Electronic music began in places where mainstream culture was often unwilling to look. Over the decades, those sounds travelled from small clubs and underground parties into the world's biggest festivals, transforming not only the music itself but also the culture, technology and industry that grew around it. There is a particular moment in the history of almost every successful music movement when the relationship between the underground and the mainstream begins to change.

Amsterdam did not invent house or techno. What it did was create an environment in which new electronic music could find an audience, a community and eventually an entire industry. There are cities that become associated with particular genres because an important artist was born there, a famous club opened there or a particular record was made there. Amsterdam's relationship with electronic music is more complicated than that. The city did not invent house, techno or the syn

More than a festival, more than a conference, and far more than five nights of clubbing. Every October, Amsterdam becomes a meeting point for the people who make, play, build, discuss and experience electronic music.