New York Garage

Where it came from

The Paradise Garage was a parking garage on King Street with no alcohol licence, no press list and a membership policy. Larry Levan played there for a decade, and what he played was not really a genre - it was disco, gospel, dub, rock and early electronic records mixed with an ear for the room rather than for the charts.

Levan's own productions and remixes came out of that. He would rebuild a record around its percussion, stretch it past ten minutes, and drop the drums out for sections long enough that a lesser DJ would have lost the floor. The famous Levan touch was live manipulation - riding a delay send on the mixing desk to catch one word and send it spinning.

This is the disco-rooted end of house, not the electronic end. It swings because the records it grew out of were played by people.

How it works musically

Slower than Chicago and looser. Percussion carries the groove - tambourine on the off-beats, congas syncopated around them, everything breathing.

The crucial rule: percussion swings at around 58%, but the kick, snare and clap stay dead on the grid. Swing everything and you get a shuffle; swing only the tops and you get the pull that made that room work. Every drum file here is programmed that way.

Harmony is jazzier - dorian rather than natural minor, so a major IV chord sits over a minor tonic. Bass has an attack rather than a click, and it sustains: this is a fingered part, not a machine part.

Structure matters as much as sound. These records ran eight minutes with a dub breakdown in the middle where the kick vanished for thirty-two bars.