House Music

The place: the Warehouse Club in Chicago. The time: late Saturday night, some time in 1983. The scene: Frankie Knuckles stands at the mixing console in the deejay booth, surveying the colorful Chicago characters "jacking" their bodies on the dance floor. Knuckles is pleased--he realizes that the Saturday - night "parties" he's been throwing at the Warehouse since arriving from New York in 1977 have already transformed the Windy City dance-club scene. Not that creating a new sound had been on his mind--it was just that the dance records coming out of New York at the time lacked something.

Chaz Bono has starred in his own documentary ("Becoming Chaz"), appeared on reality TV (ABC's "Dancing With the Stars") and authored a book ("Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man"). He's now expanded his resume by appearing onstage in a short musical parody of the cult movie "Road House" at the Celebration Theatre near West Hollywood. "Road House: The Rock Opera" is a short -- about a half-hour long -- send-up of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie.  Bono plays the role of Tinker, originally played by actor John Young. A spokesperson for the stage production said that Bono sings in the show.

It could have been a recipe for clubland disaster. Last week, DJ Adam Auburn (Balance, Afternoon Delight) and promoter Sam Gaglani (Wet Pool Parties, Roosevelt NYE and Halloween) launched their new Vanguard club night, Departure, and everything was stacked against them. They needed to fill one of L.A.'s biggest club venues on a Friday night — without a flashy superstar DJ — on a weekend when many of the city's electronic music aficionados were either recovering from Miami's Winter Music Conference or headed there for the Ultra Music Festival.

Barclay Crenshaw, the co-founder of the San Francisco dance label Dirtybird and a DJ-producer of growing renown as Claude VonStroke, just moved to the Los Angeles area five weeks ago. Not entirely for the burgeoning smart-house club scene or the perfect climate for endless parties though. "I actually moved to Beverly Hills for the school system," he said and laughed, acknowledging his more parental-concern-driven reasons for coming south and living outside of L.A.'s more famous night life locales.

Various artists "122 BPM: The Birth of House Music" Still Records Three Stars Like many micro-genres that become movements, the descriptor of "house music" has lost a lot of its meaning. Today, kids at raves take it to mean almost any kind of four-on-the-floor dance tune built with synthesized instruments. But the now-omnipresent genre came from a specific time, place and culture, and the lovingly assembled "122 BPM: The Birth of House Music" should help clear the air. Over three CDs, this compilation and album-length mixtape from Still Music's Jerome Derradji tells of the invention of a new dance music template -- one forged in the Chicago black middle class by kids influenced by the '80s New Wave movement.

Southern California, home of garage sales and garage bands, also boasts another cottage industry: A garage record company. The Pasadena garage of John Delgatto is the site of Sierra Records and its inventory of more than 20,000 records, tapes and CDs. The independent label produces rare country, rock and bluegrass recordings and over the past 20 years has cultivated an international mail-order clientele of about 7,000 music lovers.

Formed by a husband-and-wife team of psychologists, the French electronica collective known as Rino^ceero^se has developed an intriguing (and appropriately heady) concept: to combine the rhythmic euphoria of house music with the dissonant edginess of noise rock. Thursday at the Palace, the duo, enhanced by five musicians, created a series of fluid, iconoclastic soundscapes by triggering plump, sweat-inducing beats, then enriching them with layers and layers of live instrumentation.

Dance music has flown off in many different directions in recent years, from Fatboy Slim's confectionary collages to electronica artist Luke Vibert's pairing with pedal steel master BJ Cole that landed in L.A. last week.

After nearly two decades as one of the preeminent figures on the house music scene, Todd Terry finds himself at a place in his career he never expected to be -- starting over. "It's definitely like the beginning stages of my career. I never thought I would get back to this, but I'm back to that type of feel," the iconic New York producer-remixer-DJ says.

When Luke Jenner heard what would later become his band's underground hit, "House of Jealous Lovers," the 27-year-old lead singer for the Rapture didn't like it. "I hated it for the first year it came out. It didn't sound finished. It didn't feel right to me," Jenner said of the song, a post-punk dance track that throws hand claps, cowbells and samples of a screaming audience into the mix. Released in the U.K.

Portland electronic quartet Chromatics wouldn't seem to make daytime music. With songs that hum with analog bass lines, the occasional strum of a guitar and a metronic rhythm that suggests midnight drives on the Autobahn, the music of Johnny Jewel's post-disco group seems crafted for groggy, syrupy nights on the dance floor. But as the sun was setting on the Spring Street Stage at the FYF Festival in downtown Los Angeles, Chromatics soundtracked the fading light perfectly. Fans stood facing them wearing sunglasses to block the sun at the band's back, skeptical and unwilling to totally let loose to the four-on-the-floor throb.

