DJ Slam - Into The Night

Hey kids, did you know that before it was backed by 4/4 kickdrums, happy hardcore was backed by breakbeats? Did you know that back in the day techno songs were made with like, machines, that some engineers diagrammed up somewhere and had people wire by hand, and you had to kind of rig up or punch in lighted buttons on the front like old futures? Did you know that Fairlight, which is like mithril in cyberpunk, was a sampler and synthesizer company?

I took a course in college, “Learning Music Theory Through Digital Music Technology”. I came in a drummer and learned no music theory. The teacher was the original tester of the first Moog. He was kind of a space case and the lectures were basically whatever minutes of him going off on tangents while his assistant tried to make the computer stop crashing. The real prize of the thing was keycard access* to a lab with a rack full of MOTU crap and a Mac with ReBirth (that they actually paid for, with money!) and a sequencer that system crashed basically once a night.

* that you had to sign up for in 2 hour blocks such that I had like 2 AM on Tuesdays at one point

I’m not actually that old, it was more like I did this like the exact year it all became obsolete.