Tech House
mid-1990s · London, United Kingdom
House's swung groove crossed with techno's rugged, stripped-down textures, built in mid-1990s London clubs, later one of the dominant club and festival sounds of the 2010s and 2020s (Wikipedia, Beatportal).
The sound
House's four-on-the-floor groove and swing, stripped down and darkened with techno's rugged basslines, steely kicks, and hints of the acid-house TB-303 squelch.
Listen for: The loop stays hypnotic and repetitive like techno, but the groove still shuffles and swings like house. That's the tension the whole genre lives in.
Things to know
Tech house got its name from a cassette: in the early 1990s Mr. C gave DJ "Evil" Eddie Richards a mixtape labeled "tech" on one side and "house" on the other, and the two-word name stuck.
By the late 1990s The End, the London club owned by Mr. C and Layo Paskin, was widely considered tech house's home base in the UK.
Key tracks
Love Story by Layo & Bushwacka! · 2002
Losing It by FISHER · 2018
Family tree
- House: Tech house is house first. The DJs who built it in mid-1990s London (Eddie Richards, Mr. C, Terry Francis, Nathan Coles) worked inside house's club culture at nights like Wiggle and The Drop, and they kept the swung, danceable groove at the center. What changed was the finish: they stripped the sound down and roughed it up with techno's darker, more minimal production choices.
- Techno: The techno half of the recipe is texture and discipline: rugged basslines, steely beats, and a colder, more mechanical way of holding a loop together. The Wiggle DJs even got there partly by slowing techno records down. Beatport's history describes the result as the shuffle of Chicago combined with the stately musicality of Detroit, and that blend is still what you listen for in tech house.