This Is A Podcast About House Music

ThatPodcastGirl C.Dub
  • 5.0 (1)
  • MUSIC HISTORY

Dig through house music history by city and decade. Immerse yourself in ASMR stories of the birth of House Music and its regional influences.  All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com and on my reddit page r/thatpodcastgirl reach me at ThatPodcastGirlCdub@gmail.com This podcast is perfect for: people who like the style of an ASMR, spoken slowly, in a moderated tone, perfect for putting the entire season on autoplay while you do work in the background Disclaimer: Some names and personal details in this episode have been changed or composited to honor privacy while preserving the emotional and cultural truth of these histories.

  1. 7H AGO

    The DJ Booth Without Crates: CDJs, Serato, and Goodbye to Heavy Luggage (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. I see you showing up and staying. And I see some of you streaming this through Chromecast, letting it play out in your space—I really appreciate it. Wherever you're listening from tonight, I'm really glad you're here. Tonight's episode is sponsored by Cindy Wang at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Garden City office. If you're thinking about buying, selling, or just want to understand the New York market, Cindy is who you call. Details at the end of the show. 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 19 Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    15 min

  2. 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. Today’s episode is sponsored by Cindy Wang at Douglas Elliman Luxury Real Estate from the Garden City office. 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. ⸻ Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    11 min

  3. 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. Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    11 min

  4. FEB 27

    The Sound System Era: From Richard Long Sound Systems to the Ministry of Sound (S3 E3)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. The Sound System Era: From Richard Long to Ministry of Sound Hello Sexy Listeners! I'm ThatPodcastGirl C.Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. At the turn of the 1990s, the quality of sound became the next frontier for the club experience. You could feel it before the DJ even mixed out of the first record. The air held differently. The bass didn’t wobble near the bar and vanish near the bathrooms. It rolled. Even. Intentional. You could walk across the floor and the kick followed you. The hi-hats stayed crisp without slicing your ear. The sub didn’t bloom into chaos when someone pushed the gain. It felt measured. Not decorated. Measured. Paradise Garage had already shown what happened when a room treated sound as sacred infrastructure. Richard Long’s system design — built in conversation with Larry Levan — distributed low end across the entire floor. Not a hot spot near the stacks. The whole body of the room vibrated evenly. The sweet spot expanded outward until it became communal. That kind of consistency doesn’t come from instinct. It comes from calibration. By the early 1990s, graphic EQs were no longer optional hardware in a rack. They were surgical instruments. Engineers carved out frequencies that built up in concrete corners. Crossovers separated subs from mids so cabinets weren’t fighting each other for dominance. Limiters protected drivers when a chorus swelled and the DJ’s hand hovered just a little too high on the rotary. Amplifiers were chosen for headroom — real headroom — so when the floor reached that moment where bodies were slick with sweat and the air was thick, the system didn’t choke. And the producers were listening. Inner City’s “Good Life” had already hinted at this shift a few years earlier. Kevin Saunderson built that track with Detroit precision — sequenced drums, synth stabs that hit clean, bass that stayed contained. Paris Grey’s vocal floats above it with lift, but never overwhelms the chassis. That record doesn’t collapse under pressure. It expands. In a tuned room, the chords bloom without swallowing the kick. The vocal hovers in upper mids. The groove remains tight. It’s ecstatic, but disciplined. That discipline becomes the language of the era. Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” works not just because of the story behind it — the woman Waters observed in Washington, D.C., dignified and displaced — but because the production understands translation. The piano sits forward without muddying the vocal. The kick lands square. The hook — that improvised “la da dee, la da da” — rides the groove lightly, leaving air for the room to breathe. When that record hits a calibrated system, it feels buoyant. The bass touches the sternum but doesn’t suffocate it. The top end sparkles without burning. Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” sharpens the edges. That Korg M1 organ patch — short attack, clipped decay — slices into the mix like a blade. It works because it doesn’t linger. It strikes and retreats. The bassline locks via MIDI sequencing, perfectly grid-aligned. No drift. No wobble. Just mechanical certainty. Inside a properly aligned crossover stack, that organ lives in a clean band. The kick holds the center. The sub doesn’t swallow the mids. When the room reacts — and it always reacts — the energy lifts through the chest, not just the ears. CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” opens wider. The chords stret Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    9 min

