Neat article but completely unnecessary scrolljacking. If you pinch zoom in, you can't even pan around normally. Scroll down a bit and then tap the (also completely unnecessary) arrow in the bottom right, and it'll ever.. so.. slowly.. scroll you back to the top.
The web gives bad designers too much rope to hang everyone with.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
I loved the Gray back than. It was just right for me and for the time back than. Something I realized at a "revival" party for it. Growing up and out of time sucks some times ;)
It was the late 90s. I was 16 or 17. I used to sneak out, literally out the window and over the roof, to the fence, and to the ground, after bed time and trek to the city, to go to "61 Regent St". An "underground" club in Sydney. Techno all night, strange new media generative video art projected on the walls, people with glow sticks, UV lights, dreadlocks. A "drinks counter" that also sold marijuana. Place was tiny, always filled with cigarette smoke. Sort of like a hippy culture vibe, but techno. Dumonde's Tomorrow. I was so tired one night I fell asleep under the pool table. Somehow sleeping even as the bass reverberated everything. Dancing until early, then if I wanted more, walk over to the slightly more hardcore "Icebox" in the Cross. Both places closed for many, many years.
I love techno and I can't wait to read this article, but I had to stop and come back here just to say this site's scrolling behaviour is driving me nuts.
If any designers are reading this, please avoid smooth scrolling.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
Do you happen to know if the old version of "Ishkur's guide to electronic music" is still available somewhere? IIRC it was a flash site with mostly music bubbles. It opened me up to fringe music genre's like Italo, Acid Jazz and Ghetto Tech.
That comic is the funniest fucking thing I've seen in a long time.
I was literally just making the argument with my friends who were going "oh, I wish Tiesto was still playing trance; he turned his back on the trance scene" to which I responded "Tiesto was never a trance DJ, he was a mainstage DJ. He's still a mainstage DJ, and you don't get on the mainstage playing trance anymore".
In the last 50 years, you can probably count the number of chart-toppers without lyrics on one hand. Animals, Axel F, Doop, Flat Beat, and Sandstorm (and I am not sure if these even topped charts everywhere).
Sure, if you are into the niche of EDM or techno club music, the situation is different, but none of those tunes sell millions of copies.
It is though. The number of non-chart-toppers with lyrics is beyond counting. You don't make yourself a chart-topper simply by writing music with lyrics
The point is you could spend hours actually developing subtleties in engineering, especially in timing and mixing, to produce something profound.
Or you could get a drum machine and a 303, and get someone sexy to sing/rap/speak over the top, make a video, and save a lot of time. A lot of pop music these days is quite simple, except for the singing, which I can admit is talented, but it's more about personality/fashion than music.
Mainstage is a specific genre of EDM, ironically known for being particularly transparent and banal these days. Some of the most likely to have lyrics that are basically just another beat track, IMO, if they have them at all.
Trance ironically enough (including a lot of the stuff Tiesto worked on) is known for having very deep lyrics and that's a good chunk of what people are missing I think when they make the comments like above.
I'd check out Beautiful Things by Andain if you're curious. The lyrics are about a woman who believes she gave up her life and potential to be a traditional wife and is contemplating suicide to end her regret.
I think once the genre becomes defined, it's often bound to get more simplistic if there are words/lyrics. It's not limited to trance music.
A lot of trance music never even had lyrics; listen to what came out before 2000. (Even Tiesto made a lot of music without lyrics before 2002 or so). If you want to find music that sounds like the early days of trance music then you'll more likely find it labeled as techno music today (which is not really all that surprising since trance music originated from techno music anyway).
Beautiful Things is arguably not trance music. Also, when you're studying or trying to concentrate, do you listen to music with lyrics?
Actually, he definitely was a trance DJ. I remember when his first single was released. He understood how to make simple melodies with hooks which a lot of us respected. Over time, he learned how to make "epic" trance hooks that help pioneered the rise of the EDM genre.
Mainstage antics are part of performance. Check out every mainstream genre before EDM. Van Halen Jump is probably my fav example :)
My point was that he played trance because that got you on the mainstage (particularly in 2000 era Netherlands), and as soon as other genres were played on the mainstage he switched.
There's plenty of even trance without mainstage antics.
I'm mainly being pithy more than anything else, lol.
Oh thanks, I remember laughing at that comic 15 years ago or so, back when I had "trance sucks" as an avatar on at least one dance music-related forum :)
The fact that it's originally a Jack Chick tract about how evil Muslims are makes it even better lol.
Its easy to miss but descriptions of the different genres are the true mvp. Some of the saltiest things I have read, true hilarity.
E.g `Eurotrance`:
> "The rank repugnance of the self-fellating culture of DJ worship is at the forefront of this many-headed hydra of rapacious rot. Overbearing anthems, boring breakdowns, and tasteless DJ vanity have combined into one monstrous, obnoxious, pompous, unlistenable Babylonian nega-demon. Who is to blame for unleashing such a hideous beast of seething filth upon our ears?"
The descriptions are salty at every genre that is even somewhat popular. God forbid people actually enjoying the music without being under influence of several drugs
These kind of rants have gone really old for me, like the person is stuck in 2009 at the golden age of Pitchfork/Vice/Hipster blogs... music elitism/criticism.
People did their own remixes with computers at home.
Everyone and their cat tried to do their first techno/trance
song in High School.
When "modern EDM" hit the US we have been listening to
Techno/Trance since where, from 1992-1993? There were even
official Techno/Trance remixes bought by everyone, too.
I really wish you'd stop with this smug condescension. You are utterly ignorant of the US music scene during this period, and in general, based on your comments.
You seem to be basing your views on top 40 charts and what was protrayed in media. It's true, techno and electronica only rarely appeared there in the 90s. That's because electronica in the US was entirely centered around clubs and raves. Radio was controlled by a handful of big labels that all had a specific intent to shape the market towards specific genres. So techno in the US never became a "factory" product.
But that doesn't mean we weren't listening to it. I grew up in Kansas in a smaller city. In high school we were going to jungle or trance parties just as often as grunge. All the big box book and music stores had substantial electronica sections. We discovered music at parties, via word of mouth, and by the latter half of the 90s, via the internet.
People have been listening to techno in the US continuously since its inception in Detroit. But we've been listening to a whole lot of other electronica subgrenes as well.
The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt. The closest to that style that's been popular here would be Oakenfold and the like.
You also misunderstand hip hop in one of your comments. It is not just popular with black Americans. It's been popular with Americans of all sorts since its inception. In fact hip hop essentially subsumed pop in the late 90s.
There's been a lot of exchange between hip hop and electronica in the US too, particularly due to both using the 808 a lot. The latest electronica fad, the revival of phonk, is another example. It's a fusion of trap with breakbeat techno. And it's yet another example of how electronica is fundamentally international, as the revival has been driven by russian producers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smbiKaOAN3Q
I don't really know what you're trying to accomplish with your smugness, but to be blunt all it's doing is making you look both ignorant and prejudiced.
>You seem to be basing your views on top 40 charts and what was protrayed in media. It's true, techno and electronica only rarely appeared there in the 90s. That's because electronica in the US was entirely centered around clubs and raves. Radio was controlled by a handful of big labels that all had a specific intent to shape the market towards specific genres. So techno in the US never became a "factory" product.
So was Spain. People shared music with each other. Radio? pop and rhythm & blues everywhere in top charts.
While people IRL got into the clubs everywhere.
>The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt.
Here we had several substyles. As I stated, Andalusians were
more fans of breakbeat, while the North liked progressive/proto-hardbass in 1999-2001 and the East with Valencia and its "route" among Barcelona was the Techno-Trance heaven. Ibiza longly was, was, it is, and it will be, THE "chill-out/house" genre place from Spain. For obvious reasons: partying tourism and a "hippie" vibe since the 60's.
Because sarcasm and personal taste have gone out of style?
Not to mention those things were a thing at the time of Lester Bangs or the NME, 50+ years ago (and even in reviewers of classical music) hardly a Pitchfork era phenomenon or invention....
I think that music defining one's identity and their lifestyle has kind of gone out of style. I just remember the late 00's/early 10's as crazy on judging people on what they listen (or they clothes, like Vice Do and Don't), not saying it didn't exist before. But maybe I'm a bit sensitive because I did go through that phase and it's still fresh...
Also to add to this the more I lean to the content creation side and work with artists, the more genres become blurry and irrelevant. Seeing critics and the creator of that history tree obsess over this and create micro genres to try to fit every music and their listener into this is just silly and far removed from how a good composer or producer with eclectic tastes works. Nowadays a mainstream song can be surprisingly creative, while the N-th production in a "good taste approved sub-sub-genre of techno" will have 0 artistic value.
I wish some of those humorous rants still existed. Music criticism now is so staid and boring. There are more paragraphs dedicated to the author's navel-gazing about their personal circumstances, than what the damn record sounds like.
I even wish the elitism still existed. I used to go to Pitchfork, Coke Machine Glow and sites of that type to read about music that wasn't getting covered elsewhere. Now it's basically Rolling Stone, but worse because it pretends to be counter culture while devoting endless posts to TSwift or Drake or any number of artists that can be heard on every major radio station.
Don't get out your eulogies too prematurely -- let's not forget Anthony Fantano's meteoric rise in large part due to his Gordon Ramsay style critic rants! With that said, I do agree with your directional assessment, but I wonder if it's more due to economic and discovery forces (lower cost to production, discovery AND publication than ever before).
That is to say -- I've found that while the sheer volume of mass-produced crap has gone up (including but not limited to music criticism), so too has the sheer volume of rare, underground jewels. I don't know if/maybe doubt discovery has been cracked yet.
The Fantano phenomenon puzzles me. I have tried to watch his videos, but they're so boring. He looks into the camera for 10+ minutes just talking.
There are never any cut-aways, or song clips, or on-screen graphics...anything to reduce the monotony. And yet he has a million subs and the comments section does include discussion of the record. It's not very deep, but it does exist.
For me though, it's too boring. I'd read the review if he wrote articles, but definitely would not watch.
> so too has the sheer volume of rare, underground jewels
This. As for discovery, it's never been easier to find things by oneself. Bandcamp (nice place to bootstrap rabbit holes), Spotify artists playlists, Youtube channels, Subreddits...
It's absolutely delightful. You just know that when someone knowledgeable disses you with so much care and attention, there's some deep-seated love behind all that hatred.
You forgot to quote the "best" bit a few paragraphs later :
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.
Meanwhile, the US got the shittiest EDM ever in 2010-2011
as something "revolutionary".
You kickstarted the acid house genre, but you let it rot
in the dust in the 90's.
We Europeans had a huge underground fanbase since late 80's,
and since mid-90's trance has been huge for example in
Spain and Germany, up to the point to be broadcasted in
the state-backed first TV channel in the mornings.
North American techno fan for almost 30 years here.
Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
Don't lecture us -- Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno & house, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the late 80s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and shipped back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
Electronic music in Europe has always been a huge industry, and some amazing music made... but as a % of product produced/consumed.. only a small amount of it was good (which amounted to a lot of excellent records in an absolute ocean of other junk.)
Back in the day there was an amazing amount of quality underground music coming out of Chicago, New York, Detroit / Windsor, and smaller centres in the midwest, too. Great stuff even from here in Toronto. The west coast was an entirely other story, mostly dominated by "funky breaks" and trance and stuff I didn't like.
