A selection byThe Waxonia Desk
Chicago House
Three records made of almost nothing — a drum machine, a bass generator used wrong, a loop held until it becomes a song. The cheapest equipment in the shop, and a genre came out of it.
- Picks
- 3
- Genre
- Chicago House
- Years
- 1985–1987
- Curator
- The Waxonia Desk
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
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Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 1 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
The picks — selected, not ranked
Steve "Silk" Hurley / Jack Your Body
1986 · Underground / DJ International
A record made of almost nothing, which went to number one in Britain anyway. The clearest ancestor of the idea that a loop held long enough stops being a loop and becomes a song.
Also on Chicago House
Phuture / Acid Trax
1987 · Trax
The accident that became a genre. A bass machine nobody wanted, misused by mistake and then misused on purpose, and thirty years of records came out of the difference between the two.
Mr. Fingers / Mystery of Love
1985 · Alleviated
The warm end of Chicago rather than the raw end. The city produced both in the same eighteen months, and the story that it was ever only one of them is a later invention.
Also on Chicago House
About the curator
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.