  5. FEB 23

    Blueprints of Bass: Club Space, Deep Sound, and the Machines That Built the Headliner DJ (S3 E2)

    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. Today I want to let you in on what we’re doing for the next few episodes, because it’s a very specific kind of tour. We’re following two curves that rise together. One curve is the size of the room. The other curve is the size of the sound chain. House music’s live ecosystem didn’t scale because DJs suddenly got more talented. It scaled because the rooms changed, and the machinery behind the rooms changed with them. The invisible part of the club—the “back of the room,” the processing racks, the amps, the system tech—quietly became the difference between a night that felt like chaos and a night that felt like ritual. So we’re going to start where the room is still improvised, the chain is still physical, and the DJ is still building the idea of a long-form set in real time. Chicago, late 1970s. The Warehouse is the kind of place that makes sense only when you remember what cities looked like then. Industrial vacancy. Cheap square footage. Concrete. Minimal ornamentation. The point wasn’t luxury. The point was capacity—space that could hold bodies, hold vibration, hold heat, hold time. That “hold time” part matters. Because what begins to happen in rooms like this is duration. A DJ can tell a story over hours. A transition can breathe. The crowd can settle into a groove long enough for the groove to become a world. That’s a venue-scale change right there: the night becomes long-form. Now put your attention on the booth. Beatmatching had already existed in disco culture, but house inherits a new level of stability through equipment that can take physical punishment and still keep a steady hand. Direct-drive turntables become the backbone of the booth. The Technics 1200 lineage, and especially the MK2 era, matters here because it normalizes a certain kind of control: high torque, pitch adjustment that responds, a deck that behaves like an instrument under real club vibration. That stability changes the set. The DJ isn’t just choosing songs. The DJ is shaping a continuous line. And while the booth is refining, something else is quietly rising in importance. The system. Back then, the sound chain isn’t a clean digital menu you tap through. It’s electrical and physical. It’s the stacked logic of real-world control: EQ to tame a room, crossovers to split frequencies so speakers aren’t fighting each other, limiters to keep the system from shredding itself when the crowd peaks, amplifiers with enough headroom to stay clean instead of collapsing into harshness. This is where house music begins to reveal its first real truth: A room can ruin a record. A room can also make a record feel like prophecy. By the time you get to New York, that truth becomes an identity. Paradise Garage opens into legend because it treats the sound system as the product. The address becomes a promise. People don’t only show up for a song. They show up for the feeling of the low end landing the same way across the floor. That evenness is not luck. That is system design. That is placement. That is tuning. That is a room engineered to behave. And now the curve steepens. As the 1980s move forward, the music changes what it demands from a club. Drum machines an Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    9 min