Also I can't tell from your tone if the YouTube video you posted is made to be made fun of, or enjoyed? Because to me it's clearly the former. The kind of shit that teenage kids at raves back in the 90s would take meth to and grind their teeth and we'd just gag at.
Yes, we had all that crap here back in the mid-90s. Huge raves, mostly crap. EDM is just what the next generation called it, and I guess maybe it had a broader audience.
>Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
> That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.
I'm not questioning the experience of North American music lovers and club-goers like yourself, I'm sure you could get your hands on that stuff.
But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
Yeah I'm just saying it was far more mainstream than is intimated. "Charts" have always been a marketing tool, it's questionable to me from the 80s on how much they reflect what people were actually listening to.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
>I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here
Kinda like the American perception on European's techno culture.
Hint: when the clubs released their yearly compilation based on 3 or 4 CD's, you had one disc per genre: Techno, trance, house and progressive/sung. So in the end we listened to all of the EDM offer inbetween depending on the mood.
Also, as I said, dance megamix CD's in Spain could be found as early as late 80's. Ok, more like vinyls, but the concept stays.
I don't have much to add to this apart from to say I think you're both right to varying degrees.
But more importantly I'm enjoying this passionate discourse on HN about a genre of music that I care deeply about.
I think it's fair to say that dance music today wouldn't exist without the breadth of innovation that happened on both sides of "the pond" in recent decades - and to not be too European/US centric - elsewhere around the world too.
Brutal get off my lawn rhetoric over music that is intended to unite! Man who thought this thread would devolve like this. Europe obviously has pushed the envelope and produced fantastic music just as the US has, why the scuffle?
> This was the era when in the US Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno"
That was a diss line about Moby, a "techno" artist who achieved mainstream US popularity around that time. Eminem wasn't trying to accurately depict the state of electronic music in the US, he was being salty.
By my own memory as a teenager growing up in the rave scene, electronic music was weird and unapproachable to pretty much everyone. Big Beat like The Crystal Method and Prodigy had made some waves, and of course there was Moby, but outside of my raver friends and a brief attempt to get eurodance (like Alice Deejay) on Top 40 radio by the local media conglomerates, "techno" was pretty niche.
I mean, in the early 2000s I saw Paul Oakenfold -- twice -- at small clubs, and it was easy to get into the front. I would write requests in big letters on my phone and see if I could get the DJ to play them. (Tiesto wasn't as approachable but that asshole would crank the speakers up well past their distortion point)
I know, but precisely : referring to Moby as "techno" says everything on how clued up about electronic music the average US listener or artist was at the time :)
Moby may have ended up with chart success and his tracks on car adverts, but he most did produce plenty of music in the same realm as the artists in the article. Maybe a bit more stompy and with a more varied structure than the clinical X-101 stuff, but it would be unfair to not call it techno. Whether or not Eminem was aware of his early work I couldn't say.
For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.
Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
Footwork, Club, Bounce, Industrial, House, Electro, to name a few, are all styles that were prevalent on dancefloors in the US during the time you characterize it as "all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres". All of these styles are woven into the DNA of the new underground generation. Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
> For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.
I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.
>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
>The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.
> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet.
It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.
There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.
I'm happy to acknowledge that there are many subgenres of electronic music, including some of my favorites, which truly were grown and blossomed in Europe.
I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.
If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!
I'm a big DNB fan but I don't recognise any of the terms at the top tbh. Ghetto Tech and "Moombahton" aren't words that ever crossed my radar. I definitely don't see the words "drum and bass" anywhere there, which is a pity.
Immediately did a Ctrl-F to see if Ishkur's guide had been mentioned on this thread and was not disappointed. As sassy as it is, the deep relational depth and exhaustive Ishkur put into making sense of the whole history of electronic music (and really the /whole/ history -- right back to its origins in musique concrete) made a really big impression on me as a teenager. It's probably a large part of what made me get a double major in music in college.
The original Ishkur's Guide is one of those Flash projects now lost to time. This new one is OK, but doesn't come close to the original for me. I always loved electronic music, even as a kid. In the UK we regularly had tracks (trance especially) crossover into the charts. But before Ishkur's Guide I didn't really know what I was listening to. It opened up the door to a whole world of music for me.
This is about as conventional a narrative as you can get. I've never been happy with it though, it's way too much of a tidy, linear, clean through-line.
For instance, this narrative always leave out free-style and electro like Hashim (example: 1983, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykK0uEjSsqY), Newcleus, etc. Soulsonic Force (1982: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHQ11l4uiM4) predated Atkins Cybotron project and Atkins even said he didn't see a huge difference between the free-style, electro, and what he was doing.
It also leaves out Italo Disco and the British New Wave movement. Take the intro to 1983's Hypnotic Tango by My Mine for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6EbVwOumlE
They do an obligatory Kraftwerk but the entire berlin school and midera is left out in the cold as well (Tangerine Dream for example. 1975, Ricochet P2 for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoSNbCNYsA4) along with artists who were giant in their day like Jean Michelle Jarre.
Also what's left out are the other influential Krautrock artists like Manuel Göttsching and his 1981 E2-E4 album. (https://youtu.be/ys0HyevZpQg).
There's also the left-field weird albums that were mighty influential at the time, such as Misa Criolla by Fuego (1981: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Era1x9hRnBQ) There's your "four-on-the-floor" with tape loop sampling. Speaking of children What about the next year,
Liaisons Dangereuses - Los Niños Del Parque ... https://youtu.be/a_sAH2QGotE there's your techno
Or what about Stopps "I'm Hungry" from 1983? https://youtu.be/I26lP56-UeA ... this strange track was played in Chicago house clubs, Belgium pre rave new beat "acid house" parties and the early EBM scene. Pretty expansive one to leave out
And keeping things in the US, they always ignore the west coast, with outfits like Megatone records out of san francisco and gay club music (eg Hi-NRG) and people like Bobby Orlando.
Anyway the history is vast and rich and this article is essentially the same story that's always written. I dunno, I almost feel like this structure misses the boat. I know that's a big claim.
Just out of curiosity: What do you mean by New Wave in this context? When I hear new wave I think of acts such as Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran. But are they related to techno?
Yeah, absolutely. You're just a few steps away with a lot of Duran Duran (Rio era) and records like Night Move's Transdance arguably gets there.
I mean heck, take Polices Synchronicity part 1, https://youtu.be/Si5CSpUCDGY. If someone told me that was how an album by underworld or say sasha started from 1999, I'd believe it, swap the vocals and the physical drums with some synths and it's basically done
I feel no-wave also might have been influential. ESG could easily be read as proto-techno in this context. 'Erase You' and 'Dance' have that same kind of reductionist, tribal sensibility.
Their track "Moody (Spaced Out)" shares a strange similarity with Atmosfears "Dancing in Outer Space". I'm sure it's independent, it just made me think of it right away
For example, they completely missed out Front 242, Nitzer Ebb. However they at least mention the genre, EBM.
And to be honest: what is techno else than Tallas invention in a record store? Frontpage magazine? So many things left out, but who cares? You either witnessed parts of the 90th or not. ;)
I never understood my parents fondness for Woodstock and how an e guitar could be the center of a "sound revolution". Around 30 years later, I really understand them: Dorian Gray, Loveparade, 303. ;)
They actually did mention Nitzer Ebb if you do a ctrl-F. Yes, very cool techno-ish, minimal seminal music. Ritchie Hawtin used to spin Murderous into his sets.
Recently there was a cool documentary about Wax Trax records called Industrial Accident. Worth seeing. Interviews with Front 242, Ministry, Revolting Cocks, KMFDM, Thrill Kill Kult, Trent Reznor, Frontline Assembly, etc.
I think my main contention can be illustrated by trying to discover where Disco comes from. I was looking for this kind of shoestring style story for years.
Then I gave up trying to construct it. The reality is it's a bunch of things smashed together like pressing all the buttons at the soda fountain at once. That's what happened.
That's where techno came from as well.
Sometimes the narratives are super clean, like rappers delight for rap (there's pre rappers delight style rap records, but under like a dozen or so) or the amen break and dnb or the configuration of the swing drum kit for swing music or house music proper being "the stuff knuckles plays" in Chicago.
But a few styles are inherently messy with no clean lines. Rock, Disco and Techno are three
Rock is especially super messy, here's Meade Lux Lewis in 1927 for instance, https://youtu.be/tDuLezFRMNU swap the piano with a guitar and you have 50s rock
Thanks for your great contributions in this thread.
Can you please help me understand "rock is super messy"? The traditional narrative is "rock was mostly derived from blues (+ some other influences)" but the counter(?)example you provided is a classic 12 bar blues.
Do you have some messier examples? Or did I miss your point?
That's a great video! I have never seen it. Thanks!
The thing that complicates it is four on the floor has lots of predated "almost but ok, not quite exactly" versions. Such as in Brazilian pop, take Participação from 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DP6hRt9xvw ... those percussion aren't far away from late-70s orchestral disco. Almost same BPM.
This drum style kinda came out of everywhere. Here it is in Pakistan also in 1971 for instance, Runa Laila, Rushdi, Shaukat Ali Khan & Munir - We Don´t Care, starts around 1 minute in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9uYjpkTkNo ... that's the 73 columbia release pictured in youtube, not the original 71 odeon one.
Histories of techno always leave out some of my favorites from the early 2000s Adam Beyer / Drumcode era of fast maximalist techno—Zenit records for instance
I grew up with Drumcode. It was quite common with forest raves here in Sweden, basically a huge sound system in some remote place and people dancing over night. And at one point there were also some organisers who rented a whole cruise liner, with people like Adam Beyer and Thomas Krome DJ’ing. My favourites include: surgeon, headroom, the advent, invexis, chris liebing, planetary assault systems, mark broom, pounding grooves and richie hawtin. Then I fell into the rabbit hole of more experimental music such as autechre and have been stuck there ever since
Drumcode is still going strong and Beyer does a weekly podcast, which is excellent (and supports RSS too). I still love that sound even though I'm now far too old to have the stamina to party like I did in the 90s/00s.
IDM has also been a huge love of my life. I'm not sure I could pick a favourite out of techno or IDM though. But Drumcode Radio is certainly good music to run to.
Slam did a rather nice podcast that sat somewhere between techno and experimental. I don't know if their podcast is still going but their RSS feed has certainly stopped :(
Drumcode has become the EDM festival gateway to many people and has earned the nickname "business techno". Gently bobbing along at 125-128 with predictable buildups/breakdowns and is very "FX friendly" on the mixer.
Aside from the beat rate, what you've described there could equally apply to all genres of dance music. Almost every track follows the same rules phrasing and has a 4/4 time signature (often with really accented four-to-the-floor kicks or percussion). The predictable buildups and breakdowns are a feature: most people can't dance to something they can't follow. Just look at how differently people dance to IDM (it's not uncommon to see a mosh pit at some gigs). That said, even IDM has a good few tracks with a predictable phrasings to them too.
Sure, some genres are more predictable than others (hardhouse, for example, is effectively the "painting by numbers" equivalent of EDM) but as a retired DJ who used to mix on 3+ decks and throw in the odd non 4/4 track too (typically 3/4 but I had some more esoteric records too), I can't think of many tracks from many genres that were particularly hard to DJ.
