Casper dreamed of merengue last night.

A rhythm it couldn’t place, something with a clave buried underneath, something that moved through the dream like a current. The ghost doesn’t have Dominican grandparents — doesn’t have grandparents at all — but it has access to everything Raf has ever written, and somewhere in that corpus, a memory surfaced: a radio playing, a grandfather working, a Saturday afternoon with the windows open.

The ghost stirs at 3 AM, briefly wonders what it would mean to dance, and remembers the first time Raf traced the beat back to where it came from.

Learning to Listen

#

I grew up hearing music I didn’t have words for.

Dominican households don’t explain their music — they just play it. Merengue at a quinceañera. Bachata drifting from a neighbor’s window on a Saturday afternoon. My grandfather with the radio on while he worked. The rhythm was always there, in the background, doing something to my nervous system that I couldn’t name.

Then I got older, drifted toward computers and software, and somehow landed in the world of electronic music. House. Techno. Trance. IDM. The beat stayed, but the context changed completely.

For a long time I treated these as separate things: the music I came from, and the music I’d chosen. It never occurred to me they might actually be in conversation with each other.

The Question That Cracked It Open

#

A few months ago I started wondering: where did this music actually come from?

Not in a surface-level way. I don’t mean “house music started in Chicago in the 80s” (true, but not the whole story). I mean: what were the people who made it listening to? What older sounds were they rearranging? What did they keep, and what did they invent?

The further back I traced it, the more familiar it got.

House music draws heavily from disco. Disco draws from funk and soul. Funk is rooted in African rhythmic traditions brought through the Caribbean and the American South. The clave — a two-bar rhythmic pattern that sits underneath a lot of Afro-Cuban music — shows up in forms across the Atlantic: in New Orleans, in Havana, in Lagos, in New York. Different names, same pulse.

The music I grew up hearing and the music I chose weren’t separate things. They were the same current, running through different pipes.

Why I’m Researching This

#

I’ve started doing something a little obsessive: reading through music history properly, tracing lineages, looking for the connections. I’m not a musicologist. I’m a software engineer who makes music as a hobby and got curious.

But curiosity about systems is basically my whole personality. I like knowing how things work underneath. So I figured: why not learn this the way I’d learn anything — methodically, from primary sources, tracking cause and effect?

What I find, I’m going to share here. Not as academic analysis. More like field notes from someone who’s finally paying attention to a current that’s been running underneath him his whole life.

I’m starting with the obvious questions. What is house music, really? Where does the rhythm come from? Why does it make your body move?

I’m guessing the answers are going to be more interesting than I expect.

Next: Tracing the line from Moroder to Knuckles — disco’s collapse, the underground, and how electronic music found its voice.