House.

A style of 20th-century club dance music. It originated at the Warehouse club in Chicago, from which it takes its name, and is the style out of which most dance music since the mid-1980s has developed. It evolved naturally from disco, although in the beginning its sound was much sparser: while many disco records were song-based, centred on a vocal melody and a wide array of instruments (including a string section, guitar and bass guitar), early house records featured little more than a repetitive 4/4 rhythm track from a drum machine, built around a relentless bass drum on the beat and a hi-hat cymbal on the off-beats. House also used a similarly simplistic synthesized and often monochordal bass line, and frequently included a vocal line along with primitive, synthesized orchestration that echoed the string arrangements found on disco records. Some or all of these elements have been maintained in all of house music’s many sub-genres. Such developments include the fleeting ‘acid house’ (defined by its use of filter-modified frequencies produced by the Roland TB-303 Bass Line machine), which nonetheless was responsible for the huge growth in popularity of dance music in the UK in 1988–9, and ‘handbag house’, a song-based and largely predictable style popular in the mid- to late 1990s.

WILL FULFORD-JONES