...well there was this one track that was difficult, not because of the phrasing nor time signature, but because the producer decided to fade in the start of the track. Very unhelpful that!
What I've written here also applies to a significant amount of rock and it's various sub-genres too.
As for the "FX friendly on the mixer", that's been technos style since the 90s. It's nothing new and certainly not anything specific to Drumcode. Richie Hawtin even released a compilation album called "Decks, EFX & 909" in 1999 and his style is very different to Adam Beyer's. In the early 00s Misstress Barbara wrote in a cover sleeve on one of her mixes about how her sets were about creating new compositions live using 3 decks, heavy EQing and effects. Her style also differed massively from Drumcode.
Source: retired DJ and producer. Not a household name but played a few gigs in and around London. Mostly techno but with house, electro, breaks, EBM, rock, metal, industrial and pretty much anything else thrown in that had the right vibe to it.
It's funny because I guess I'm old but that kind of stuff feels sort of like the "end of the road" for techno and not part of the history, more of the end of the history.
I liked some of it at the time -- I have some of the Code Red Adam Beyer stuff on coloured red vinyl somewhere -- but it's a bit soul-less and monolithic. A very white middle class European straightlaced "thump thump thump" interpretation of the genre.
The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.
> I liked some of it at the time -- I have some of the Code Red Adam Beyer stuff on coloured red vinyl somewhere -- but it's a bit soul-less and monolithic. A very white middle class European straightlaced "thump thump thump" interpretation of the genre.
I've got a couple of those records and I can tell you that Adam Beyer and Drumcode still sound like that today, they've really nailed that "far duller than it sounds" sub-genre of techno.
> The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.
I managed to see Landstrumm play two days before the start of lockdown last March as part of the 20 Years of Don't evening at the Bangface Weekender, how's that for good timing? :)
I was going out to a lot of squat parties that played it in the 00s when there was tons of it coming out of London from labels like Don't, Yolk, Chancer, Victim and 4x4 Recordings, and also went to Jerome Hill's Uglyfunk night regularly (it's still going in fact but I've not made it there recently). Mark Hawkins was probably my favourite producer followed by Jerome Hill and Michael Forshaw.
I've only managed to see Landstrumm twice, cuz of being on this side of the pond. Once in the early 2000s he DJ'd along with DJ Hell at a local club, and actually he was quite competent on the vinyl (more than Hell was) and he played a lot of Chicago and Detroit classics. It was a good night if I recall.
The other time was actually very recent (2019), someone I know locally knows him personally and brought him over into my local small Ontario city to play live. Small gig, maybe 50 people there. Even got to shake his hand and say hi.
I also saw him as Crystal Distortion back in the mid-00s at Uglyfunk and as himself in the early 10s, so that's only one more time than you :)
I'm a big fan of Detroit ghetto-tech like DJ Godfather, and have a similar problem of it only existing on the other side of the Atlantic... The weekender I mentioned has had at least one of the top DJs over every other year or so over the last decade which is amazing, because otherwise I've been out to see it played three times in the past two decades, so I feel your pain :)
Hah, I bet, watching people dancing to it in Boiler Room videos is different enough from what I'm used to, and that's got to be a lot tamer than you'd see somewhere without cameras filming the entire thing!
The first time I saw this clip it was amazing how distant it was from everything I've experienced since going to my first club in 1995 - and the video is from closer to 1995 than 1995 is to today!
I've seen Model 500 and wasn't impressed to be honest, but then again electro isn't my thing at all so that's more about me lol, my friends enjoyed it a lot :)
Electro was my thing back then. But I think I'd tire of a whole gig of just Model 500.
The DEMF dancefloor vibe while the booty stuff was playing was... raunchy. Like full on grinding, ass rubbing, etc. Didn't see that stuff at clubs here. The rave/club/techno scene back then here was pretty androgynous and public displays of affection would have been very gauche. Not so in Detroit at certain gigs
First time I saw DJ Godfather they had DJ Stingray play before him and I enjoyed that style of modern harder electro a lot more, if only because the production was so much better :)
The scene here was neither androgynous nor restrained in the public displaying of affection - but overtly sexual displays were very much in the minority and stood out, probably because British people loved being able to shed our passively-aggressive polite and emotionally stunted personas for an evening by consuming large amounts of pills and just wanting to dance and hug people ;)
I've seen some full-on stuff at squat parties though. Ecstasy and alcohol can make people completely lose their inhibitions lol.
I totally agree for 90, even 99% of the tracks from that era, but there are some serious gems in there. I really enjoy the Youtube account "TECHNO" for finding some of it. A few producers that stood out to me: Kobaya, Rino Cerrone, Samuel L. Session, Leandro Gamez, G-Force, Tomie Nevada, Headroom, Gaetano Parisio, Damon Wild & Echoplex (slightly difference scene), Ade Fenton ... and many others less famous and with fewer releases.
Adam Beyer's tracks himself and most of the stuff on Drumcode from any era though is totally boring, I agree. And we can also agree the Neil Landstrumm and Cristian Vogel (I'd argue early Villalobos too) are the height of the end of techno history.
Quite possibly I just like this stuff because it reminds me of video game soundtracks from the era.
That whole movement was kinda self contained. Early 2000s Central Europe.
There's a party drug contribution that's really instrumental to these movements. I have been thinking of how to do a musical taxonomy by narcotic, but it's hard to do without making everyone sound like a junkie.
New Beat and MDMA, Disco and cocaine, freeform Jazz and heroine, etc. (I'm a big fan of all of these btw, and could likely make you want to "delete my number" talking about them. But pretending like Gino Soccio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhAPoip5YeQ) or Tantra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyqkePY6FKY) or the partiers listening were sober is personally, not very plausible. Sure, I'm sober, but I'm an outlier)
The big theory here is the genres that seem to compactly come and go in a few years, seem to have a high degree of self similarity in releases (take reggae or psytrance for example), and seem to be popular with the party kids might be heavily linked to a particular single or set of narcotics.
Take happy hardcore for example. Thousands of tracks, labels, artists, a huge culture and scene behind it, of well, to be honest, a bunch of teenagers on drugs. Take psychedelic rock and LSD.
Again, this is a really touchy subject but I kinda think drumcore is in that camp. It follows the same chronological and social patterns and seems to fall in the same circles.
I'm not a drug user but I've been to enough parties to know there's certainly a different prevalence in different circles. It's even more difficult because you know, it's all technically illegal so people aren't entirely forthcoming and people don't tend to leave great documentation of illegal substance use around for future historian study.
Maybe a cross comparison with police arrest reports would be as authoritative as we can get? Even that is tough though because in all the hundreds of underground raves I went to in my teens and twenties in california, police arresting people happened at I believe zero. So that sample size is extremely small.
And even then, everything usually gets consumed rather immediately and if they bust a dealer what they're finding are the unsold inventory so even that's not a good metric, the "empty shelves" are the important ones.
Mostly it's me not understanding why so many people are captivated, excited and enthralled by something that sounds so caustic and abrasive.
It's admittedly extremely arrogant for me to say "well they must be on drugs because ahem, I am perfect." but you see parties starting at around midnight and going until 4pm the next day, there's something up with that.
I was one of those independent artists and frankly it was sometimes a lot harder to get booked in the early to mid 00s because people started to identify themselves with those labels. The techno crowd were generally more open minded but outside of that things would often get ridiculously pigeon-holed.
To be honest I think after the rise of gangsta rap and miami bass, the whole era kinda got discarded: whodini, mantronix, man parrish, egyptian lover, grandmaster flash. Actually you could probably say the writing was on the wall after the decline of the party rockers in 1983-84 (epitomized by the Busy Bee Starski/Kool Moe D battle from 1981). Afrika Bambaataa is still occasionally releasing btw. 2017: https://youtu.be/sOx7VeHPIJY - if you were hoping for a more faithful traditional electro, check out this label instead https://dominanceelectricity.bandcamp.com/
The current narrative still discards it as if big hits like Freeez's IOU and Alexander Robotnick's Problèmes d'amour wasn't influential when that style mutated just a tad a year or two later and called itself techno.
Speaking of Cybotron and electro check out Nitro Delux "Journey to Cybotron Transform" off Cutting Records (1986)
"As stated below by Jerry Calliste Jr., this video is not and original version of Hashim - Al Naafiysh (The Soul). Probably it was made for the purposes of one of the UK television programs, like " The Tube", during the early 80's. This recording is one of the first hip hop stories to be seen and published on the British Television. The track "Al Naafiysh (The Soul), was originally used for this video, added by unknown author or crew which worked on the video, as the only thing that was known so far, was Geoff Stern, the director."
One clue to this is that there isn't anyone smoking in the video, and the tube windows have a "no smoking" roundel. The smoking ban on the London Underground came in on the 9th July 1984.
Yep. Not an original video at all. It's still great.
These days sometimes the artist makes a video for an old song. For instance, Earlene Bentley made a video for "Caught In The Act" 23 years after she released it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55KOBCgv7f4
It's not exactly common, but it's interesting to see it what it happens. (her "big" hit btw, in the early 80s, in specifically gay clubs was "The Boys Come To Town" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0fBil_4dU) ... it has that 80s hard driving orchestration ... pretty nice. The instrumentals are occasionally sampled on this one, about as much as Two Tons o' Fun are. It's always nice to overhear the latest pop song and be like "oh look, there's Barbara Roy's instrumentals from If you want me still living on". (https://youtu.be/lOCMRk8Nex4?t=272 for the uninitiated)
Thanks for bringing this. This article basically looks at what beatports has to propose but it just totally forgets so many things that it's not even funny. What about "pop corn" too ?
I don't think popcorn is part of it to be honest. It's some adjacent siderail of groups like Mannheim Steamroller or BBC Radiophonic (eg Delia Derbyshire/Dr Who theme) or for that matter, video game music.
Check out the "Soothing Sounds for Baby" album by Raymond Scott (1962) for an early example of this.
To put Popcorn in comparison to what would be on the techno track at that time, look at Hugo Montenegro's Moog album, released the same year. His MacArthur Park rendition I would argue is a closer direct ancestor to techno being in the pursuit of electronic dance. Direct link https://youtu.be/eNM6187cznE
There's certainly "bridges" between the worlds like the 1979 Automat album https://youtu.be/w7nQHBiv_u0 or the Droids "Star Peace" but synth and techno are kinda like the catholics and eastern orthodox, they split off a long time ago and kinda have their own worlds.
Agree. It's always such a 'just so' with these kinds of articles about Detroit techno. That being said, I think Kraftwerk is actually a little underrated in their influence. I know that probably seems hard to believe given the praise they got, but there was something about the spectre of 4 white robo-mannequins that triggered some latent afro-futurist impulse that, for me, goes back to Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane.
Great song picks. Absolutely agree. Hell, the article even largely omits the massive influence of house on techno in general, as most of these narratives seem to do.
As a result, many people seem to think techno preceded house. But taking the view that Juan Atkins' early 80s work was basically electro and not yet really "techno", it's pretty clear that house was already quite prevalent prior to techno becoming a distinct genre.
