Without Larry Levan, dance music as we know it wouldn’t be the same. As the mastermind behind New York’s Paradise Garage from 1978 until its closure a decade later, the Brooklyn native—born Lawrence Philpot in 1954—helped carry New York club culture from disco’s golden age to the transitional years after it went back underground, when the thumping groove and skeletal synths of house music began to map out a whole new era. In both his track selections and his remixes for acts like Taana Gardner, Gwen Guthrie, and Arthur Russell’s Loose Joints, Levan favored a deep, dubby, faintly psychedelic sound marked by carefully applied effects, crystalline mixdowns, and three-dimensional space. Levan’s sound was so distinct that it earned its own name: In New York and New Jersey, the muscular, keyboard-driven style he worked in came to be called not house but garage, after the club where the late musician, who died in 1992, invented it.