Moulton Lava Inheriting his sound genetics from Poulsen and Tubby, Tom Moulton, would be the next to join this art of technological progression. Moulton produced a number of ‘mix-tapes’ for use at the Sandpiper, an exclusively gay club on Fire Island. The 'mix-tapes' were tape recordings of a sequence of discs being played like recording a DJ playing records live. Moulton was working from a home studio though, without the direct pressure of the audience, so he was able to survey his record collection to find which discs blended indecipherably together. Mel Cheren relates his achievement and its pronounced effect on DJs: Tom began to mix his tapes so that they played over each other and blended into each other, making it impossible to distinguish where one ended and the next began. . . So as Tom’s innovation spread, the bpm of each song became important. DJs began to make a conscious effort to build sets from relatively slow to furiously fast by gradually increasing the bpm. Eventually this became so standard that today some complain there’s almost a tyranny of bpm—that DJs are hostage to matching beats of songs, and that this limits their creativity and spontaneity. Certainly this building up to a crescendo had been a part of every great live dj’s repertoire before Moulton, but Moulton made it the standard, he made it a necessary trait of the live DJ at the time—by 75 or so in the top Disco clubs if a DJ couldn’t mix, she (a small group of the first female DJs appeared at this time) would be replaced by a another DJ who could. Moulton was using 2 and 4-track tape as his instrument of choice. Just like the Dub architects, Moulton was stripping away melodies and vocals to reveal the seamy under-belly of the original sound recording. It was a decade old tradition in Jamaica at the time, but, when American ears first heard the bare-bones, rough-and-ready version of an original track, they were enthralled and a new era had begun in American music, Disco.