And even then, early 80s italo-disco was leagues ahead of house in terms of production quality... a few of my personal favorites:
These articles always mention "Shari Vari" since it's so early (1981) and influential (and still good!) but I always find it odd that they omit so many great tracks from the next few years.
These are all nice and currently somewhat famous as much as tracks from that era go.
The question here, and most of this stems from the deephousepage reference elsewhere in this thread, is that in the actual 80s tape recordings (I've got an archive of most of them) from say WBMX or WBLS or any contemporary first hand accounts, I don't see these tracks playing prominently.
The more heavily played are things we may find less interesting today such as Pamala Stanley - Coming Out Of Hiding https://youtube.com/watch?v=M6G8dKgsEG0 ... catchy 80s pop, ok. You listen to the old recordings and this song comes up frequently. Also Bobby Orlando's dozen songs that all sound the same come up a lot (the flirts, divine, ronnie griffith, i spies) probably because their similarity in bpm and key made them versatile toys for the 80s dj.
Our perception of the past through the lens that the modern world "as a context" creates defines a narrative that we impose on the events.
I'm interested in I guess two things here. From simplest to hardest
1. What's the perceived reality of who heard/influenced what and why do we tell ourselves that
2. What's the actual reality and where's the evidence?
We have the mighty Memex machine at our fingertips and can immediately call up forgotten songs from far off lands with a few twitches of our fingertips. A Japanese synthesizer album from the 70s, a bollywood orchestration from the 60s and say a funk song from the Bronx in 1971, immediately recognize a through line and claim "aha, these are connected". But how would this fiction be possible in "before the internet" days? Records traveled, ok, Goa beach parties were real, sure. But I want to be careful in trying to remove my "person of the future" context in trying to understand the past
For instance, there's a bunch of Mexican knockoffs of italo disco tracks in the 80s and they could get away with it because Italy and Mexico are far away from each other.
I wrote an article about this 4 years ago, let me quote it:
is a nearly 100% knock-off of the 1986 Italian release SQ 87504, produced by Miki Chieregato and Roberto Turatti, of Paul Lekakis, "Boom Boom":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ovsnO7Akg
So yeah, that's an example of the context warp.
Now given that, who actually heard and owned what and how it happened is tough. Famous people know how important origin stories are and so they tend to not be great self documentarians. It makes the whole thing tricky especially since not very many people take this as obsessively as I do so the records are continually destroyed and altered
It's a shame this isn't the top comment, because it's a lot more interesting than Ishkur's smartassery and all the across-the-pond sniping.
There used to be a great website called Deep House Page which archived loads of Hot Mix 5 mixes, and you could really hear just how diverse that early era of post-disco dance music was, before it even got pigeonholed into "house" or "techno" and the myriad of subgenres that came since. Sadly the page has disappeared, and I'm not sure where to find the mixes now.
Meanwhile, in parallel, people in other countries were experimenting with synthesizers and unconventional composition too. I remember finding mixtapes of an obscure Australian band called Hugo Klang (https://hugoklang.bandcamp.com/) who were doing techno-y stuff with the 303 a few years before Phuture put together their seminal tune.
Without a doubt the big names that everyone remembers as the progenitors were hugely influential. Already in the 90s people were writing articles that started out exactly like this one, so we're already a full generation into the myth. But it's still interesting to go digging and find all the other stuff that surely played a part in influencing all the other people whose stories never got written up.
Also strange that "I Feel Love" isn't mentioned. I thought this was the first real electronic dance music song. There was other "electronic music" but "I Feel Love" was strictly for dancing, which was new. "Supernature" is mentioned here, but AFAIK, that was released after "I Feel Love" and is pretty derivative.
Happy to see that New Beat got a shoutout. IMO one of the more under rated electronic genres. If you're interested, I can recommend the documentary "The Sound of Belgium" (2012).
I'm surprised there's no mention of New Order's Blue Monday in there. I thought it was seen as a key moment in the history of techno? Can anyone with more knowledge than me comment on why it isn't there?
Agreed. It is apparently "the biggest selling 12-inch single ever." But maybe because of its classic song structure (verse/chorus), it is not lumped in with what is typically considered techno.
There were tons of electronic dance tunes during that period of time. Blue Monday was a great tune and had some great original ideas, but it at the peak of synth pop.
That same year, Phuture released Acid Tracks which influenced Hawtin to make Spastik.
Not really. Not in the in sense of where the music came from. I'd agree on an enjoyment level it taps into something similar. But the roots of the genre as far as I am aware owe nothing to tribal music.
I'm missing a reference to the hardcore 'gabber' techno which was a hugely popular subculture in The Netherlands in the 1990s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabber
Yes indeed. I actually went looking for it to post here and remembered it was a flash blob, and wondered whether it still existed? I didn't remember who posted it or where, just what it looked like back in the day. Glad you mentioned it otherwise I might still be looking.
I've been listening to techno (not EDM in general, Techno) since the 90s. It's definitely my favorite music for deep work; something about the tight repetitive loops is just perfect for concentration. Since the pandemic started I've been listening to techno mixes almost constantly in order to mask the noise from everyone else in my house. Initially, I found it difficult to find decent mixes since Techno has become a generic term for EDM. I just returned to following the genre so I really didn't know where to look. However once I found a single Soundcloud account curating mixes of the style I like, it opened up an unlimited supply of music through following recommendations. Maybe someone will find this useful:
EDIT: There's craploads of content, a lot of styles, although I will observe that oldschool sounds have continued to come back in a big way in 2020. Rave, electro, acid.
I lived in Germany in the 90s and early 2000s, loathed techno, and I must admit that bouncing around a dozen or so of these videos gave me a flashback of nostalgia for lost youth mixed with the same desire to escape the music.
No offense intended - divergent musical taste should be celebrated!
Slam, Adam Beyer (Drumcode) and Chris Liebling (CLR) are all good places to start. They all have weekly radio stations.
From there on you can follow an guest DJs who you like the style off.
Also when did “techno” become an umbrella term again? I was possessed off enough when “EDM” was redefined as a specific genre (and such a lousy one at that).
Reclaim Your City is fantastic! I've been listening to it for years. Endless totally techno sets from a wide range of DJs and a wider range of tracks, and they're all really expertly put together. Seamless is the rule, not the exception. It generally feels like it's one mad synthesizer boffin performing on a giant machine, rather than picking individual tracks to play in sequence. Rarely can you tell when they switch from one track to another.
Already got a stack of records from Cari and Jasper. Particularly love Cari’s Agent Orange stuff.
I’ve not knowingly come across Boris before though. Pretty sure I’d have heard some of his records play but looking at his discography I think he might have started making a name for himself around the same time I hung up my own DJ headphones so he’s not a name that’s immediately recognisable for me.
I did recently hook my decks up again but not yet had a chance to play anything.
> Also when did “techno” become an umbrella term again?
I would guess in the '90s, when there was a lot more crossover between electronic music and other genres. Rock and hiphop oriented stuff like the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were topping the dance charts, and other more conventional techno like Aphex Twin and Underworld were getting decent media coverage as well.
Plus movie soundtracks at the time tended to include a lot of techno. Trainspotting, Pi, Hackers, The Jackal, The Saint....discovered a lot of artists thanks to these.
Yeah, I was around then; buying those records, going to those clubs and in many cases partying with those DJs. But that was the end of “Techno” as a synonym for “electronic music. By then there was already numerous sub genres and many of them because music styles in their own right (like rock, metal, blues are all guitar music) with people identifying themselves as trance, house, hardcore et al clubbers rather than techno.
My comment was in regard to how the GP suggested that techno has since become another umbrella term again now. Or maybe I misunderstood their post?
I've got about 40 or so playlists on SoundCloud for individual techno DJs I like, as well as a couple for general techno mixes - they're all the ones with "techno" in the title :) You'll find a some overlap with the artists in your playlist in fact, I've got playlists for Ben Sims, The Advent and Drumcell that I found in the first minute of scrolling through it.
What sort of techno do you prefer? The artists I've got are mostly the tougher end of European techno, there's also some Detroit techno, acid techno and hard techno/schranz. You can look at my likes for my favourites...
I've also been into techno since the 90s and it's still my favourite thing in the world :) The combination of relentless kick drum and the constantly changing synths and percussion never fails to draw me in. It manages to sooth my ADHD with the constant heartbeat of the kick drum while the constant progression of everything else serves to keep my attention from wondering off after a few bars.
Not sure if you have spotify, but here's my "techno" playlist that has over 800 songs in it so far. I put techno in quotes because I'm sure someone can find songs in there that aren't "real techno" but you won't find any big room EDM, that's for sure.
Cercle channel on YouTube puts out some great techno shows. They go to historical places and record a set with some of the best djs
Here is the link for Pan-Pot set
https://youtu.be/hENgrbIMiy4
I maintain a YouTube playlist called "music to hack by" which is up to over 500 songs now. Basically the criteria are: 1) electronic 2) has a beat (no ambient) 3) few to no vocals, with only one or two exceptions
I think the repetitive loops of percussion and basslines let you keep a certain part of your mind "busy" so you can focus on other things. Like it occupies some sort of nervous energy and let's other areas of the mind run more free.
Just to pitch in a suggestion for anyone looking: NTS radio and boiler room both have a huge number of mixes by techno artists - generally speaking I find artists by listening to mixes on NTS and checking the track list and then find mixes by them on boiler room.
I agree completely - techno is hypnotic and almost by design is meant to be heard and not listened to, and I find this really helps me maintain focus/flow while working. No vocals, ear catching melodies, or overdone chord progressions that try to grab your attention. Techno is my go to work music for this reason!
An accurate history. Got to see where this music evolved from in real time. Worked in an all-black mailroom (except me) in the 70s where there was one station and one station only: Los Angeles’ KISS 106. You heard Cerrone, Cameo, Toto, Grandmaster Flash, Prince, Teena Marie, Kool and the Gang, Black Russian, EWF—-the least formatted format on the market. It was a Cambrian explosion of dance music, much of which became the basis of techno styles.
Combine that with the fact that Southern California set so many music trends, and literally nothing until about the Nirvana era was even remotely new to me for decades (and of course Nirvana’s music style isn’t particularly new to anyone who listened to the White Album or Iggy Pop, not that it’s not great music). It was all recycled constantly in the dance music world and continues to be to this day.
Techno and hiphop so obviously came out of these roots that I laugh every time someone names a new variant of EDM, which is about twice a week. Prince, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Kool in the Gang didn’t even call themselves R&B groups. They called themselves rock bands, intentionally. Nothing new etc.
> Los Angeles’ KISS 106. You heard Cerrone, Cameo, Toto, Grandmaster Flash, Prince, Teena Marie, Kool and the Gang, Black Russian, EWF—-the least formatted format on the market. It was a Cambrian explosion of dance music, much of which became the basis of techno styles.
That sounds a lot like the Electrifying Mojo, mentioned in the article. Mojo played rock and other stuff too.
Reminds me of the track that is considered the first hardcore techno track, originating from Frankfurt as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACxT5_SLjfM
(Mescalinum United - We Have Arrived)
Funny that the Techno scene in Frankfurt is pretty much gone.
I'm pleased to see accuracy in the history of techno.
I for one did not know it's roots took place back in the 70s and from the black community.
