Tech-House Essentials

While house and techno are often held up as the yin and yang of dance music, there's a wide swath of club music that straddles the line between the two styles. Tech-house emerged as a subgenre in its own right in the mid-'90s, when commercial house was especially slick and techno had gone dark and pummelling. Combining house music's shuffling grooves with techno's more synthetic timbres, artists like Ian Pooley, John Tejada, Circulation, and Martin Buttrich forged a hybrid sound, bursting with potential, that continues to fuel underground dance floors from L.A. to Ibiza.