​How Atlanta developed its own unique dance music sound

When you think about music from Atlanta, chances are you’ll think of rap, trap and all things hip hop. Perhaps a few big names will spring to mind: Outkast and the duo's eccentric rapper-turned-flautist André 3000, Ludacris, T.I., Lil Yachty, Migos, 21 Savage, maybe Goodie Mob. Whichever order, it’s fair to say Atlanta’s musical reputation, on an international scale, lies within this realm.

But there is another scene that thrives in Atlanta. Lesser known but by no means less rich, the city’s electronic music scene is a distinct and vibrant community that has been ticking away (somewhat quietly) since the late '80s.

“If you're outside of Atlanta, it's difficult to know about our dance music scene because we’re not very high profile,” says Karl Injex, founder of The Sound Table nightclub, a legendary Atlanta institution that existed between 2010 and 2020. “We’ve always had that kind of under the radar vibe – we’re not New York, we’re not Chicago and we’re not Detroit – but when you start to dig, you’ll find there’s an incredibly deep history of electronic music here.”

That's not to say there is competition between the rap and dance music scenes. Quite the opposite. “Atlanta is very cohesive,” Injex explains. “People always try to make it an either/or type thing, but it's not. We look at it more like one larger, inter-influenced scene. For example, Kevin Lee, AKA Coach K, the man who brought us Migos, Lil Yachty, Gucci Mane, is a massive house fan. He would show up at The Sound Table and was very much a part of the scene.”

This strong sense of collective spirit filters through the dance music scene alone, in which everyone is connected in some way or another. “The scene has always been one of community and friendship,” says soulful house producer DJ Kemit. “We are a family; we all hang out and we all look after each other. It’s different to LA or New York - we’ve got that Southern hospitality.”

Having moved to the city as part of the hip hop group Arrested Development, Kemit began DJing in clubs and at college parties around Atlanta in the early '90s. He still plays regularly at events, including Soul Makoussa, Come Together, and Kickin’ Up Dust.

This large, inter-connected musical family can be divided into distinct generational groups. Kemit and Karl sit together in one level of the tree, alongside house music legend Kai Alcé, who arrived in Atlanta around the same time as Kemit to study psychology at Morehouse College, one of the city’s four HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities).

Born in Queens, New York, Kai had initially relocated to Detroit in 1980 with his family, where he became embedded in the Motor City’s pioneering music scene. A distant cousin of Chez Damier, he worked lights at The Music Institute, a historic nightclub where the early sounds of techno were first shaped.

Kai first met Karl at one of Atlanta’s main dance record stores called Let The Music Play, which, at the time, was owned by a man named Steve Berman. “What’s interesting,” Karl tells me. “Is that if you look at myself, Kai and Kemit as a group, then there’s another generation worth mentioning. The DJs we were being influenced by in the early '90s, people like DJ Buc, Ron Pullman, Daz Wright. These guys were the house DJs playing all the parties. They were really setting the tone.”

“And shortly before that there was Tedd Patterson,” Kemit points out. “Ted, Ron and another gentleman owned a club called Plastic, which was one of the first mixed straight and gay house clubs. We also had Loretta’s, a well-known gay club, and Club Anytime, a 24-hour club.”

Backstreet was another key venue in the scene and one of the first clubs that Atlanta native Vicki Powell started going to when she was just 16. “Backstreet was a 24-hour gay club,” she says. “Even though it was a gay club, it was pretty much where everyone was ending up. If you worked until 4:AM you could go and have a proper night out ‘till noon.” Now a well-respected DJ, Vicki cut her teeth in these spaces, getting into the music and developing a taste for the new four-to-the-floor sound filtering down from the Midwest.

She too met Kai at a local record store, this time called Satellite. A subsidiary branch to its New York location, Satellite in Atlanta was a key link between the two cities, with Kai (who worked there) gaining access to many of the seminal house tracks coming out of labels such as Ibadan and King Street Sounds.

So, when Ron Pullman and Tedd Patterson left the city – around 1991 – the new guys jumped at the opportunity to take over. “I just felt like if I didn’t step in, there wasn’t anyone concentrating on playing house music,” Kai tells me. “And the rest is history.”

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The scene developed into a mish-mash of different styles, sounds and influences as students from Chicago, New York and Detroit came down to study in Atlanta, bringing their music with them. Like many other cities around the globe, the '90s were something of a heyday for nightlife in Atlanta.

