply selecting music anymore. The booth itself had become something closer to an instrument. ⸻ When the culture reached New York, that instrument became more powerful. Inside Paradise Garage, Larry Levan stood behind a booth surrounded by a sound system designed specifically for that room by engineer Richard Long. Multiple turntables. Tape machines. R Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    11 min

  8. Mar 6

    Martha Wash, Loleatta Holloway, Lady D, Smokin Jo, and Women in House Music (S3 E4)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. I’m ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. It’s March, and Women’s History Month. The women we’re about to spend time with changed what was possible inside the house music club culture. And the rooms we dance in today still carry the results of these women accomplished. Picture this. It’s 1990. Clubs from New York to Manchester are already shifting into the new sound that’s forming between Chicago house and the explosion of club culture in Europe. DJs are building nights that stretch from midnight until morning. Drum machines are hitting harder. Synths are sharper. The basslines are deeper. And suddenly a voice cuts through the speakers like a lightning bolt. “Everybody dance now!” The command isn’t sung. It’s declared. The record is Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now). The voice belongs to Martha Wash. Inside clubs the reaction is immediate. The song becomes unavoidable. DJs slam it into sets because it detonates the room every time. Radio grabs it. MTV grabs it. The record climbs charts around the world. But something strange happens. When the video for the song begins circulating on MTV, the woman lip-syncing the vocal isn’t Martha Wash. The singer audiences see on screen is Zelma Davis. The voice and the body have been separated. Wash already knows this pattern. Nearly a decade earlier she had stood at the center of disco history as half of The Weather Girls, the duo behind It’s Raining Men. That record had been one of the biggest dance records in the world. Martha Wash wasn’t an anonymous vocalist. She was already one of the most recognizable voices in dance music. But by the late 1980s parts of the dance industry had begun quietly making a different calculation. The sound of Black female gospel power could move the floor. But the image being sold to television audiences looked different. Wash later said the industry wanted the voice without the woman. So she fought. She sued. And the case forced labels to acknowledge something the dancefloor already knew: the voice mattered. The person behind the voice mattered. Contracts began changing. Credits became more explicit. One singer had just altered the legal structure of dance music. And this wasn’t even the first time something like this had happened. Just one year earlier, another voice had already traveled around the world before the story behind it caught up. The record was Ride on Time. The Italian group Black Box built the track around a sample from a disco record released a decade earlier. The vocal came from Love Sensation sung by Loleatta Holloway. Holloway’s voice was enormous — a church-trained belt powerful enough to lift a dancefloor clear off its feet. But when “Ride on Time” exploded across European charts in 1989, the woman appearing in the video again wasn’t the woman singing. Another model lip-synced the vocal. Holloway pursued legal action over the use of the sample. And again the industry shifted. Sampling laws tightened. Producers began thinking carefully about where those voices came from and who deserved recognition. Two women. Two lawsuits. Two structural changes in the machinery of dance music. ⸻ Years earlier, far from the clubs where house music was forming, another woman had already been fighting a completely different structural barrier. The barrier wasn’t in the club. It was in the machine. Electronic music studios in the 1960s and 70s looked more like laboratories than rehearsal spaces. Modular synthesizers stretched across entire walls. Patch cables snaked across panels. Every sound had to be built from scratch. One of the people who mastered that world was Suzanne Ciani. Support the show Copyright 2026. It's ThatPodcastGirl C-Dub

    11 min
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This Is A Podcast About House Music. A deep dig into house music history by city and decade. ASMR-style storytelling, spoken slowly and in a moderated tone, built for long listening sessions. The kind of show you put on autoplay while you work. -ThatPodcastGirl C Dub. All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com   Reach me at ThatPodcastGirlCdub@gmail.com

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