BIGSTEREO

I feel like as a general rule, if BIG STEREO or MISSING TOOF blogged about you in 2006 or the first half of 2007, you are a blog house band whether you like it or not. I never really read music blogs back then, but if I had to guess, I think that rule would apply. There’s just something very AMERICAN about the term ‘blog house’ as if some AMERICAN guy invented the term even though it didn’t make too much sense, so it makes sense that two of the top American Electroblogs would be responsible for accidentally blogging BLOG HOUSE into existence.

Bloghouse grouped together a mishmash of veteran DJs, indie bands who had recently purchased samplers, remix-focused aesthetes, and careerist musicians looking to reinvent themselves at a time when the bookish, folksy sensibilities of early-2000s indie culture were falling out of vogue. The point of intersection in a Venn diagram of “dance” and “indie,” bloghouse combined thumping beats and streamlined melodic sensibilities at a time when dance music was too inscrutable for the mainstream and indie was too boring for the party kids.

Still, it emerged at a specific sweet spot in the e-tastemaker era, one where refreshing sites like Big Stereo and Discobelle and spending hours trawling for remixes on MP3 blog aggregator HypeMachine was as much of a scene activity as hitting up now-defunct venues...

A-Trak's approach to DJing quickly began to change. "The new reality, where you could download something and play it in a nightclub two hours later, opened a bunch of new possibilities," said A-Trak. "Those were the years when production software became more accessible. Anybody could make a bootleg remix, post it on a blog, and DJs from other cities could grab it and play it in their sets— that speed and accessibility didn't exist before. It was such a perfect storm, even down to the fact that internet download speeds became fast enough to share MP3s." Where a year prior he'd have been rifling through his white labels, suddenly the five-time world champion DJ was scanning blogs like Big Stereo and Missing Toof to build his sets. "There was something so charming and personal about every single blog post," he said, looking back on his Hype Machine-digging days.