Major nightclubs included The Yin Yang Music Café, Velvet Room, Tongue and Groove, EarWax (a record store that threw a house music party every second Saturday of the month), Nomenclature, Club Kaya, Traxx, Oxygen and Crescent Room (the latter two marking clubs with no digital footprint that exist only through oral history, passed down to me by Atlanta house head Justin Chapman), and MJQ, where Kai would eventually begin DEEP, his aptly-named, decade-long residency, which saw sets from the likes of Phil Asher, Joe Claussell, King Britt, Steve “Silk” Hurley, and Peven Everett.

Following the turn of the millennium, there was a shift, with gentrification, real estate development, and stricter licensing laws causing many of these nightclubs to close and the dance music scene to sink further into the underground. “Between the mid-2000s to 2010, we were sort of reforming and the city was more well-known for hip hop, which has become quite massive,” explains Karl.

But the heads carried the torch for house music, and in 2005, Kai and Kemit teamed up with fellow DJs Salah Ananse and Ramon Rawsoul to launch House In The Park, a festival dedicated to soulful and deep house music. In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Ash Lauryn, the esteemed producer and founder of Underground and Black, stated: “House In The Park is the one thing that got me truly back into house music.”

In a similar trajectory to Kai, Ash moved to the city of Atlanta from Detroit when she was 21. At the beginning, the young DJ struggled to find any dance music events, reflecting the scene’s underground nature. “I would Google every now and then trying to find house music in Atlanta, ’cause sometimes I’d be like, ‘I need that release. I wanna let go.’ But couldn’t find anything for literally at least the first two years I was there,” she says in the interview.

Then one day, a friend told her about House In The Park, so she went along to check it out. “After that experience I dove in really, really deep,” Ash adds. “House In The Park is honestly the one thing, the pivotal point that got me back into the scene and made me realise that this is the one thing in my life that I am passionate about, that I love.”

Ash also happened to live next door to Vicki, who quickly cottoned on to the young DJ’s potential and invited her to play a Deep South party, an event focussed on platforming Black excellence. The pair have remained close friends and collaborators ever since, with Ash joining the team at Deep South and Vicki providing guidance and support as Ash shot to stardom.

Another place in Atlanta that Ash credits with shifting her “trajectory as an artist and DJ” is Karl’s much-loved venue, The Sound Table. In fact, of all the people I spoke to about nightlife in Atlanta, not one failed to mention The Sound Table. Located on Edgewood Avenue, this restaurant-cum-nightclub (a popular formula for venues in Atlanta) was run by Karl and his wife, Muona Essa.

“I once went to a little venue called The Room in Tokyo,” Karl tells me of how The Sound Table came to be. “It was a very small, hand-built nightclub run by Shuya and Yoshihiro Okino of Kyoto Jazz Massive. That changed my whole perception of what a nightclub could be. That along with APT in New York. Those places gave birth to The Sound Table. Nightclubs that are focussed on programming, music and sound, rather than hype or worrying about the bar. A true audiophile experience. So I set out to make a small club that had a really good soundsystem and the booking policy had to be pure heat.”

And pure heat it was. On the opening night, Karl and Mouna booked DāM FunK to play, an event remembered dearly by local DJ/producer Divine Interface. “After that first party, I would go almost every night and then I started playing there the last five years it was open. The Sound Table was my introduction to dance music.”

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“Karl had the ear,” says Kai. “He’s an appreciator of music, so you could always count on going in there, and it was programmed correctly.” And this didn’t mean just dance music. You could hear everything from techno to ambient to soul to hip hop in any given week at The Sound Table. “What would happen,” Karl explains. “Is that people would forget what night it was, and the crowds would start mixing. The techno heads would listen to house and vice versa. The regulars became less concerned about what genre was playing and trusted that they could go any night and hear something interesting. That was the focus; not a genre, more a feeling of quality.”

Nonetheless, electronic dance music was a central focus of the nightclub as its past listings reveal. Everyone from Pearson Sound to Black Coffee, Timmy Regisford, Glenn Underground, Quantic, Soul Clap, Hunnee and The Blessed Madonna graced this small, neighbourhood bar.

Kai also had a major impact on the programming. Through his direct connection to Detroit, he brought artists such as Theo Parrish, Moodymann, Mike Huckaby, Carl Craig, Kevin Saunderson and Octave One to play, which (retrospectively) can be credited with shaping Atlanta’s distinct electronic sound.

