Waterhouse digital: the mic men after Sleng Teng

Risto Benji (Michael Benjamin) was a Jamaican dancehall deejay who began recording as a child at King Jammy's studio in the 1980s, known for witty, rapid-fire singles including 'Gun John Crow' and 'Passport Buddy'. He recorded 'Mama Cry' with Beenie Man and 'Pepper Pot' with Ninjaman before his career faded; he was shot and killed in Kingston in 2011.

Metro Media is a Kingston sound system started around 1974 in the Woodford Park area by Lou Gooden, and taken over after his mid-1970s migration by Jimmy "Daddy" Metro (Haldane James). It was a clash specialist, known for its dubplates and its selecting, and toured through the 1980s to England, Canada and Japan. Its resident deejay was Peter Clarke, who took the sound's name for his own and worked from then on as Peter Metro — the clearest illustration in the archive of how completely a Kingston deejay's identity could be bound to the set he chatted on.

The West Kingston district that produced an outsized share of the music's engineering and voices — King Tubby's workshop and sound, King Jammy's studio, and singers and deejays including Black Uhuru and Junior Reid. Dub was effectively invented here, and the digital turn was launched from here fifteen years later.

Anthony Red Rose is a Jamaican dancehall singer-deejay whose 1985 tune 'Tempo', recorded in one take after King Tubby overheard him rehearsing it and produced by King Jammy, gave its name to the widely versioned Tempo riddim and became a foundation record of the Waterhouse digital-dancehall style. He later co-founded the production label How Yu Fi Say Dat with fellow deejay Anthony Malvo.

Digital riddim from King Tubby's Firehouse camp, named for Anthony Red Rose's "Tempo" (1985). Arriving in the first wave after Sleng Teng, it proved the digital turn was a movement rather than a one-off, and its dark, minimal pulse kept being recut into the 1990s.

Trevor Sparks (born 13 November 1965, died 25 March 2004) was a Jamaican deejay known for carrying lovers-rock-style singing into hardcore dancehall riddims, including the 1988 album Sparks produced by Whitfield 'Witty' Henry and Norman 'Bachelor' Wilson. He recorded the combination single 'Dolly My Baby' with Super Cat.

Junior Lee Bryan, known as Daddy Lizard, is a Jamaican deejay and producer from Kingston who began deejaying on the Rambo International sound system in 1986 before working Stone Love, Metro Media and Inner City, cutting his first single, 'Haf Fi Fly Out', for the Techniques label in 1987. He later founded the production label Reptile Productions.

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.

Winston "Wee Pow" Powell's Kingston sound, built in 1972 on locally made amplifiers and now the most durable operation in dancehall — a sound that outlived the eras it played through. Stone Love defined juggling culture and the weekly dance as an institution, and its selector roll (Rory, Geefus, Billy Slaughter, Diamond, Scary Gary and many more) reads as a history of the craft. Its tapes are among the most widely circulated documents of Jamaican dance culture.

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

How a cheap keyboard preset in 1985 reset the sound of dancehall.

One harmony group's lead-singer chair changed hands more than almost any other in reggae, and each singer carried it somewhere new.

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.