New beat  

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"Places like The Happy House in Aarschot, the Apelier in Leuven and On The Beach in Kortrijk all spun a variety of import material, from The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette' through Throbbing Gristle's 'United', checking A Certain Ratio, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire and Medium Medium along the way."--NME, 1991, "New Beat: One Nation Under A (Slowed Down) Groove", by Richard Noise, (a.k.a. Richard Norris of The Grid)

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New Beat music was a contemporary genre to Detroit techno and Chicago house, although not intrinsically linked. New beat originated in Belgium in the late 1980s and was a forerunner of European house music.

Legend has it that New Beat was invented in the nightclubs Ancienne Belgique in Antwerp and Boccaccio in Ghent when DJ Marc Grouls played "Flesh" by by A Split-Second, a 45rpm record at 33rpm, with the pitch control set to +8.

In addition to A Split Second, the genre was also heavily influenced by other EBM acts such as Front 242 and The Neon Judgement, as well as the likes of Fad Gadget, Gary Numan and Anne Clark.

New Beat later incorporated more techno and acid house influences and morphed into Eurodance, a commercial style of dance music that dominated European music charts in the early 1990s with artists like 2 Unlimited and Technotronic.

Outside the aforementioned "Flesh" and a handful of other compositions such as "Fatal Error" (1988), the genre produced few interesting original recordings. Its antecedents however, its breeding ground so to speak -- the music played at Belgian discotheques just before the genre came into being -- is where it gets interesting, as can be judged from the playlists of the Antwerp nightclub Ancienne Belgique (Ronny Harmsen) and the radio program Liaisons Dangereuses.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "New beat" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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