Read an interview with Psychic TV’s Genesis and Paula P-Orridge featured in a rare tour zine from 1990. Best known as the cofounder of Throbbing Gristle (alongside Cosey […]
Frankie Knuckles’ Record Collection: A Treasure Trove of Dance Music History

Let’s allow the great dance music writer Barry Walters set the scene, which takes place not long after Larry Levan’s friend Frankie Knuckles started DJing in Chicago. There, he began spinning obscure stuff that other DJs listened to but weren’t bringing to the dance floor, resulting in music that, Walters wrote, “borrows from obscure Italian disco records that imitate New York club records that draw from Philadelphia soul that grew out of Detroit black pop.” The writer continues:
In Chicago former New York DJ Frankie Knuckles provided a similar sound from 1977 to 1983 at a gay black club called the Warehouse. Like Levan, Knuckles mixed dubbed-up inspirational electronic funk cult jams by the Peech Boys and D Train with ’70s black disco classics by Loleatta Holloway and South Shore Commission. Knuckles spun what other jocks had long forgotten or never had the nerve to play, creating a following of dancers who came just to hear his signature sound. They called this sound Warehouse music. For short, house music.
After Knuckles passed in 2014, his record collection ended up at the then-newly created Frankie Knuckles Foundation in Chicago. A few months ago, the foundation announced on its Instagram that they’d recently concluded a long-gestating project: archiving and digitizing the Frankie Knuckles Collection, described as containing “over 4,000 vinyl and ephemera belonging to the Godfather of House Music.” The aim: “[E]xtend the life of the collection and make it more accessible to the public.”
Historically speaking, the collection is among the most consequential in the history of dance music. To give an example of the convergence going on when Knuckles was moving from DJing at the Warehouse and the Power Plant to making tracks, his first drum machine came through a friend in Detroit.
“I didn’t finally get my first drum machine until 1984 I think,” Knuckles told the Red Bull Music Academy. “I got it from Derrick May. It was a Roland TR-909. Somehow he had two of them, and he called me from Detroit to tell me he was coming down. At this point I was at the Power Plant. I left the Warehouse in spring of ’83. I opened the Power Plant in the fall of ’83. Anyhow, he had called me up and said he had these two drum machines and he wanted to sell me one. And I told him I didn’t know the first thing about programming them. He said, ‘It’s easy, I’ll show you.’ So he came down that weekend and he brought it.”
In an interview with Resistor Mag in 2020, Julie Yost, then the director of programming for the Rebuild Foundation and its imposing facility, the Stony Island Arts Bank.
“In order to best preserve the collection, the records themselves are not publicly accessible,” Yost said. “Our ongoing digitization of the collection has enabled us to make it much more available, however, both passively, and actively. For instance, when the Arts Bank has public hours, we are usually digitizing the collection for all to hear through our sound system.”
Four years later, no formal discography of Knuckles’ collection has yet been published, but it seems we’re inching closer. His records are accessible by appointment, and DJs have been creating mixes based on the digital files, but not through an outward-facing site. Here’s hoping that’s on the horizon.