Louie Vega came up in a musical Bronx family and was DJing young, with salsa, Latin music, disco and New York club records all going into the same ears. Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez came from Brooklyn with hip hop, breakbeats, record digging and a serious thing for drums. Put very simply: Louie could hear the whole room, Kenny could make the drums kick the door in.

Todd Terry helped connect them around 1990. Louie heard Kenny’s A Touch of Salsa and wanted to know who had made it. Kenny then brought beats into sessions around Little Louie & Marc Anthony’s When The Night Is Over. The important bit wasn’t some grand plan to form a legendary production duo. They got in the studio and immediately realised their ears fitted together.

The name itself had existed before the duo, connected to Kenny’s earlier circle, but the Vega/Gonzalez partnership turned it into a global production identity. Their early 1990s work arrived at exactly the right moment for New York house: labels needed club mixes, singers needed remixes and DJs wanted versions that could transform familiar songs into completely different dancefloor records.

Then the remixes started coming at a ridiculous rate. Louie has talked about 16-to-18-hour studio days, sometimes knocking out several records while normal people were presumably asleep. Saint Etienne, Neneh Cherry, Madonna, Tito Puente, Chic, George Benson — the names changed, but the job was the same: make something a DJ would actually want to play.

And a MAW remix wasn’t usually the original tune with a house beat glued underneath it. They would pull the thing apart and rebuild it until the club mix had its own life. Sometimes that meant vocals and musicianship; sometimes it meant stripping everything back to drums and groove. Hardrive could go rougher, KenLou could get properly tracky, and the different names gave them room to make whatever the dance needed without worrying whether it fitted one tidy brand.

Nuyorican Soul took that even further. Instead of just lifting a nice bit from an old jazz or Latin record and calling it job done, Louie and Kenny brought musicians and singers into the room. Live percussion, salsa, jazz, soul and house could all sit together because those weren’t museum pieces to them — they were part of where the music had come from in the first place.

They also understood something house occasionally forgets when everybody gets obsessed with drums: a proper song can destroy a dancefloor too. India, Jocelyn Brown, Barbara Tucker and other vocalists sit across the wider MAW world because the voice mattered just as much as the dub. They could make DJ tools, but they could also make records people remembered when the rave was over.

Masters At Work also influenced how producers thought about low end and percussion. Kenny’s drum programming could be raw and hip-hop-informed; Vega’s arrangements could be lush without smoothing the groove away. The combination made their records useful to DJs across soulful house, garage, Latin house and harder New York rooms.

By the late 1990s and 2000s, the duo had become a reference point rather than simply a current act. Younger producers studied the remixes as templates for arrangement, while dancers who had never seen the pair together still knew the sound through decades of club staples.

The later reunions matter because Masters At Work was never merely nostalgia. When Vega and Kenny play together, the set can move from disco and Latin music into tough drums, deep house and contemporary material because the original partnership was always built from breadth.

That’s why Masters At Work belong here even though their story isn’t British rave in the narrow sense. While we were building acid house, rave and hardcore over here, New York had its own clubs, labels, singers, DJs and remix culture going absolutely full tilt. Those records crossed the Atlantic, landed in UK record shops and DJ boxes and became part of our nights as well. Rave history isn’t only the records made here — it’s the records that made the room go off when they arrived.