Tech House

Like house, tech house features a 4-to-the-floor beat but with technoid snappy, rhythmic drums typically an open hi-hat on the offbeat. Further characteristics are big ass, groovy and heavy basslines, minimalistic, repetitive melodies (sometimes even mysterious) and a tempo between 120 and 135 bpm. Its influences broadly range from Chicago house and Detroit techno. It's kind of a fusion of both. The result is music built for DJs first: functional, adaptable, and made to sit inside a longer arc of a set rather than announce itself as a standalone record.

By the early '90s, acid house in the UK had split two ways: one side was venturing into hardcore and rave, the other into glossy, commercial "handbag house." Eddie "Evil Eddie" Richards, already a veteran of the acid house scene, wanted neither. Together with Terry Francis and Nathan Coles, he started the Wiggle parties: word-of-mouth events in warehouses and car parks where the DJs played everything between house and techno, picking records purely on how they worked in a set rather than which side of the genre line they fell on.

Tech house's more recent history is a story of scale. The genre picked up serious commercial momentum through the 2010s, and by the time FISHER's "Losing It" (2018) and "You Little Beauty" (2019) became worldwide hits, "tech house" had become shorthand for a much bigger, more festival-facing sound than the one that came out of Wiggle. Jamie Jones and Patrick Topping have carried a more club-rooted version of that same lineage forward.

This commercial wave is the reason why the term needs some unpacking. A lot of what circulates as tech house today is a flatter, more predictable version of the original idea. Built for boring main-stage drops rather than the kind of juicy groove that develops over an hour. The records worth seeking out are the ones that still work the way the Wiggle DJs intended: functional, physical, built by people thinking about how a track behaves in someone else's set, not just how it sounds in isolation. That's the lineage SEVEN's tech house selection tries to stay close to.