David Mancuso

He grew up in an orphanage in Utica, New York, where a nun named Sister Alicia hung balloons in the rooms and played records for the children. He spent the rest of his life rebuilding that room.

On Valentine's Day 1970 he sent invitations to a party in his own home at 647 Broadway and called it Love Saves the Day. It was not a club. There was no bar, no door policy, no VIP — just balloons, a table of food and juice, and a sound system he had tuned obsessively.

He was an audiophile first. Klipschorn speakers, Koetsu cartridges, the shortest signal path he could build. He did not beat-mix and rarely touched an EQ: he played records whole, in the order he had chosen, at the level they were mastered for. Sound quality, to him, was a form of hospitality — the same impulse as the food on the table.

The Loft outlasted the clubs it inspired. Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Nicky Siano passed through his rooms before they built their own. He kept throwing the same party, in one loft or another, for forty-six years.

The records that stayed

What you are moving through is what was left at the end.

Over the decades the collection thinned. What remained were the sides he kept reaching for — the ones he chose to finish with, the ones he could not bring himself to let go of. He was still playing them when he died in New York on 14 November 2016.