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Born in Corona, Queens, on 1 June 1967, Roger Sanchez's arrival coincided with the kind of major demographic shift that can generate gang wars ⎯ or the kind of rich musical mix that makes you want to become a DJ. Historically Italian American, Corona, or "crown" in Italian, became largely Latin when Colombian, Guatemalan, Eucadorian and (in the case of Sanchez's parents) Dominican...

Histories of UK club culture often tell the following story. Before the summer of 1987, rare groove ruled, beats-per-minute were slow and dance floor energy was low. Then a gaggle of London lads went to Ibiza, tasted the Ecstasy-dance cocktail, and carried on the party when they came back home. The "Summers of Love" of 1988 and 1989 that followed didn't so much mark a new twist in

Born in Brooklyn's Sunset Park in 1970, Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez grew up with the meshed sounds of Puerto Rico and New York chiming in his ears. The seventies were the peak years of Fania, and Gonzalez's parents didn't think twice about gazing at their record collection and nodding at their good fortune to be able to call the likes of Eddie Palmieri, Blades and the Fania All Stars "family". Gonzalez absorbed this Nuyorican music like a sponge absorbs water; even though he didn't like...

New York, 1987. The city's dancers are walking around in a daze. Throughout the seventies, they knew that the most innovative DJs, the best sound systems and the most dynamic party spaces were indisputably theirs. When the disco bubble burst in the second half of 1979, New York's night owls, gravitating to the Paradise Garage, Better Days, the Loft, Bond's and the soon-to-open Danceteria, Saint and Fun House...

  House music is disco's revenge. So said Frankie Knuckles, reflecting on the charged history of the genre, which emerged in hometown Chicago in the middle of the 1980s. In this case home, to quote Gil Scott-Heron, is where the hatred is, or was. The disco sucks movement had its spiritual and organisational headquarters in the city, and the organisation's campaign reached its vitriolic climax when the celebrity rock DJ Steve Dahl detonated...

Louie Vega looks out of the booth, feels the crowd, flicks through his records and makes his next selection. The dancers — the Ritualists — spin, duck, stretch, scream and smile as the rhythms of the world are refracted through the sound system. Global and emotional, the music and the crowd meld into one as they journey into the material-spiritual ether...

Nicky Siano was an extreme DJ, perhaps the most extreme DJ of the 1970s. More than any other spinner of the era, he stretched the nascent practice of turntablism to points where nobody dreamt it could go, and he did this not just in terms of technical skills but also emotional expressivity. If you danced to Nicky Siano, it was almost inevitable you would have an attack of the heart...

This tale begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on speed. It closes with the same man, sick with Aids and all but blind, fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading dusk. In between, Walter Gibbons transformed the art of DJing and marked out the future co-ordinates of remixology...

There is something incongruous about Marshall Jefferson, the most influential Chicago house music producer of the 1980s, compiling a mix CD of his favourite Salsoul records. Jefferson, after all, listened to rock, not disco, during the 1970s, and he never once set foot in the Warehouse, where the rousing selections of Frankie Knuckles — which revolved around Salsoul anthems such as "Let No Man Put...

As one half of the celebrated MAW/Nuyorican Soul team, Louie Vega's legacy as a prolific remixer and producer has been etched into thousands of slabs of black vinyl. But when Vega first started out, he was driven by the pleasure of selecting and spinning music, and to this day the art of DJing — the communal, spiritual, above all, musical line of communication that runs between the spinner, the sound system and the dancing crowd — is what propels him forward. If Vega isn't DJing, he isn't happy...