The night the riddim went digital

A small consumer keyboard sold from the early 1980s, and the most consequential piece of equipment in dancehall's history. One of its preset accompaniment patterns — slowed down and reworked by Noel Davey — became the rhythm of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng", produced by King Jammy in 1985. A machine intended for living rooms replaced the session band, and the music has been made on keyboards ever since.

The singer of "Under Mi Sleng Teng" (1985), the King Jammy production whose Casio-driven rhythm is the conventional starting gun for digital dancehall. Smith (1965-2014) recorded plenty besides, but the record that changed the music's economics — no session band required — is the one history keeps him for.

The 1985 riddim, built by Wayne Smith and Noel Davey on a Casiotone preset at King Jammy's and voiced by Smith as "Under Mi Sleng Teng", that ended the era of the live band as the default of Jamaican music. Cheap, fully electronic and instantly copyable, it triggered the digital turn: hundreds of versions followed within a few years, production costs collapsed, and dancehall's tempo, texture and economics were remade around it. Nothing else in the archive divides a before from an after so cleanly.

Lloyd James, the engineer and producer who came up under King Tubby in Waterhouse and then changed the music twice over. He built and ran his own sound before turning to production, and in 1985 issued "Under Mi Sleng Teng" — the Casio-preset rhythm that ended the live-band era and opened the digital one. Through the late 1980s his Waterhouse studio was the busiest room in Jamaica, cutting for Half Pint, Admiral Bailey, Chaka Demus, Ninjaman and most of the era's voices, and his Super Power sound carried the same material into the dance.

How a preset rhythm on a consumer keyboard turned Jamaica's oldest studio economy into the digital age.

When King Jammy's went digital in 1985, a wave of deejays rode the new Waterhouse computer sound into the dancehall mainstream.

The digital riddim turned the producer into the star of the record - and the story runs from a Casio preset to the modern hit factory.

How the B-side and the mixing desk became instruments.