As a result, The Sound Table became something of a hub for local musicians. “Everybody could meet there,” says renowned producer and label head Stefan Ringer. “Kai’s age group, my age group, and the younger age group. It was really the epicentre for music in Atlanta.” Stefan eventually hosted a joint residency with Ash at the venue, while Kai and Kemit played there regularly at various different events.

Another DJ that came up under the auspices of The Sound Table was Byron the Aquarius, an Atlanta-based producer with releases on Sound Signature, BBE and Eglo. “That’s where I met Kai Alcé," he says. “It was actually Daz-I-Kue [former member of British broken beat crew Bugz in the Attic] that introduced me to him.”

This introduction would spark an ongoing relationship between the two of them, with Kai playing an important role in Byron’s transition from hip hop production to house. “Kai was really the key when it came to creating a modern-day house scene for Atlanta. Kai helped me, Stefan and Ashley, and just got us into that sound,” Byron explains.

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“Kai doesn't try to hold information to himself,” he goes on. “He’s always trying to lift everyone up. I feel like we need more of that from the OGs, to bring the generations together, instead of trying to separate us. That’s one thing I love about Kai, he’s still bringing younger people on. If we keep having that, house music will keep living.”

Stefan had a similar experience with Kai who gave him a “crash course in the deep, underground stuff” that now inflects his music. This culture of handing down knowledge is part and parcel of the Atlanta way; there is a sense of intergenerational support that works in both directions. “Whatever information I can give, I just want to make sure that it’s there,” Kai tells me, stopping midway to pick up a call from Stefan – a timely sign of his ongoing mentorship. “Any of the youth I see that are into it or feel it, and they want to get the knowledge, I am willing to give it. And within that – as KRS-One famously said – I learn something new. That trading of knowledge, that’s where it’s at.”

The Sound Table eventually closed its doors during the pandemic – one of many Atlanta spots impacted – leaving behind a wealth of memories, sore hearts, and aspiring musicians. “If Kai, Kemit and Karl are the fathers of the scene, then The Sound Table gave them a home. It created a community and so many things came out of that: Ash, Stefan, Alley Cat [an Atlanta-based house and techno collective established in 2015]. Now it feels like a really healthy scene,” says Ree de la Vega, a local promoter who recently took over the old site of The Sound Table to establish a new club, Pisces.

“It’s like a full circle moment,” Karl says of her inheritance. “Ree is a very good friend of ours and one of the DJs that used to play at The Sound Table from the very beginning. She would throw parties in our parking lot before we opened our doors. We were very excited to hear she was taking over because it felt like a good way to reinvigorate the space but in a whole new way. She’s created something completely different to The Sound Table and that will set the tone for the next 10 years.”

“I’m standing on the shoulders of all the clubs I’ve been to,” he continues. “ATP, The Room, Plastic People, and now she’s gonna do the same thing with all the clubs she’s been in, including The Sound Table. That’s how this culture survives and grows. I don’t believe that nightclubs should exist for more than a decade. There are a few exceptions, of course, but nightclubs are not really designed for that – they’re designed to serve a function in a moment and then move on, and then there’s another club for another moment. In other words, for a Pisces to exist, a Sound Table has to not exist.”

Having officially launched in October last year, Pisces has already seen appearances from the likes of Nikki Nair, Crystallmess, JiaLing, Manuka Honey, and Eli Escobar, signalling Ree’s intention to continue the legacy of Karl’s expert curation, albeit with a greater emphasis on faster, high energy sounds – as is the general trend across the globe.

Elsewhere in Atlanta, Leonce (another child of The Sound Table) established Club Morph in 2016 alongside fellow DJ JSPORT. “Club Morph literally means to be in a constant state of change, to move between different sounds or different aesthetics,” Leonce explains. “We started our party from that perspective; wanting to hear all these different kinds of music blended together in the same setting, but also a setting that is welcoming to queer people, Black people and people of colour. At the time, it just felt like something we needed to do. First, when we played the weirder, more experimental music, people were a bit wary, maybe they’d stop dancing or go outside, but now it feels more like people get it, and people can appreciate it.”

Leonce himself has grown to international fame in recent years, with releases on Night Slugs and Nervous Records, collaborations with Karen Nyame KG and Pangaea, and support from the likes of Honey Dijon, Pangaea, Midland, Moxie, Joy Orbison, Ben UFO, and more. In 2024, he released his debut album ‘System of Objects’, which was featured as one of Mixmag’s best albums of the year.