  6. FEB 15

    The Architecture of House Music and 808 and 909 Sound (S3 E1)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hey everyone. It’s ThatPodcastGirl cdub. And This Is A Podcast About House Music. Before we get into it, I want to say something. If you’ve been listening from Chicago, from London, from Berlin, from Sydney, from wherever this show finds you, I want to hear from you, email me at thatpodcastgirlcdub at gmail dotcom. If you have a memory about your first time hearing house on a proper system, if you were there in a field somewhere in the 90s, in a basement, a warehouse, a club, or just in your bedroom with headphones on, send it to me. Send me your stories. Send me your details. I read everything and I carry them.  Today’s show is sponsored by Cindy Wang at Douglas Elliman Garden City. If you’ve ever stood in front of a speaker and felt your ribcage hum before your brain could form a thought, this one is for you. Tonight I want to talk about the mechanics. The part of house music that doesn’t always get explained. Not the romance. Not the mythology. The reason your body reacts before you even decide to move. Because house music didn’t just spread. It scaled. It expanded. It filled warehouses, then parks, then fields. And that expansion wasn’t accidental. It was engineered. If you listen closely to classic house records, you’ll hear that kick drum. Not just a thud. A very specific punch. That’s often a Roland TR-909. The 909 didn’t just sound good. It cut through air. It had a tight mid-range knock that traveled across a room full of bodies absorbing low frequencies. It hit somewhere around sixty to one hundred hertz with a tiny click layered on top, so even if you were far from the speakers, you still felt its definition. Before that, there was the 808. The Roland TR-808 kick is rounder. Deeper. More like a wave than a punch. It blooms underneath you. In a small room, that sub-bass wraps around your legs and lives in your chest. So it wasn’t really a war between 808 and 909. It was context. The 808 feels like water. The 909 feels like muscle. And when house music started moving into larger spaces, that muscle mattered. Outdoor air absorbs sub-bass. Open space eats it. So producers leaned into the 909 when they wanted drive, when they wanted thousands of bodies to lock into the same pulse. Around one hundred twenty-two to one hundred twenty-six beats per minute, something subtle happens in the human body. At about one hundred twenty-four BPM, breathing settles. Your heart rate nudges upward but not into panic. It’s fast enough to energize, slow enough to sustain. You don’t feel rushed. You feel carried. Your nervous system recognizes it before your thoughts do. That steady four-on-the-floor kick, landing evenly every beat, creates predictability. And the brain loves predictable rhythm. It reduces cognitive load. It frees you to move. Layer in hi-hats with a little swing, not perfectly on the grid, just slightly ahead or behind, and that micro-timing keeps the brain engaged. It feels human, even when it’s coming from a drum machine. Machines used by humans. That’s the heartbeat of it. And then there’s vinyl. Before USB sticks and laptops and cloud folders, DJs traveled with crates. Thirty, forty, sometimes eighty pounds of records. When you press music onto vinyl, you are physically cutting grooves into lacquer. Low frequencies take up more space on a record. Push too much sub-bass too loudly and the needle can literally jump the groove. So mastering engineers shaped the low end c Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    11 min

  7. FEB 14

    Bonus Episode: Australia 90s House Music and the Doof (S2 E12)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Email me at thatpodcastgirl cdub@gm ail.com  Hello, my sexy listeners. It’s ThatPodcastGirl Cdub. And This Is A Podcast About House Music. All right Australia,…..no worries, I see you tuning in. Sydney. Melbourne. Brisbane. Perth. The Gold Coast. Adelaide. The Central Coast. I see you all in the numbers. I see you showing up on Chromecast, on smart TVs, in living rooms across a continent that sits beautifully far from where this music first caught fire. And I did not want to just say thank you and move on. If I’m going to say your names, I want to understand what your dance floors felt like when the 80s turned into the 90s. I want to feel the temperature of it. I want to know how house music sounded when it had to travel thousands of miles to reach you. Because geography changes culture. Australia was not down the street from Chicago. It was not a train ride from New York. Records had to be imported. DJs had to wait. Scenes had to build without constant touring artists flying in every weekend. That kind of distance creates a certain kind of self-reliance. It forces a scene to listen closely to what it has and stretch it into something of its own. In Sydney, the late 80s and early 90s dance ecosystem was already alive with large-scale party culture. Events at places like the Hordern Pavilion carried a scale that allowed dance music to fill serious architectural space. At the same time, there was a strong LGBTQ+ underground energy shaping the floor. Queer spaces were not an afterthought. They were central. They were foundational. They were where experimentation could breathe. And then there were the warehouses. Sydney had early warehouse raves that borrowed from what was happening in the UK and the US, but filtered through local networks, local crews, local bodies. Flyers moved through friend groups. Phone numbers were whispered. Locations were sometimes revealed close to the event. The feeling was part anticipation, part pilgrimage. You drove. You found it. You stepped inside and the bass hit differently because you had earned your way there. When I picture those floors, I don’t imagine them trying to imitate Chicago or New York. I imagine a room full of people who knew they were building something slightly off-center from the global map. The music might have been imported, but the energy was domestic. The sweat was local. And then Melbourne. Melbourne in the 90s developed a reputation for serious warehouse culture. All-night events. Named party brands that meant something to the people who went every month. One series that still gets spoken about is Every Picture Tells a Story, which ran through the early and mid 90s as an all-night electronic gathering. The name alone feels cinematic. You can almost see it. The lights cutting through industrial space filled with fog. The bass bouncing off concrete. The bodies settling into marathon rhythm. Melbourne crowds had stamina. That is something you hear again and again in oral histories. People showed up knowing they were there for the long arc of the night. They did not arrive for a quick peak. They arrived to stay. That kind of culture shapes the way DJs play. It shapes the way dancers pace themselves. It shapes how house and techno blend into one another over six, eight, ten hours. It shapes what you wear. And by the mid 90s, the music was no longer invisible. In 1995, the ARIA Awards introduced a Best Danc Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    9 min

