Progressive house

Progressive house has its origins in Great Britain in the early 1990s, with the output of Guerrilla Records and Leftfield's first singles (particularly "Song of Life"). Mixmag editor Dom Phillips coined the term to describe this type of music. In 1992, the dance club Renaissance opened in Mansfield. Its DJs - particularly Sasha and John Digweed - were instrumental in popularizing its early sound. The music itself consisted of the 4-to-4 beat of house music with deeper, dub-influenced basslines and a more melancholic, emotional edge. Often, it featured elements from many different genres mixed together. Song of Life, for instance, has a trip-hop like down-pitched breakbeat and a high-energy Roland TB-303 riff at various stages.

There have been many shifts in style in progressive house. After the release of BT's debut album Ima, for instance, many of the genre's subsequent records featured an ethereal, melodic style. As trance became more popular and melodic, progressive house darkened and acted as an underground counterpoint, merging with tribal house to produce many very minimal percussive tracks.

Meanwhile, the Melbourne-centered Australian progressive scene, whose luminaries include Phil K and Luke Chable pioneered a distinctive sound of their own - marked by melodic pads and delicate melodies. This style was pushed heavily in Britain and elsewhere by DJ Dave Seaman and Australian Anthony Pappa. Its influence even fed back into trance, with many sub-genre trademarks finding their way into the so called "Anjuna sound" centred on Above & Beyond's record label Anjunabeats.

Since 2005, progressive house's popularity has been said to have lessened in dance music, with most of the scene's major DJs playing electro-, tech-house, and minimal. However, this is a common misconception throughout the electronic dance music industry as new sub-genres are being created so often. What we are seeing today are many crossover tracks that have different elements of different sub-genres that make electronic dance music very hard to nail down to just one style. People do their best to label tracks in a proper way, but sometimes genre associations are not so cut and dry. You can find many electronic dance music tracks labeled as electro-, tech-house or minimal that are essentially Progressive House tracks.