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“Leonce is totally repping Atlanta globally,” says Ree. “One of his tracks is like a modern-day club hit. I’ve been partying in Atlanta for a really long time, and I’ve never seen the music and nightlife scene more diverse than it is today. Before you couldn't find a techno party, now you can choose the exact kind of techno you want to hear, and you could go hear it in a queer space, or a queer POC space, or you could go hear it with the bros, or with the Latinos. There’s never been so much going on all at once.”

But with so much going on and new things constantly starting up, there are not always enough resources to go around. “For the size of Atlanta we have a pretty big electronic music scene, but there’s a lack of access to venues like you would see in New York or San Francisco,” explains Leonce. “We lost a lot of our clubs because of COVID and things haven't quite lined up to replace those, which makes it difficult for all the promoters here because you have to coordinate things with other people. I feel like our scene would be comparable to others in the States if we did have that infrastructure because everyone would have that space to thrive. It wouldn’t be like everyone’s trying to get a little piece of the crumbs.”

Up-and-coming DJ and producer Alexis Curshé says that a lot of her musical friends “moved to New York last year because there aren’t enough venues here”, highlighting the issue of creative drain. But luckily for those who do stay, the inter-connectedness of the scene helps to ensure these crumbs are – generally – spread equally. “We all have to depend on one another for everyone to succeed,” says Vicki. “Even down to sharing gear sometimes. It behooves us all to work together because together, we lift the entire city up.”

Of course, a lack of venues doesn’t necessarily stop the party from happening. Alternatively, a large proportion of Atlanta’s dance music scene today is DIY. “We’re always trying to find places that aren't officially party spaces and making them into party spaces,” Alexis tells me, herself a South Carolina native who moved to Atlanta in 2018.

“There are a lot of after-hours events,” explains Divine Interface. “That’s just how it is here because there aren’t enough clubs and the ones that do exist close at 3:AM. A lot of them happen around Edgewood. It’s not really illegal – it's always safe and there's always security – but we have to bring the sound and that allows us to go till 6:AM.”

One party that often takes place in these DIY spaces is MoodToMove, an event series founded by Samuel Parra (AKA S.P) which counts David Bulay and Jadon Murad (AKA Playr1) among its residents – the youngest layer of the family tree. With an intention to “bridge generations”, MoodToMove is focussed on celebrating both the roots and future of electronic dance music. Their line-ups platform fresher talent such as Alexis, Wild Cherry and New York’s Soul Connection, as well as “paying respect to the originators of dance music” like Kai, DJ Minx and Chez Damier.

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Jadon, who grew up listening to the sounds of Byron, Stefan and Ash (all of whom have played at MoodToMove), started his own DJ journey as Playr1 around 2022. “I met Divine Interface around that time,” he says. “From then on it’s just been a really fruitful friendship and mentorship; he’s showed me around some really cool places, taught me what I should be mindful of, and helped me establish connections with some of the older DJs in the scene like Kai and Kemit.” – both of whom express their admiration for the young promoter team, with the latter saying: “MoodToMove have done such a great job of taking notes of what the previous administration had done.”

And now Jadon is looking forward to seeing how the generation beneath him will take notes from what they are doing. “There’s a lot of young people in the crowd,” he says. “And I think that’s exciting because they will be the next DJs, just as we were the next DJs. If they’re going to the right parties and listening to the right music, that’s just going to create better artists in the future. The way people’s tastes are being shaped by what's going on right now is going to be reflected in the music that comes out of Atlanta in the next two years.”

So what will that music sound like? Does Atlanta’s electronic music have a distinct sound?

“Definitely,” Kai tells me. “Each of us has a personal style within that sound, but yes, there’s an Atlanta sound.”

“Atlanta is known for its bass,” Byron reflects. “If you go to the club here, you’re going to feel it in your chest, that bass-heavy sound.”

“I’d say there’s a bounce to it, like a Louisiana club bounce, but then also a Southern drawl,” Jadon adds. “People take their time out here. It’s slow in the south, but it also feels good.”

Karl breaks it down for me: “We have a heavy influence from Detroit. That's the foundation. But we also have a big influence from the sounds of the South, which come from the church, like gospel and soul. So Atlanta dance music, even if it's edgy or experimental, is often described as soulful.”

For Karl, the scene’s lack of exposure and underground nature allowed it to “ferment” its sound over the years. “We’ve been operating under a cover, but I think that really helped us because there were very low expectations, so we could do whatever we wanted. We didn’t feel like we needed to be in the ‘New York box’ or the ‘Chicago box’ or the ‘Detroit box’; we were influenced by all those sounds and made our own vernacular. It developed over a long period of time, but then, by the time it started to spread throughout the international music scene, it did have a unique sound – Atlanta music does have a distinct thumbprint that differentiates it from other cities. You can immediately tell it's not from Chicago or New York.”

