- Deep Vibes – Soulful house and garage music reviews, clubbing news from Montreal.
- Diva Delight – House music history and culture with a focus on house divas.
- D.J. Rhythms – A guide to dance music, including BPM listings for many tracks.
- Gotta Have House – Real Audio house and dance music mixes, message board, and merchandise.
- The Home of Latin House – Dedicated to the latin house music market including record reviews, biographies and links to similar pages.
- House Nation – Interviews, reviews, charts, Ibiza section, chat room, and directories of links to labels, stores, clubs, artists, and mix shows.
- HouseMusic.com – Message board, charts, mailing list, reviews, and links to streaming audio and labels.
- Intrafunk – A series of nights, with focus on the fusion of house, soul, funk and jazz. Based in Athens.
- Jackhouse, The Canadian House Music Movement – E-zine with reviews. [Flash required]
- Milk ‘n’2 Sugars – UK based label and DJ management agency. Recordings, MP3s, DJ biographies, and club information. [Flash required]
- New City Movement – Internet deep house. Broadcasting music of Salt Lake’s top jocks.
- Spirit of House – House and garage reviews and Real Audio mixes.
- Underground Files – Monthly e-zine about underground house music.
- Body and Soul – New York based board, centered around real-life club Body & Soul. Owned by John Davis’ JD Productions.
- Latin House Message Board – Message board for Latin house enthusiasts moderated by Hot Hands.
- UndergroundNYC – Formerly known as Classic House messageboard, started early 1999 by Nestor. Based in New York.
- Brazilica – bum-bum.tv is dedicated to the brazil and electronic music scene , from the sixties to now, including dj mix, mp3, samples, live radios and tv, from worldwide.
- Deep House Music Page – Features Real Audio house mixtapes, history, articles, and interviews.
- Deep Rhythms – Deep soulful underground house mixes by Timo Rotonenin MP3 and Realaudio from Helsinki, Finland.
- DezMix Muzik – The source for NYC underground House Music in RealAudio. Listen to a 52 hour mix online.
- Galaxy 102 – Home of The Dreem Team, Andy Ward, Boy George, and others. Listen live with your windows media player.
- Garage House Music – Features Toronto’s DJs in real audio playing deep garage house music.
- GlobalHouseConnection – Live DJ show every Sunday night featuring 2 hours of deephouse, jazz, soul, funk, afro and related styles. Requires Windows media Player.
- DJ Kos – Hard-house disc jockey features DMC style scratches in his sets.
- DJ Lady D – The Official Website for Chicago’s First Lady of House Music, Lady D.
- DJ Matt Lee – Includes bio, schedule, mailing list, and streaming mixes.
- DJ Mes – Includes audio streams, San Francisco events, and biography.
House music is a collection of styles of electronic dance music, the earliest forms of which originated in the United States in the early- to mid-1980s. The name is said to derive from the Warehouse club in Chicago, where the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, mixed classic disco and European synthpop recordings. Club regulars referred to his selection of music as «house» music. However, since Frankie was not creating new music at that time, it has been argued that Chip E. in his early recording «It’s House» defined this new form of electronic music and gave it the name «House Music».
The common element of most house music is a 4/4 beat (a prominent kick drum on every beat) generated by a drum machine or other electronic means (such as a sampler), together with a continuous, repeating (usually also electronically generated) bassline. Typically added to this foundation are electronically generated sounds and samples of music such as jazz, blues and synth pop, as well as additional percussion. As new recordings adhering to this general style emerged, the house genre divided into a number of subcategories, some of which are described below.
«House Music» also refers to the recorded music played while a theatre audience takes their seats before a performance, or, in live music venues, the recorded music played before the live music begins. Well-known live acts can demand their choice of house music, or that there be none at all. Such demands are made in the technical rider to their contract (the same document that specifies what items must be present in the dressing room).
House, techno, electro and hip hop musicians owe their existence to the pioneers of analog synthesizers and sample based keyboards such as the Minimoog and Mellotron which enabled a wizardry of sounds to exist, available at the touch of a button or key.
Although many people believe house music to have originated from Donna Summer’s «I Feel Love», fully formed electronic music tracks actually came before house. Early American Sci-Fi films and the BBC Soundtrack to popular television series Doctor Who stirred a whole generation of techno music lovers like the space rock generation during the 1970s, influenced by the psychedelic music sound of the late 1960s and bands such as Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Amon Düül, Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and the so-called Krautrock early electronic scene (Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze). Shunned by many as a «gimmick» or «children’s music», it was a genre similar and parallel to the Kosmische Rock scene in Germany. Space rock is characterized by the use of spatial and floating backgrounds, mantra loops, electronic sequences, and futuristic effects over Rock structures. Some of the most representative artists were Steve Hillage’s Gong and Hawkwind.
The late 1970s saw disco utilise the (by then) much developed electronic sound and a limited genre emerged, appealing mainly to gay and black audiences, it crossed over into mainstream American culture following the hit 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. As disco clubs filled there was a move to larger venues. «Paradise Garage» opened in New York in January 1978, featuring the DJ talents of Larry Levan (1954–1992). Studio 54, another New York disco club, was extremely popular. The clubs played the tunes of singers such as Diana Ross, Chic, Gloria Gaynor, Kool & the Gang, Donna Summer, and Larry Levan’s own hit «I Got My Mind Made Up». Drugs including LSD, poppers and quaaludes boosted the stamina of the clubbers. The disco boom was short-lived. There was a backlash from Middle America, epitomised in Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl’s «Disco Demolition Night» in 1979. Disco returned to the smaller clubs like the Warehouse in Chicago, Illinois.
Opened in 1977 the Warehouse on Jefferson street in Chicago was a key venue in the development of House music. The main DJ was Frankie Knuckles. The club staples were still the old disco tunes but the limited number of records meant that the DJ had to be a creative force, introducing more deck work to revitalise old tunes. The new mixing skills also had local airplay with the Hot Mix 5 at WBMX. The chief source of this kind of records in Chicago was the record-store «Imports Etc.» where the term House was introduced as a shortening of Warehouse (as in these records are played at the Warehouse). Despite the new skills the music was still essentially disco until the early 1980s when the first drum machines were introduced. Disco tracks could now be given an edge with the use of a mixer and drum machine. This was an added boost to the prestige of the individual DJs.
House music is uptempo music for dancing and has a comparatively narrow tempo range, generally falling between 118 beats per minute (bpm) and 135 bpm, with 127 bpm being about average since 1996.
Far and away the most important element of the house drumbeat is the (usually very strong, synthesized, and heavily equalized) kick drum pounding on every quarter note of the 4/4 bar, often having a «dropping» effect on the dancefloor. Commonly this is augmented by various kick fills and extended dropouts (aka breakdowns). Add to this basic kick pattern hihats on the eighth-note offbeats (though any number of sixteenth-note patterns are also very common) and a snare drum and/or clap on beats 2 and 4 of every bar, and you have the basic framework of the house drumbeat.
This pattern is derived from so-called «four-on-the-floor» dance drumbeats of the 1960s and especially the 1970’s disco drummers. Due to the way house music was developed by DJs mixing records together, producers commonly layer sampled drum sounds to achieve a larger-than-life sound, filling out the audio spectrum and tailoring the mix for large club sound systems.
Techno and trance, the two primary dance music genres that developed alongside house music in the mid 1980s and early 1990s respectively, can share this basic beat infrastructure, but usually eschew house’s live-music-influenced feel and black or Latin music influences in favor of more synthetic sound sources and approach.
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