Emphasis tended to fall on cushiony kick-drum thumps and the accompanying hi-hats, with faint textures provided by synthetic strings and dreamy keyboard tones.
Microhouse has continued on in the late 2010's-20's with electronic artists like Jon Hopkins, The Field, Pantha du Prince, Rival Consoles, Matthew Herbert, Actress, Four Tet, Isolée, and many others.
"[7] Sherburne recalled how listening to Perlon's Superlongevity compilation in 1999, he "had the strong impression that House had been stripped down to a trifold essence: rhythm, soul and silence."
He traced the sound's reductionism to "Chain Reaction's blissed out minimalism," and its "punchier and groovier" qualities to "Matthew Herbert's clipped, cushioned romps, and the minimalist Chicago disco pioneered by the likes of Moodymann and Theo Parrish."
This is one of the main characteristics of microhouse compared to deep house, for example, which tends to feature no vocals and also a slower tempo going to as low as 115 BPM in some songs.
Microhouse is somewhat obscure when compared to other genres of house and techno, but several cities including Bucharest, Melbourne, Berlin, London, Paris, Montreal, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Miami, Detroit, and Chicago, have budding scenes, and with the minimal techno boom of the mid-2000s, is now gaining great popularity in German, French, Canadian, Italian and Spanish clubs.