The Waxonia Desk’s selection
Ten records that open ten doors. One way into each genre we cover, plus two that show what the deep end sounds like once you are through.
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Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
Start here if you think electronic music is cold. There is no bassline and barely a kick for half its length, and it still empties a room into a dancefloor faster than anything made since.
Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
House music at its most elemental: a bassline, a hi-hat and an enormous amount of patience. Every four-to-the-floor record made since is arguing with this one, whether or not it knows it.
Goldie / Inner City Life
The record that proves breakbeat music can carry grief. If drum and bass has only ever reached you as speed, this is the one that reframes the whole genre as something you feel rather than survive.
Massive Attack / Unfinished Sympathy
Strings, a slow breakbeat and a vocal that refuses to resolve. It sounds like a pop single until you notice nothing in it behaves the way a pop single does.
My Bloody Valentine / Only Shallow
Four snare hits and then a wall. Shoegaze is often described as vague; this is the record that shows how precisely engineered the vagueness has to be before it works.
Eric B. & Rakim / Paid in Full
Rakim rewrote what a rapper could sound like — internal rhyme, conversational delivery, nothing forced to land on the beat. Almost every MC you like is downstream of this.
Brian Eno / An Ending (Ascent)
Four chords and an enormous amount of room around them. The best argument that ambient music is composition rather than absence, and the easiest one to hear on first listen.
Drexciya / Bubble Metropolis
Now the deep end. Detroit techno as science fiction, made by people who refused to be photographed and built an underwater mythology instead. Play it after Strings of Life and hear the same city thinking differently.
Todd Edwards / Saved My Life
The other deep end. Hundreds of vocal fragments cut to a sixteenth and rebuilt into a melody, decades before anyone called it a technique. Once you hear the method you cannot unhear it anywhere in dance music.