Various artists "122 BPM: The Birth of House Music" Still Records Three Stars Like many micro-genres that become movements, the descriptor of "house music" has lost a lot of its meaning. Today, kids at raves take it to mean almost any kind of four-on-the-floor dance tune built with synthesized instruments. But the now-omnipresent genre came from a specific time, place and culture, and the lovingly assembled "122 BPM: The Birth of House Music" should help clear the air. Over three CDs, this compilation and album-length mixtape from Still Music's Jerome Derradji tells of the invention of a new dance music template -- one forged in the Chicago black middle class by kids influenced by the '80s New Wave movement.

In 1975, Donna Summer released a pop single unlike any before it. The singer, then an unknown in the U.S., was living in Germany and working with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and lyricist Pete Bellotte. Together they came up with a breathy, minimalist number that sounded flagrantly sexy. Summer's coos acted as musical erotica atop a simple, four-on-the-floor drum beat. "Love to Love You Baby," all 17 minutes of it, set a template that would ignite Summer's career, and a style that defined an era: disco.

When the lineup for the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was announced in January, the reaction among a particular demographic of electronic dance music fans was swift and merciless, best captured on the festival's message board by one user: "It's like a VIP-bottle Las Vegas casino nightclub has taken over the Sahara. " Translated: Many dance music snobs are disgruntled about the offerings in the big dance tent and elsewhere on the pitch. That sentiment has since been echoed often, and with good reason: The presence of superstar DJs like David Guetta, Kaskade, Martin Solveig, Swedish House Mafia - all mainstream dance producers who have taken over the top of the Billboard charts or have sold out mega-tours in the past year - suggests to many that Coachella has lost sight of the dance music vanguard, running counter to the festival's philosophy of bringing the best forward-thinking music to the desert.

UNDERRATED Dean Winters : In the DVR age, commercials are generally best suited to ignoring with extreme prejudice, but there's a playful menace to Winters' recent turn as the personification of "mayhem" that makes something as drab as an insurance spot actually entertaining. Equally memorable in regular stints on "Oz" and as Liz Lemon's dim, beeper-bearing boyfriend on "30 Rock," Winters needs to be wrecking havoc on a more regular basis. House music : It's been easy to dismiss this enduring corner of electronic music as strictly confined to the club scene with its disco roots and dedication to a hypnotic, four-on-the-floor beat.

It could have been a recipe for clubland disaster. Last week, DJ Adam Auburn (Balance, Afternoon Delight) and promoter Sam Gaglani (Wet Pool Parties, Roosevelt NYE and Halloween) launched their new Vanguard club night, Departure, and everything was stacked against them. They needed to fill one of L.A.'s biggest club venues on a Friday night — without a flashy superstar DJ — on a weekend when many of the city's electronic music aficionados were either recovering from Miami's Winter Music Conference or headed there for the Ultra Music Festival.

Sporting a yellow nylon gym jacket and red gym shorts, Orange High junior Salina Guerrero psyches up for battle. She plucks a grape Blow Pop from her mouth and bites her bottom lip. Her mouth twists enough for her to hurriedly bite the tiny hoop threading her lip, making sure for the umpteenth time that it's still there. Next to her stands Maria Camarena, a Los Amigos High senior this fall.

Where would San Francisco be without Miguel Migs? The Bay Area DJ-producer has been instrumental in putting the city on the global house music map, via years of stellar releases on labels like Naked Music and his own label, Salted. His latest, "Those Things," cements his reputation, with smooth-as-silk tracks like "So Far." Sunday at weekly house party Deep, he will be joined by another Bay Area icon, Mark Farina (pictured).

Music fans looking for a serious dance scene have often faced a dilemma going out in Los Angeles. Either hit a pricey Hollywood club, where glittering starlets dance behind velvet ropes until the wee hours and bottle service buys a place to sit, or cram into a sketchy, industrial-district warehouse outfitted with Porta-Potties and no parking. A new option is appearing Saturday: Get on the Gold Line. A pair of Los Angeles DJs and their graphic artist partner have teamed to produce "The Gold Line," a techno and house music night happening every third Saturday of the month at downtown L.A.'s Señor Fish restaurant.

Who and what will change L.A.'s after-dark scene in 2010? And why? 1. The end of the velvet rope "With the tougher economy, staff will have to recognize that bars are an extension of the hospitality industry, so all customers must be treated really well," says 213 proprietor Cedd Moses, owner of downtown bars such as Seven Grand and Tony's Saloon. Already we've seen bouncers loosen up: Rather than avoid eye contact with clubbers unwilling to give the "$100 handshake," they're making small talk with patrons and smiling.