If you’re not familiar with this sound, a good place to start might be Stefan’s track ‘ATL Sh*t’. Released last year via the artist’s own imprint FWM Entertainment, this collaborative project features Ash, Kai, Divine Interface and another Atlanta-born artist called Niyah. “I’m on my ATL shit” sing the lyrics as the bassline bounces in. Is this something of an ode to Atlanta’s dance music scene?

Stefan laughs when I ask him. “It was kind of a joke I had with Ash. I go to Detroit a lot because of the music. And Detroit and Detroiters are so proud of Detroit; they always wear a D on their hat or got something with a D on it, and there’s this artist named DJ Bone and he put out this project called ‘The Detroit EP’. Every song was about Detroit, so I was like, ‘OK let me make a song about Atlanta’, because I’d like to play some shit about where I’m at.”

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For many of the older heads in the scene, Atlanta has always been a bit “overlooked” when it comes to electronic dance music. “It does not get enough recognition,” says Kemit. While Byron recalls being on tour and telling people he’s from the South: “They’re always like, huh, but that’s where trap music is from, how did this happen?” he says. “Atlanta definitely needs to be put in the conversation more.”

That’s not to say that individual artists from Atlanta aren’t getting enough recognition. Many have achieved huge amounts of success and are stalwart names in the global dance music landscape. It’s more that their success is less connected to the scene from which they were born, as it might be for an artist from London, Berlin, New York or Chicago. “I think people see Byron and Stefan,” says Kai. “People see Leonce, and they see me and Ash from Atlanta and Detroit. But I think they see us as different entities and not so much as a scene. I don’t think people see the connectivity yet. I don’t think they see us as a collective.”

From Leonce’s perspective this is starting to happen more. “I’d say me and my peers have all done our share of putting Atlanta’s scene on the map and representing the city. We had Boiler Room Atlanta here in 2023, and it sold almost 5000 tickets. It was huge. No one was expecting it to be so big.”

“I feel so proud because everyone in Atlanta is doing some major stuff,” says Vicki of the younger generations. “I feel Southern proud.” This is the general consensus throughout my conversations, with one thing in particular sticking out as a source of immense pride.

“One thing about Atlanta’s scene that is different from some other cities in the US is the way that Black people participate in underground dance music,” says Ree. “Black people and people of colour are playing genres that people might not associate with Black DJs in cities like LA, Miami or San Francisco." She names New York as a city that does align with Atlanta in that respect, while others include Chicago and Detroit.

“I really take pride in that,” agrees David from MoodToMove. “The fact that we have more Black people and people of colour coming out. A lot of dance music came from Black people, so it feels like we’re bringing back the roots of dance music.”

Alexis, who focuses mainly on deep house and techno, frequently dedicates her sets to educating people on the Black roots of electronic dance music, such as her Black History Month mix for Deep South. Much like Ash, Alexis was invited to become part of the Deep South team by Vicki, who subsequently “mentored [her] in the business part of DJing”, once again continuing this cycle of knowledge sharing that keeps Atlanta’s dance music tree growing.

So what’s next for the city? “If we begin to get proper representation, with more artists being highlighted and valued for all of their work, then I think Atlanta could be like the next New York, where there's a lot of club spaces and festivals strictly for the underground. I feel like we could have so much more going on in Atlanta because there are so many different artists doing their thing,” says Alexis.

Meanwhile, Karl looks fondly at a new wave of clubs that are focussed on the smaller aesthetic. “Banshee, Desires, El Malo – they are Sound Table alumni. El Malo even continued Kai and Kemit’s nights, so that was like a literal handshake. And then there’s some listening bars like Stereo and Commune, which are focussed on quality sound and interesting programming.”

Either way, one thing’s for sure: “Everybody is still staying true, everyone is still themselves and doing the same shit,” says Divine Interface. With younger DJs like Anónima, NSA, Crai Bbyy, Titino, Gimmick, and Final First coming onto the scene, Atlanta keeps the ball rolling, evolving that Deep South sound and keeping the party alive – with or without attention from the outside world.

“Atlanta’s always had a very independent dance scene,” reflects Kai. “We never followed the rules of other places, we were always a bit different and unpretentious because no one was looking at us. We’ve just been doing our own thing.” On that ATL Sh*t.

Meena Sears is a freelance writer, follow her on Instagram