Twelve families, and the lines between them.
Twelve of them. There are more.
Early-1980s Chicago: disco rebuilt on drum machines into four-on-the-floor dance music, the starting point for much of what followed.
1970s dancefloor music played by bands and string sections, later sped up and switched to synths as Hi-NRG.
1980s Detroit: minimal arrangements that move by repetition, born as an industrial city's vision of the future.
Early-1990s Frankfurt: layered melody and long repetition to induce a trance state; a decade later the Dutch turned it into the breakdown-and-climax formula.
Distortion taken to the limit: faster, harder, louder, from Rotterdam gabber to Japan's J-core.
Breakbeats pushed past 170 BPM over deep sub-bass, the fastest branch of UK rave.
Raw material: drum breaks from American funk records, grown into dance music in UK rave. Jungle and drum & bass both came out of here.
808 bass and drum-machine programming from the local clubs of Black American cities. One city, one sound, sharing its origins with hip-hop.
One London line running through pirate radio and soundsystem culture, changing shape every few years: garage, grime, dubstep.
Built around space. Sound used to convey a scene, a mood, an atmosphere.
Built around technique. Pushing at the edges of sound: spliced tape, glitches, appropriated samples, sustained tones.
Built around online aesthetics. Mostly nostalgic, and inseparable from a mood and a look.