These days when I look at techno artists and their raving followers, its prodimently white. I have since taken active steps to seek out the lesser know black artists to support.
Many modern music fundamentals are origins from the black community and very little is correctly attributed and/or black artists are sidelined.
Good documentary on the origins of house and techno from 70s disco, to 4 to the floor disco and the coming of the 808, how this moved to house in chicago and some sci fi nerds with a love for kraftwerk in detroit started techno. Then how the UK got involved and these DJs from the US, used to playing to 50-80 people in tiny underground, often gay clubs would come to the UK and play to 10,000 in massive outdoor / warehouse events and rave was born
For anyone seeing the copyright claim and wondering what this was, it seems to be a BBC documentary called Can You Feel It - How Dance Music Conquered the World.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11719632/
And I’d argue that blues and rock are separate, but that most rock until late 90s was heavily influenced by blues. But that’s all just fun trying to draw lines where there isn’t a clear difference sometimes.
PD: I didn´t put Blues/Rock as separate entities, but two genres where late blues albums could be considered something as proto-rock. And ditto with jazz-swing-blues. It's like a continuum.
Omitting jazz from the list of African-American musical innovations is like omitting goal-scoring from Messi's achievements or MacOS from Apple's.
Also, by "rap" I think you mean 'hip-hop', which includes sampling and mixing, especially using turntables.
> Well, blues is the son of jazz music :)
Try some Muddy Waters and John Coltrane, listen, then report back.
With due respect, beyond every form of music being related to every other (just like you are probably a distant relative of mine), they are such different genres that my impression of the comment - which could be completely wrong - is that the commenter has not listed to jazz, blues, or both.
It's not uncommon for a popular techno artist to talk about how Detroit techno influenced them. As far as I've seen, Detroit techno artists, most often Black, are given a lot of respect for their contributions, so I would like to hear about who was sidelined or not correctly attributed.
Great examples of the racial diversity in the early scene in Detroit. I think this was some public access TV show?
Anyways speaking from living in Latin America the scene here is HUGE for techno and house, I would probably say the numbers here are bigger and more diverse than I've seen for the same scene in North America and balance out the melanation factor quite a lot
It's bizarre and charming at the same time to hear music so similar to the colder, minimal kind of techno you'd expect to hear at a dark themed party in a shady club full of edgy young people, and see the happy, well dressed, colorful, smiling people in the video.
Yes, LATAM has the wildest contemporary techno scene after Europe. The US had next to no techno scene pre-pandemic, a party or two in NY or LA each weekend was it, now its dead.
Yeah they even have a hardtechno/schranz thing going on in Colombia and Venezuela, bit too turbo for me but still cool
Colombia had someone spinning that who was when she was still alive quite the amusement because she changed her name to ladyzunga cyborg and then... this
Are you sure? NY would have plenty of parties, like 20-30 on a popping weekend night. Full range.
I know Colombia is really into it. I went to pretty solid parties in Brazil, at Fabriketa in Sao paulo. Felt fairly similar to the NY scene.
NY would have the big events for the "cool" crowd, big showcases like afterlife and stuff at the Mirage. Then smaller clubs like Nowadays, where you could get an 8 hour Wata Igarashi set etc. Underground one-offs like The Bunker.
Plus it seemed like a lot of Europe's cities have their scene and they focus more on that. Of course Berlin is high quality but like Copenhagen focuses on schacke and stuff. Whereas NY you can get a taste of everything in a year.
> it's roots took place ... from the black community
> origins from the black community
gotta give credit to the engineers who pioneered electronic music synthesis, like Robert Moog, or the Japanese who created Korg synthesizers in the article.
Influences for any technology, project, art, etc come from a large web of sources. Racial gatekeeping and attribution is close-minded.
And that's OK, there's literally nothing wrong with this. I think there's also a lot of stuff to be said about how there's anecdotes about how the early rave scene had a lot of previously unheard of racial unity going on, stuff like skinhead and rasta gangs or even rival football ultras encountering each other and literally just vibing when they'd be fighting each other before
GP made it seem like whites being a big part of current techno scene is bad.
> The first stuff anyone started calling techno was pretty black
you could say the first stuff anyone started calling electronic music was pretty white. point is, racial attribution for something that has a huge array of influences is silly.
> GP made it seem like whites being a big part of current techno scene is bad.
I don't see that; I don't see any "guilt", using your word. Can you point it out? People have other motives.
My impression is that you brought your own (reactionary?) bias to it, using a reactionary talking point whether it really applies or not. Why bring down someone who is trying to expand their experiences, knowledge, and community, in a world where racism is common and leads to many people being excluded. We should work to include - that's great, creative, positive; there's no reason it needs to be motivated by guilt.
This article is about techno specifically, not electronic music. There's a lot of electronic music that has nothing to do with techno - techno is a genre, like chiptune, trance or dubstep.
> As part of Beatportal’s new series on the history of electronic dance music, Marcus Barnes explores the rich history of techno, from the 1970s right through to today.
oh i don't feel any guilt at all. I was interpreting OPs motive for changing their behavior, and why they felt the need to communicate it as if it were a noble act.
> its prodimently white. I have since taken active steps to seek out the lesser know black artists to support
I couldn't care less who the specific artist is for techno music i listen to.
Detroit techno is a completely different beast to the modern European techno scene. Less than 1% of DJs playing at Berghain are black. Modern techno is dominated by Europeans.
331 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThe web gives bad designers too much rope to hang everyone with.
I have smooth scrolling turned off because it makes me impatient. You can't continue reading while everything is moving. Now slow smooth scrolling...
I ended up using the "Reader view" on Safari read it.
I archived it and here's the archive version of it to avoid the scrolling problem:
https://archive.is/rk0DB
I can't read it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://archive.is/rk0DB
If any designers are reading this, please avoid smooth scrolling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
http://www.bleep43.com/bleep43/2009/10/4/juan-atkins-intervi...
'Alleys of Your Mind'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMHNhJJnve4
“The Flow”, here as an original MTV music video,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZJt0XlhEoQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212706
Another favorite is Ishkur's "trancecracker" comic, which you can find here: https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=245900
I was literally just making the argument with my friends who were going "oh, I wish Tiesto was still playing trance; he turned his back on the trance scene" to which I responded "Tiesto was never a trance DJ, he was a mainstage DJ. He's still a mainstage DJ, and you don't get on the mainstage playing trance anymore".
Also, any musician that wants to get big should know that the fastest way is to add words/lyrics.
Music is such a universal language that it needs to be annotated or something.
Ahem. I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that
In the last 50 years, you can probably count the number of chart-toppers without lyrics on one hand. Animals, Axel F, Doop, Flat Beat, and Sandstorm (and I am not sure if these even topped charts everywhere).
Sure, if you are into the niche of EDM or techno club music, the situation is different, but none of those tunes sell millions of copies.
The point is you could spend hours actually developing subtleties in engineering, especially in timing and mixing, to produce something profound.
Or you could get a drum machine and a 303, and get someone sexy to sing/rap/speak over the top, make a video, and save a lot of time. A lot of pop music these days is quite simple, except for the singing, which I can admit is talented, but it's more about personality/fashion than music.
Trance ironically enough (including a lot of the stuff Tiesto worked on) is known for having very deep lyrics and that's a good chunk of what people are missing I think when they make the comments like above.
I'd check out Beautiful Things by Andain if you're curious. The lyrics are about a woman who believes she gave up her life and potential to be a traditional wife and is contemplating suicide to end her regret.
A lot of trance music never even had lyrics; listen to what came out before 2000. (Even Tiesto made a lot of music without lyrics before 2002 or so). If you want to find music that sounds like the early days of trance music then you'll more likely find it labeled as techno music today (which is not really all that surprising since trance music originated from techno music anyway).
Beautiful Things is arguably not trance music. Also, when you're studying or trying to concentrate, do you listen to music with lyrics?
Mainstage antics are part of performance. Check out every mainstream genre before EDM. Van Halen Jump is probably my fav example :)
There's plenty of even trance without mainstage antics.
I'm mainly being pithy more than anything else, lol.
The fact that it's originally a Jack Chick tract about how evil Muslims are makes it even better lol.
E.g `Eurotrance`:
> "The rank repugnance of the self-fellating culture of DJ worship is at the forefront of this many-headed hydra of rapacious rot. Overbearing anthems, boring breakdowns, and tasteless DJ vanity have combined into one monstrous, obnoxious, pompous, unlistenable Babylonian nega-demon. Who is to blame for unleashing such a hideous beast of seething filth upon our ears?"
The site is basically one very elaborate opinion piece. Ishkur doesn't like Eurotrance. Deal with it.
Spain, 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9W5LRcVzk
This was everywhere. Everywhere.
People did their own remixes with computers at home. Everyone and their cat tried to do their first techno/trance song in High School.
When "modern EDM" hit the US we have been listening to Techno/Trance since where, from 1992-1993? There were even official Techno/Trance remixes bought by everyone, too.
You seem to be basing your views on top 40 charts and what was protrayed in media. It's true, techno and electronica only rarely appeared there in the 90s. That's because electronica in the US was entirely centered around clubs and raves. Radio was controlled by a handful of big labels that all had a specific intent to shape the market towards specific genres. So techno in the US never became a "factory" product.
But that doesn't mean we weren't listening to it. I grew up in Kansas in a smaller city. In high school we were going to jungle or trance parties just as often as grunge. All the big box book and music stores had substantial electronica sections. We discovered music at parties, via word of mouth, and by the latter half of the 90s, via the internet.
People have been listening to techno in the US continuously since its inception in Detroit. But we've been listening to a whole lot of other electronica subgrenes as well.
The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt. The closest to that style that's been popular here would be Oakenfold and the like.
You also misunderstand hip hop in one of your comments. It is not just popular with black Americans. It's been popular with Americans of all sorts since its inception. In fact hip hop essentially subsumed pop in the late 90s.
There's been a lot of exchange between hip hop and electronica in the US too, particularly due to both using the 808 a lot. The latest electronica fad, the revival of phonk, is another example. It's a fusion of trap with breakbeat techno. And it's yet another example of how electronica is fundamentally international, as the revival has been driven by russian producers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smbiKaOAN3Q
I don't really know what you're trying to accomplish with your smugness, but to be blunt all it's doing is making you look both ignorant and prejudiced.
So was Spain. People shared music with each other. Radio? pop and rhythm & blues everywhere in top charts. While people IRL got into the clubs everywhere.
>The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt.
Here we had several substyles. As I stated, Andalusians were more fans of breakbeat, while the North liked progressive/proto-hardbass in 1999-2001 and the East with Valencia and its "route" among Barcelona was the Techno-Trance heaven. Ibiza longly was, was, it is, and it will be, THE "chill-out/house" genre place from Spain. For obvious reasons: partying tourism and a "hippie" vibe since the 60's.
Not to mention those things were a thing at the time of Lester Bangs or the NME, 50+ years ago (and even in reviewers of classical music) hardly a Pitchfork era phenomenon or invention....
Also to add to this the more I lean to the content creation side and work with artists, the more genres become blurry and irrelevant. Seeing critics and the creator of that history tree obsess over this and create micro genres to try to fit every music and their listener into this is just silly and far removed from how a good composer or producer with eclectic tastes works. Nowadays a mainstream song can be surprisingly creative, while the N-th production in a "good taste approved sub-sub-genre of techno" will have 0 artistic value.
