Electroclash

You want a way in, not a canon. Electroclash was a short window — roughly 1998 to 2003 — when New York, Berlin, Detroit and Paris all decided the answer was an old analogue drum machine, a deadpan vocal and a dress code.

The entry point is not a sound so much as an attitude: punk delivery over electronic equipment, made by people who mostly could not play.

The term came from Larry Tee, a New York promoter who named his October 2001 festival Electroclash and then used the word for everything around it. But the records predate the label.

Ersatz Audio in Detroit and International Deejay Gigolos in Munich were already putting out cold, vocal-led electro by 1998. In New York, Fischerspooner built a theatre piece around pop songs; Felix da Housecat flipped from Chicago house to synth-pop; Peaches made an album on a Roland MC-505 alone in a Toronto apartment.

In Paris, the Tigersushi and Record Makers crowds — Vitalic, Black Strobe — pushed the harder, French end. By 2003 the press had turned on the word, and the artists stopped using it.

The music carried on under "electro" and "new rave".

, DJ Hell. What: 12"s and compilations, not albums — Gigolo's series and Tee's festival mix did the sorting.

How: the gear defined it. Roland TR-606 and 808, Juno and SH-101, voice through cheap effects, lyrics spoken more than sung, usually about sex, fame or boredom.

Records were made fast and cheap, often by two people, often one of them doing the vocals as a joke that stuck. Scene venues mattered as much as studios: Luxx in Williamsburg, Berlin's WMF, Paris's Pulp.