It’s not a competition, but if we were to crown one electronic genre as the one that represents dance music in its purest form, it has to be house. House music is the genre from which countless others were born. It was the genre that gave birth to DJing and clubs as we know them, spanning from its black and queer roots in Chicago to arenas, festivals and pop charts across the world. Sure, techno has a decent claim to equal longevity and popularity, but it hasn’t reached quite so deeply into both the commercial and underground realms as house.
That spread has meant that, in 2023, it’s hard to define ‘house music’ as any one thing. It’s a genre tag that encompasses everything from Beyoncé and Kylie Minogue through to big-room Ibiza house and EDM, to fresh takes on the sound coming out of Africa and South America, the weirder, lo-fi sounds of the UK and European underground, and back to the raw house styles still coming out of Chicago and Detroit. So our ‘definitive guide’ is doomed to be anything but. Instead, this issue we’ll explore a few lasting, core genre tropes, as well as the ways that modern gear lets us put a fresh spin on things. We’ll also defer to a few of our favourite current producers too, to get the lowdown on house in 2023 straight from those pushing the genre forward.
THE HOUSE TOOL KIT
genres, early house music was defined as much by the instruments used to make it as its musical influences. While the genre is directly descended from the lush orchestrations of funk, soul and disco, it’s equally born out of the sampling techniques and synths and drum machines – most notably Roland’s TR boxes – used to turn