This is just some guys opinions on music, let him talk about them, you don't have to agree.
I even wish the elitism still existed. I used to go to Pitchfork, Coke Machine Glow and sites of that type to read about music that wasn't getting covered elsewhere. Now it's basically Rolling Stone, but worse because it pretends to be counter culture while devoting endless posts to TSwift or Drake or any number of artists that can be heard on every major radio station.
That is to say -- I've found that while the sheer volume of mass-produced crap has gone up (including but not limited to music criticism), so too has the sheer volume of rare, underground jewels. I don't know if/maybe doubt discovery has been cracked yet.
There are never any cut-aways, or song clips, or on-screen graphics...anything to reduce the monotony. And yet he has a million subs and the comments section does include discussion of the record. It's not very deep, but it does exist.
For me though, it's too boring. I'd read the review if he wrote articles, but definitely would not watch.
This. As for discovery, it's never been easier to find things by oneself. Bandcamp (nice place to bootstrap rabbit holes), Spotify artists playlists, Youtube channels, Subreddits...
We love you too Ishkur! <3 from Holland
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.
Perhaps it will add a little context to note that Eminem, like Techno, is from Detroit.
Spain, 1999:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9W5LRcVzk
Meanwhile, the US got the shittiest EDM ever in 2010-2011 as something "revolutionary".
You kickstarted the acid house genre, but you let it rot in the dust in the 90's.
We Europeans had a huge underground fanbase since late 80's, and since mid-90's trance has been huge for example in Spain and Germany, up to the point to be broadcasted in the state-backed first TV channel in the mornings.
Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
Don't lecture us -- Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno & house, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the late 80s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and shipped back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
Electronic music in Europe has always been a huge industry, and some amazing music made... but as a % of product produced/consumed.. only a small amount of it was good (which amounted to a lot of excellent records in an absolute ocean of other junk.)
Back in the day there was an amazing amount of quality underground music coming out of Chicago, New York, Detroit / Windsor, and smaller centres in the midwest, too. Great stuff even from here in Toronto. The west coast was an entirely other story, mostly dominated by "funky breaks" and trance and stuff I didn't like.
Also I can't tell from your tone if the YouTube video you posted is made to be made fun of, or enjoyed? Because to me it's clearly the former. The kind of shit that teenage kids at raves back in the 90s would take meth to and grind their teeth and we'd just gag at.
Yes, we had all that crap here back in the mid-90s. Huge raves, mostly crap. EDM is just what the next generation called it, and I guess maybe it had a broader audience.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.
But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
Kinda like the American perception on European's techno culture.
Hint: when the clubs released their yearly compilation based on 3 or 4 CD's, you had one disc per genre: Techno, trance, house and progressive/sung. So in the end we listened to all of the EDM offer inbetween depending on the mood.
Also, as I said, dance megamix CD's in Spain could be found as early as late 80's. Ok, more like vinyls, but the concept stays.
I don't have much to add to this apart from to say I think you're both right to varying degrees.
But more importantly I'm enjoying this passionate discourse on HN about a genre of music that I care deeply about.
I think it's fair to say that dance music today wouldn't exist without the breadth of innovation that happened on both sides of "the pond" in recent decades - and to not be too European/US centric - elsewhere around the world too.
That was a diss line about Moby, a "techno" artist who achieved mainstream US popularity around that time. Eminem wasn't trying to accurately depict the state of electronic music in the US, he was being salty.
By my own memory as a teenager growing up in the rave scene, electronic music was weird and unapproachable to pretty much everyone. Big Beat like The Crystal Method and Prodigy had made some waves, and of course there was Moby, but outside of my raver friends and a brief attempt to get eurodance (like Alice Deejay) on Top 40 radio by the local media conglomerates, "techno" was pretty niche.
I mean, in the early 2000s I saw Paul Oakenfold -- twice -- at small clubs, and it was easy to get into the front. I would write requests in big letters on my phone and see if I could get the DJ to play them. (Tiesto wasn't as approachable but that asshole would crank the speakers up well past their distortion point)
- 1994 Horses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice5Nw6ltfY
- 1995 Desperate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdu9UwXqGc
- 1992 Drop a Beat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA
- 1991 UHF3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TjeBcA1cI
- 1991 Voodoo Child (Poor in New York Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA
Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
Footwork, Club, Bounce, Industrial, House, Electro, to name a few, are all styles that were prevalent on dancefloors in the US during the time you characterize it as "all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres". All of these styles are woven into the DNA of the new underground generation. Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.
>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
I've addressed most of your points in another comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26981256
A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.
> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet. It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.
There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.
I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.
If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!
It is tough being a fan in the US when the kings of DnB all live in the UK. Can’t wait for Fabric to reopen - its time for a visit.
https://blackboxdenver.co/
If anyones interested in hearing what modern techno is up to this is a pretty good list: https://www.soundshelter.net/collection/techno-records
For instance, this narrative always leave out free-style and electro like Hashim (example: 1983, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykK0uEjSsqY), Newcleus, etc. Soulsonic Force (1982: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHQ11l4uiM4) predated Atkins Cybotron project and Atkins even said he didn't see a huge difference between the free-style, electro, and what he was doing.
It also leaves out Italo Disco and the British New Wave movement. Take the intro to 1983's Hypnotic Tango by My Mine for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6EbVwOumlE
They do an obligatory Kraftwerk but the entire berlin school and midera is left out in the cold as well (Tangerine Dream for example. 1975, Ricochet P2 for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoSNbCNYsA4) along with artists who were giant in their day like Jean Michelle Jarre.
Also what's left out are the other influential Krautrock artists like Manuel Göttsching and his 1981 E2-E4 album. (https://youtu.be/ys0HyevZpQg).
There's also the left-field weird albums that were mighty influential at the time, such as Misa Criolla by Fuego (1981: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Era1x9hRnBQ) There's your "four-on-the-floor" with tape loop sampling. Speaking of children What about the next year, Liaisons Dangereuses - Los Niños Del Parque ... https://youtu.be/a_sAH2QGotE there's your techno
Or take the Bobby Orlando sounding driving beat in Le Jeté - La Cage Aux Folles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzI2v0RJ8DQ) - a common track of the hot-mix 5. Or Massimo Barsotti's cover of Led Zepplins' Whole Lotta Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsEwWSs-t7w)
Or what about Stopps "I'm Hungry" from 1983? https://youtu.be/I26lP56-UeA ... this strange track was played in Chicago house clubs, Belgium pre rave new beat "acid house" parties and the early EBM scene. Pretty expansive one to leave out
And keeping things in the US, they always ignore the west coast, with outfits like Megatone records out of san francisco and gay club music (eg Hi-NRG) and people like Bobby Orlando.
Anyway the history is vast and rich and this article is essentially the same story that's always written. I dunno, I almost feel like this structure misses the boat. I know that's a big claim.
I mean heck, take Polices Synchronicity part 1, https://youtu.be/Si5CSpUCDGY. If someone told me that was how an album by underworld or say sasha started from 1999, I'd believe it, swap the vocals and the physical drums with some synths and it's basically done
For example, they completely missed out Front 242, Nitzer Ebb. However they at least mention the genre, EBM.
And to be honest: what is techno else than Tallas invention in a record store? Frontpage magazine? So many things left out, but who cares? You either witnessed parts of the 90th or not. ;)
I never understood my parents fondness for Woodstock and how an e guitar could be the center of a "sound revolution". Around 30 years later, I really understand them: Dorian Gray, Loveparade, 303. ;)
Calling it the "definitive history of techno" and then trying to be as concise as possible seems a bit presumptuous to me, though...
Recently there was a cool documentary about Wax Trax records called Industrial Accident. Worth seeing. Interviews with Front 242, Ministry, Revolting Cocks, KMFDM, Thrill Kill Kult, Trent Reznor, Frontline Assembly, etc.
Then I gave up trying to construct it. The reality is it's a bunch of things smashed together like pressing all the buttons at the soda fountain at once. That's what happened.
That's where techno came from as well.
Sometimes the narratives are super clean, like rappers delight for rap (there's pre rappers delight style rap records, but under like a dozen or so) or the amen break and dnb or the configuration of the swing drum kit for swing music or house music proper being "the stuff knuckles plays" in Chicago.
But a few styles are inherently messy with no clean lines. Rock, Disco and Techno are three
Rock is especially super messy, here's Meade Lux Lewis in 1927 for instance, https://youtu.be/tDuLezFRMNU swap the piano with a guitar and you have 50s rock
Can you please help me understand "rock is super messy"? The traditional narrative is "rock was mostly derived from blues (+ some other influences)" but the counter(?)example you provided is a classic 12 bar blues.
Do you have some messier examples? Or did I miss your point?
Isn't the concise answer Philadelphia? :) Partially joking, I know this is an oversimplification.
In any case, this interview with Earl Young from The Trammps, discussing the origin of four-on-the-floor, is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsf51_a1ceI
The thing that complicates it is four on the floor has lots of predated "almost but ok, not quite exactly" versions. Such as in Brazilian pop, take Participação from 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DP6hRt9xvw ... those percussion aren't far away from late-70s orchestral disco. Almost same BPM.
This drum style kinda came out of everywhere. Here it is in Pakistan also in 1971 for instance, Runa Laila, Rushdi, Shaukat Ali Khan & Munir - We Don´t Care, starts around 1 minute in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9uYjpkTkNo ... that's the 73 columbia release pictured in youtube, not the original 71 odeon one.
Here you can get it in part of this 1971 Phillipines release by Dakila as well during the chorus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUKDKXSA2-8
Or what about Sophy, from Puerto Rico also in 1971: No Quiero Que Te Vayas ... a very slight change in the drums and you get disco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bhdOpVs9hU ... this one-step-away stuff was common, here's Polish artist Halina Frackowiak - Do końca świata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgrUUfXesdM or ピンキー グッド・バイ from 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeRtlpY96B0 ... ok that last one was just for fun.
Anyway, I've been trying to compile this narrative for a long time ... all the soda flavors at once smashed together. That's all I can come up with.
It's like a better version of Sven Vath's Electric Salsa.
BTW the link for Manuel Göttsching E2-E4 is the wrong one (duplicate of Hyponotic Tango). Here is the right link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0HyevZpQg
Also if you like that please check out his 1975 release "Inventions for Electric Guitar".
I can't praise this one enough
https://youtu.be/khejrbgdc4w
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPN0gicPJTTUJVhVMzCne... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOfuXwU6GoQ
And I was surprised they mentioned Surgeon and Regis, but not their Downwards Records
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBilbhSIIhgKbRezA7RoO...
IDM has also been a huge love of my life. I'm not sure I could pick a favourite out of techno or IDM though. But Drumcode Radio is certainly good music to run to.
Slam did a rather nice podcast that sat somewhere between techno and experimental. I don't know if their podcast is still going but their RSS feed has certainly stopped :(
Sure, some genres are more predictable than others (hardhouse, for example, is effectively the "painting by numbers" equivalent of EDM) but as a retired DJ who used to mix on 3+ decks and throw in the odd non 4/4 track too (typically 3/4 but I had some more esoteric records too), I can't think of many tracks from many genres that were particularly hard to DJ.
