While Electronic sounds had been in the European music scene since the mid to late seventies, the cheaper and more widely available Japanese electronic gear set off a musical revolution in Detroit, Chicago and New York. The music that this revolution gave birth to was called techno, house or garage, depending in which of the previously mentioned cities you partied at.
Some noteable producers, DJs and remixers of the eighties, the second wave of dance music influencers, were Shep Pettibone, Tony Humphries, John Morales, Todd Terry, Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Jellybean, Francois Kevorkian,David Morales and Timmy Regisford.
Other noteable trends were electro, NYC no wave and labels Trax records, Sleeping Bag, Jump Street and Uno Melodic records.
By the `80's New York house could no longer be confined to the garage, but had spread into a mansion full of rooms, each with a different style. In one was the plush, inventive keyboards of Josh Milan on Blaze's "If You Should Need a Friend," in another the dreamy girl-group vocals of Jomanda's "Drifting." The Basement Boys transformed the simmering vocal tour de force "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" with ping-pong percussion and percolating, pipe-like keyboard effects. Phase II's "Mystery" weaved layered vocals into a carpet of polyrhythmic effects, a near-perfect marriage of man-made passion and machine-driven groove. And Todd Terry dispensed with a vocal narrative altogether on Royal House's "Can You Party," as he created a dance classic out of a delirious, near chaotic collage of electronic samples. At the core of this track is a repeated vocal hook that refutes Farley Funk's Chicago-only definition of house. As the vocal loop in "Can You Party" insists, all that matters on the dance floor is, "Can you feel it?"