  8. FEB 7

    House Music Club Dance Moves in New York City, Chicago, UK and a tribute (S2 E11)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Well hello sexy listeners. I’m ThatPodcastGirl C Dub, and This Is A Podcast About House Music. I want to start by saying hello to the new listeners I’m seeing pop up in Australia, Germany, the UK, Israel, and Brazil. I see some of you listening on your TVs, streaming through Chromecast, sitting back and letting the sound fill the room. I love that. I’m really glad you’re here. All season long, we’ve talked about rooms. Chicago basements. New York lofts. UK warehouses. We’ve talked about sound systems, about pacing, about what happened when clubs got bigger and nights got longer and house music had to stretch without losing itself. For this episode, I want to talk about the people and how they moved to this music. Because if you really want to understand a culture, you don’t just listen to the music. You do have to watch what it does to bodies over time. House music dancing had a very particular feel to it. It had a posture. A way of settling into the body that showed up again and again, even though nobody was teaching it. It didn’t come from choreography or instruction. It came from the conditions of the music itself. There were long blends. Steady tempos. Heat. Sweat. And a lot of time. If you weren’t around it, the dancing could look subtle, even understated. But once you recognize it, you start seeing it everywhere. In Chicago for example, so much of the movement lived in the torso. The word jack shows up constantly in early house culture. In record titles and in lyrics. In the way people talked about the music. Jackin’ described a rolling motion through the chest, ribs, and spine. A forward and back wave that never really stopped. The beat didn’t hit the body from the outside. It moved through the center and outward. People didn’t rush it. They let the motion repeat until it settled. Knees stayed bent. Weight dropped low into the hips. Nothing looked sharp or forced. Dancers talked about getting locked in, catching the groove, finding the pocket. Those weren’t metaphors. They were describing what it felt like when the body finally lined up with the track. That made sense because Chicago house gave you time. Records stayed in place long enough for the body to relax into them. The dancing conserved energy and it was sustainable. You could stay there for hours. When you move to New York, the quality shifts. The dancing becomes more contained, more internal. A lot of people later used the word lofting to describe it, connected to the culture of David Mancuso’s Loft and other noncommercial spaces where dancing wasn’t about being seen. Movement stayed compact. Arms followed the body instead of leading it. Steps stayed close to the floor. People danced inches from each other without needing interaction. You could be surrounded by hundreds of people and still feel like everyone was having a private experience. A lot of dancers from that era remember how quiet those floors could feel, even when they were full. Not quiet in sound, but quiet in energy. It wasn’t about big gestures or screaming. The movement stayed focused and inward. Across all of these rooms, the feet carried the most information. House footwork was quick and responsive, but not flashy. Steps skimmed the floor. Heels and toes worked independently. Weight shifted constantly through small pivots, slides, and turns. Dancers responded to details in the music. Hi-hats and shuffled percussion. Swung claps. Bas Support the show Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    10 min
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About

Dig through house music history by city and decade. Immerse yourself in ASMR stories of the birth of House Music and its regional influences.  All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com and on my reddit page r/thatpodcastgirl reach me at ThatPodcastGirlCdub@gmail.com This podcast is perfect for: people who like the style of an ASMR, spoken slowly, in a moderated tone, perfect for putting the entire season on autoplay while you do work in the background Disclaimer: Some names and personal details in this episode have been changed or composited to honor privacy while preserving the emotional and cultural truth of these histories.

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