...well there was this one track that was difficult, not because of the phrasing nor time signature, but because the producer decided to fade in the start of the track. Very unhelpful that!
What I've written here also applies to a significant amount of rock and it's various sub-genres too.
As for the "FX friendly on the mixer", that's been technos style since the 90s. It's nothing new and certainly not anything specific to Drumcode. Richie Hawtin even released a compilation album called "Decks, EFX & 909" in 1999 and his style is very different to Adam Beyer's. In the early 00s Misstress Barbara wrote in a cover sleeve on one of her mixes about how her sets were about creating new compositions live using 3 decks, heavy EQing and effects. Her style also differed massively from Drumcode.
Source: retired DJ and producer. Not a household name but played a few gigs in and around London. Mostly techno but with house, electro, breaks, EBM, rock, metal, industrial and pretty much anything else thrown in that had the right vibe to it.
I liked some of it at the time -- I have some of the Code Red Adam Beyer stuff on coloured red vinyl somewhere -- but it's a bit soul-less and monolithic. A very white middle class European straightlaced "thump thump thump" interpretation of the genre.
The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.
I've got a couple of those records and I can tell you that Adam Beyer and Drumcode still sound like that today, they've really nailed that "far duller than it sounds" sub-genre of techno.
> The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.
I managed to see Landstrumm play two days before the start of lockdown last March as part of the 20 Years of Don't evening at the Bangface Weekender, how's that for good timing? :)
https://bangface.com/weekender2020/lineup/
I was going out to a lot of squat parties that played it in the 00s when there was tons of it coming out of London from labels like Don't, Yolk, Chancer, Victim and 4x4 Recordings, and also went to Jerome Hill's Uglyfunk night regularly (it's still going in fact but I've not made it there recently). Mark Hawkins was probably my favourite producer followed by Jerome Hill and Michael Forshaw.
I've only managed to see Landstrumm twice, cuz of being on this side of the pond. Once in the early 2000s he DJ'd along with DJ Hell at a local club, and actually he was quite competent on the vinyl (more than Hell was) and he played a lot of Chicago and Detroit classics. It was a good night if I recall.
The other time was actually very recent (2019), someone I know locally knows him personally and brought him over into my local small Ontario city to play live. Small gig, maybe 50 people there. Even got to shake his hand and say hi.
Def. one of my favourite musicians in the genre.
I'm a big fan of Detroit ghetto-tech like DJ Godfather, and have a similar problem of it only existing on the other side of the Atlantic... The weekender I mentioned has had at least one of the top DJs over every other year or so over the last decade which is amazing, because otherwise I've been out to see it played three times in the past two decades, so I feel your pain :)
Sweet little Canadian me was ... shocked ... by the way people uh, danced to that stuff.
The first time I saw this clip it was amazing how distant it was from everything I've experienced since going to my first club in 1995 - and the video is from closer to 1995 than 1995 is to today!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EarSRa19sZc
I've seen Model 500 and wasn't impressed to be honest, but then again electro isn't my thing at all so that's more about me lol, my friends enjoyed it a lot :)
The DEMF dancefloor vibe while the booty stuff was playing was... raunchy. Like full on grinding, ass rubbing, etc. Didn't see that stuff at clubs here. The rave/club/techno scene back then here was pretty androgynous and public displays of affection would have been very gauche. Not so in Detroit at certain gigs
The scene here was neither androgynous nor restrained in the public displaying of affection - but overtly sexual displays were very much in the minority and stood out, probably because British people loved being able to shed our passively-aggressive polite and emotionally stunted personas for an evening by consuming large amounts of pills and just wanting to dance and hug people ;)
I've seen some full-on stuff at squat parties though. Ecstasy and alcohol can make people completely lose their inhibitions lol.
Adam Beyer's tracks himself and most of the stuff on Drumcode from any era though is totally boring, I agree. And we can also agree the Neil Landstrumm and Cristian Vogel (I'd argue early Villalobos too) are the height of the end of techno history.
Quite possibly I just like this stuff because it reminds me of video game soundtracks from the era.
Here, crack a cool one and breathe this in, for a little while:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RFY8GK5PAA
There's a party drug contribution that's really instrumental to these movements. I have been thinking of how to do a musical taxonomy by narcotic, but it's hard to do without making everyone sound like a junkie.
New Beat and MDMA, Disco and cocaine, freeform Jazz and heroine, etc. (I'm a big fan of all of these btw, and could likely make you want to "delete my number" talking about them. But pretending like Gino Soccio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhAPoip5YeQ) or Tantra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyqkePY6FKY) or the partiers listening were sober is personally, not very plausible. Sure, I'm sober, but I'm an outlier)
The big theory here is the genres that seem to compactly come and go in a few years, seem to have a high degree of self similarity in releases (take reggae or psytrance for example), and seem to be popular with the party kids might be heavily linked to a particular single or set of narcotics.
Take happy hardcore for example. Thousands of tracks, labels, artists, a huge culture and scene behind it, of well, to be honest, a bunch of teenagers on drugs. Take psychedelic rock and LSD.
Again, this is a really touchy subject but I kinda think drumcore is in that camp. It follows the same chronological and social patterns and seems to fall in the same circles.
I'm not a drug user but I've been to enough parties to know there's certainly a different prevalence in different circles. It's even more difficult because you know, it's all technically illegal so people aren't entirely forthcoming and people don't tend to leave great documentation of illegal substance use around for future historian study.
Maybe a cross comparison with police arrest reports would be as authoritative as we can get? Even that is tough though because in all the hundreds of underground raves I went to in my teens and twenties in california, police arresting people happened at I believe zero. So that sample size is extremely small.
And even then, everything usually gets consumed rather immediately and if they bust a dealer what they're finding are the unsold inventory so even that's not a good metric, the "empty shelves" are the important ones.
Boom-tss, boom-ts, fist pump
Mostly it's me not understanding why so many people are captivated, excited and enthralled by something that sounds so caustic and abrasive.
It's admittedly extremely arrogant for me to say "well they must be on drugs because ahem, I am perfect." but you see parties starting at around midnight and going until 4pm the next day, there's something up with that.
I always have a mixed feeling about music style classifications. It shifts focus from the music to discussions about what style a piece of music is.
Maybe techno originated from rhytmic tribe music. Who knows. Personally I don't care.
That's why these early pre-language explorations are great.
Luckily there's a lot of independent artists these days that are exploring things and refusing to label them with an abstract genre.
We need our modern John Cages to feel empowered. I think it's important.
Newcleus is fully sick though. I dunno if people overlook them as a gimmick or what, but the first album is just track after absolute track.
The current narrative still discards it as if big hits like Freeez's IOU and Alexander Robotnick's Problèmes d'amour wasn't influential when that style mutated just a tad a year or two later and called itself techno.
Speaking of Cybotron and electro check out Nitro Delux "Journey to Cybotron Transform" off Cutting Records (1986)
From the YT description:
"As stated below by Jerry Calliste Jr., this video is not and original version of Hashim - Al Naafiysh (The Soul). Probably it was made for the purposes of one of the UK television programs, like " The Tube", during the early 80's. This recording is one of the first hip hop stories to be seen and published on the British Television. The track "Al Naafiysh (The Soul), was originally used for this video, added by unknown author or crew which worked on the video, as the only thing that was known so far, was Geoff Stern, the director."
One clue to this is that there isn't anyone smoking in the video, and the tube windows have a "no smoking" roundel. The smoking ban on the London Underground came in on the 9th July 1984.
These days sometimes the artist makes a video for an old song. For instance, Earlene Bentley made a video for "Caught In The Act" 23 years after she released it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55KOBCgv7f4
It's not exactly common, but it's interesting to see it what it happens. (her "big" hit btw, in the early 80s, in specifically gay clubs was "The Boys Come To Town" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0fBil_4dU) ... it has that 80s hard driving orchestration ... pretty nice. The instrumentals are occasionally sampled on this one, about as much as Two Tons o' Fun are. It's always nice to overhear the latest pop song and be like "oh look, there's Barbara Roy's instrumentals from If you want me still living on". (https://youtu.be/lOCMRk8Nex4?t=272 for the uninitiated)
Check out the "Soothing Sounds for Baby" album by Raymond Scott (1962) for an early example of this.
To put Popcorn in comparison to what would be on the techno track at that time, look at Hugo Montenegro's Moog album, released the same year. His MacArthur Park rendition I would argue is a closer direct ancestor to techno being in the pursuit of electronic dance. Direct link https://youtu.be/eNM6187cznE
There's certainly "bridges" between the worlds like the 1979 Automat album https://youtu.be/w7nQHBiv_u0 or the Droids "Star Peace" but synth and techno are kinda like the catholics and eastern orthodox, they split off a long time ago and kinda have their own worlds.
Similarly, Underworld of "Born Slippy NUXX" fame in the '90s, are indebted to Kraftwerk (and Brian Eno) as well.
As a result, many people seem to think techno preceded house. But taking the view that Juan Atkins' early 80s work was basically electro and not yet really "techno", it's pretty clear that house was already quite prevalent prior to techno becoming a distinct genre.
And even then, early 80s italo-disco was leagues ahead of house in terms of production quality... a few of my personal favorites:
Charlie - "Spacer Woman" (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZDPCjEoIMI
Klapto - "Mister Game" (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQUVg-HCjEE
Mr Flagio - "Take a Chance" (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDV_dBYp4h0
Fun Fun - "Happy Station" (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb5B1C5PFVo
Meanwhile on the house side we have debatable-first-house-record Jesse Saunders "On and On" (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUeMFG4wjJw. Although my personal favorite under-appreciated proto-house pick would actually be from nyc, Boyd Jarvis "The Music Got Me" (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYfG8tcEl3E.
These articles always mention "Shari Vari" since it's so early (1981) and influential (and still good!) but I always find it odd that they omit so many great tracks from the next few years.
The question here, and most of this stems from the deephousepage reference elsewhere in this thread, is that in the actual 80s tape recordings (I've got an archive of most of them) from say WBMX or WBLS or any contemporary first hand accounts, I don't see these tracks playing prominently.
The more heavily played are things we may find less interesting today such as Pamala Stanley - Coming Out Of Hiding https://youtube.com/watch?v=M6G8dKgsEG0 ... catchy 80s pop, ok. You listen to the old recordings and this song comes up frequently. Also Bobby Orlando's dozen songs that all sound the same come up a lot (the flirts, divine, ronnie griffith, i spies) probably because their similarity in bpm and key made them versatile toys for the 80s dj.
Our perception of the past through the lens that the modern world "as a context" creates defines a narrative that we impose on the events.
I'm interested in I guess two things here. From simplest to hardest
1. What's the perceived reality of who heard/influenced what and why do we tell ourselves that
2. What's the actual reality and where's the evidence?
We have the mighty Memex machine at our fingertips and can immediately call up forgotten songs from far off lands with a few twitches of our fingertips. A Japanese synthesizer album from the 70s, a bollywood orchestration from the 60s and say a funk song from the Bronx in 1971, immediately recognize a through line and claim "aha, these are connected". But how would this fiction be possible in "before the internet" days? Records traveled, ok, Goa beach parties were real, sure. But I want to be careful in trying to remove my "person of the future" context in trying to understand the past
For instance, there's a bunch of Mexican knockoffs of italo disco tracks in the 80s and they could get away with it because Italy and Mexico are far away from each other.
I wrote an article about this 4 years ago, let me quote it:
The 1987 Mexico release Trebol – TI - 71161, produced by J. Brenner of Mannequin, "Boom Bam" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqLt7SwaN90
is a nearly 100% knock-off of the 1986 Italian release SQ 87504, produced by Miki Chieregato and Roberto Turatti, of Paul Lekakis, "Boom Boom": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ovsnO7Akg
So yeah, that's an example of the context warp.
Now given that, who actually heard and owned what and how it happened is tough. Famous people know how important origin stories are and so they tend to not be great self documentarians. It makes the whole thing tricky especially since not very many people take this as obsessively as I do so the records are continually destroyed and altered
There used to be a great website called Deep House Page which archived loads of Hot Mix 5 mixes, and you could really hear just how diverse that early era of post-disco dance music was, before it even got pigeonholed into "house" or "techno" and the myriad of subgenres that came since. Sadly the page has disappeared, and I'm not sure where to find the mixes now.
Meanwhile, in parallel, people in other countries were experimenting with synthesizers and unconventional composition too. I remember finding mixtapes of an obscure Australian band called Hugo Klang (https://hugoklang.bandcamp.com/) who were doing techno-y stuff with the 303 a few years before Phuture put together their seminal tune.
Without a doubt the big names that everyone remembers as the progenitors were hugely influential. Already in the 90s people were writing articles that started out exactly like this one, so we're already a full generation into the myth. But it's still interesting to go digging and find all the other stuff that surely played a part in influencing all the other people whose stories never got written up.
Seems there was a lot of parallel invention and cross pollination.
this is the book cover: https://monoskop.org/images/9/9f/Toop_David_Ocean_of_Sound_A...
Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYH8DsU2WCk
That same year, Phuture released Acid Tracks which influenced Hawtin to make Spastik.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igNBeo3QSqc
disclaimer: I love techno
This one has connected with me recently on that more tribal level!
Good one!
Not really. Not in the in sense of where the music came from. I'd agree on an enjoyment level it taps into something similar. But the roots of the genre as far as I am aware owe nothing to tribal music.
What tribes? Where? When?
Techno is the sound of automation, or as one of the Detroit originators said, 'like James Brown and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator together'.
Here's the book in Spanish https://archive.org/details/latelegrafiarapida.eltritecladoy... and this is a homage to his work in 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFZk6WrbOKw
;-)
Bedrock For What you Dream off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzHmXaUSL6o
Undeworld Born Slippy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQGOlawi6n0
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493341.Techno_Rebels
Kraftwerk's first live recorded performance was in 1970: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUiLJnEYJI
How many people in the 1970 audience sensed that they were listening to something as significant as what it became?
The famous original is still hosted as flash here: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/
And after more than a decade the update V3: https://music.ishkur.com/
https://soundcloud.com/invite-1
https://www.youtube.com/c/H%C3%96RBERLIN/videos
EDIT: There's craploads of content, a lot of styles, although I will observe that oldschool sounds have continued to come back in a big way in 2020. Rave, electro, acid.
Here's my favourite party set from 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0qeZ1fpWwU
No offense intended - divergent musical taste should be celebrated!
Videos I've come back to way more than once below (most of these are on the harder side of "electro" -- hard techno, hard acid -- but not all)
Lady Starlight (live modular!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9oVM7CQbI
Tigerhead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpuHmH495us
Tham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOfhuYW_OI
The Brvtalist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0qeZ1fpWwU
FJAAK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwpF8CAcGQ8
SPFDJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ7lbqyLbX8
Dax J and Hector Oaks also need a mention - Hector adding a sparkle of punk to electronic mixes.
From there on you can follow an guest DJs who you like the style off.
Also when did “techno” become an umbrella term again? I was possessed off enough when “EDM” was redefined as a specific genre (and such a lousy one at that).
His style is a bit less minimal, but Boris Brejcha is absolutely sick.
I’ve not knowingly come across Boris before though. Pretty sure I’d have heard some of his records play but looking at his discography I think he might have started making a name for himself around the same time I hung up my own DJ headphones so he’s not a name that’s immediately recognisable for me.
I did recently hook my decks up again but not yet had a chance to play anything.
I would guess in the '90s, when there was a lot more crossover between electronic music and other genres. Rock and hiphop oriented stuff like the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were topping the dance charts, and other more conventional techno like Aphex Twin and Underworld were getting decent media coverage as well.
Plus movie soundtracks at the time tended to include a lot of techno. Trainspotting, Pi, Hackers, The Jackal, The Saint....discovered a lot of artists thanks to these.
My comment was in regard to how the GP suggested that techno has since become another umbrella term again now. Or maybe I misunderstood their post?
https://soundcloud.com/hate_music/sets/hate-podcasts
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/sets/ra-podcasts
https://soundcloud.com/resident-advisor/sets/ra-podcast-arch...
(IIRC they were on Mixcloud previously, but parted ways for some reason.)
What sort of techno do you prefer? The artists I've got are mostly the tougher end of European techno, there's also some Detroit techno, acid techno and hard techno/schranz. You can look at my likes for my favourites...
https://soundcloud.com/spiralx/sets
I've also been into techno since the 90s and it's still my favourite thing in the world :) The combination of relentless kick drum and the constantly changing synths and percussion never fails to draw me in. It manages to sooth my ADHD with the constant heartbeat of the kick drum while the constant progression of everything else serves to keep my attention from wondering off after a few bars.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1LSjVUxQk1Nrh7kHavZ4uu?si=...
Enjoy the music instead of going around and barking like a mad dog
Nah, it's not experimental at all. It's bland, posh, Tomorrowland-tier tech-house.
Techno has a vast range of styles.
I maintain a YouTube playlist called "music to hack by" which is up to over 500 songs now. Basically the criteria are: 1) electronic 2) has a beat (no ambient) 3) few to no vocals, with only one or two exceptions
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2A7B99AB93F1E522
Combine that with the fact that Southern California set so many music trends, and literally nothing until about the Nirvana era was even remotely new to me for decades (and of course Nirvana’s music style isn’t particularly new to anyone who listened to the White Album or Iggy Pop, not that it’s not great music). It was all recycled constantly in the dance music world and continues to be to this day.
Techno and hiphop so obviously came out of these roots that I laugh every time someone names a new variant of EDM, which is about twice a week. Prince, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Kool in the Gang didn’t even call themselves R&B groups. They called themselves rock bands, intentionally. Nothing new etc.
That sounds a lot like the Electrifying Mojo, mentioned in the article. Mojo played rock and other stuff too.
Funny that the Techno scene in Frankfurt is pretty much gone.
https://musicforprogramming.net/
I for one did not know it's roots took place back in the 70s and from the black community.
These days when I look at techno artists and their raving followers, its prodimently white. I have since taken active steps to seek out the lesser know black artists to support.
Many modern music fundamentals are origins from the black community and very little is correctly attributed and/or black artists are sidelined.
Good documentary on the origins of house and techno from 70s disco, to 4 to the floor disco and the coming of the 808, how this moved to house in chicago and some sci fi nerds with a love for kraftwerk in detroit started techno. Then how the UK got involved and these DJs from the US, used to playing to 50-80 people in tiny underground, often gay clubs would come to the UK and play to 10,000 in massive outdoor / warehouse events and rave was born
Black people in the US invented basically the three modern music roots:
- Blues/Rock
- Techno
- Rap
The problem is rap had much better marketing in the US, ditto with rhythm and blues in the 90's.
And I’d argue that blues and rock are separate, but that most rock until late 90s was heavily influenced by blues. But that’s all just fun trying to draw lines where there isn’t a clear difference sometimes.
PD: I didn´t put Blues/Rock as separate entities, but two genres where late blues albums could be considered something as proto-rock. And ditto with jazz-swing-blues. It's like a continuum.
Also, by "rap" I think you mean 'hip-hop', which includes sampling and mixing, especially using turntables.
> Well, blues is the son of jazz music :)
Try some Muddy Waters and John Coltrane, listen, then report back.
With due respect, beyond every form of music being related to every other (just like you are probably a distant relative of mine), they are such different genres that my impression of the comment - which could be completely wrong - is that the commenter has not listed to jazz, blues, or both.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV8_eUJ6C1w [ Acid Mix Detroit Chicago - New Dance Show 1989 ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz2wInkVkRU [ Techno Jam - New Dance Show 1989 ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUAqboAvQM [ City of Techno (Detroit) - New Dance Show 1991 ]
Great examples of the racial diversity in the early scene in Detroit. I think this was some public access TV show?
Anyways speaking from living in Latin America the scene here is HUGE for techno and house, I would probably say the numbers here are bigger and more diverse than I've seen for the same scene in North America and balance out the melanation factor quite a lot
Colombia had someone spinning that who was when she was still alive quite the amusement because she changed her name to ladyzunga cyborg and then... this
https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/80/590x/Colombi...
RIP abcdefg hijklmn opqrst uvwxyz
Berlin, Amsterdam, London, etc, each had a larger scene than the entirety of the US combined.
I know Colombia is really into it. I went to pretty solid parties in Brazil, at Fabriketa in Sao paulo. Felt fairly similar to the NY scene.
NY would have the big events for the "cool" crowd, big showcases like afterlife and stuff at the Mirage. Then smaller clubs like Nowadays, where you could get an 8 hour Wata Igarashi set etc. Underground one-offs like The Bunker.
Plus it seemed like a lot of Europe's cities have their scene and they focus more on that. Of course Berlin is high quality but like Copenhagen focuses on schacke and stuff. Whereas NY you can get a taste of everything in a year.
> origins from the black community
gotta give credit to the engineers who pioneered electronic music synthesis, like Robert Moog, or the Japanese who created Korg synthesizers in the article.
Influences for any technology, project, art, etc come from a large web of sources. Racial gatekeeping and attribution is close-minded.
Let the people enjoy techno without guilt.
And that's OK, there's literally nothing wrong with this. I think there's also a lot of stuff to be said about how there's anecdotes about how the early rave scene had a lot of previously unheard of racial unity going on, stuff like skinhead and rasta gangs or even rival football ultras encountering each other and literally just vibing when they'd be fighting each other before
GP made it seem like whites being a big part of current techno scene is bad.
> The first stuff anyone started calling techno was pretty black
you could say the first stuff anyone started calling electronic music was pretty white. point is, racial attribution for something that has a huge array of influences is silly.
> unheard of racial unity going on
yes, the way it should be.
I don't see that; I don't see any "guilt", using your word. Can you point it out? People have other motives.
My impression is that you brought your own (reactionary?) bias to it, using a reactionary talking point whether it really applies or not. Why bring down someone who is trying to expand their experiences, knowledge, and community, in a world where racism is common and leads to many people being excluded. We should work to include - that's great, creative, positive; there's no reason it needs to be motivated by guilt.
> using a reactionary talking point
???
Telling americans to shut up about race already == "reactionary talking point"
it's a series about electronic music history.
> its prodimently white. I have since taken active steps to seek out the lesser know black artists to support
I couldn't care less who the specific artist is for techno music i listen to.