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Techno music

Techno is a form of electronic music that emerged in the mid-1980s, primarily developed in basement studios by "The Belleville Three", a cadre of African-American men who were attending college, at the time, near Detroit, Michigan.

The budding musicians -- former high school friends and mixtape traders Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson -- found inspiration in Midnight Funk Association, an eclectic, 5-hour, late-night radio program hosted on WJLB-FM from 1977 through the mid-1980s by DJ Charles "The Electrifying Mojo" Johnson. Mojo's show featured heavy doses of electronic sounds from the likes of George Clinton, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream, among others.

Though initially conceived as party music and played at Detroit all-ages clubs such as the Music Institute[?], techno began to be seen by many of its originators and up-and-coming producers as an expression of Future Shock and post-industrial angst. It also took on increasingly urban, science-fiction oriented themes.

The music's producers were using the word "techno" in a general sense as early as 1984 (as in Cybotron's seminal classic "Techno City"), and sporadic references to an ill-defined "techno-pop" could be found in the music press in the mid-1980s. However, it was not until Neil Rushton assembled the compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit for Virgin UK in 1988 that the word came to formally describe a genre of music.

Techno has since been retroactively defined to encompass, among others, works dating back to "Shari Vari" (1981) by A Number Of Names, the earliest compositions by Cybotron (1981), Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love" (1982), and the more danceable selections from Kraftwerk's repertoire between 1978 and 1983.

In the years immediately following the first techno compilation's release, techno was referenced in the dance music press as Detroit's relatively high-tech, mechanical brand of house music, because on the whole, it retained the same basic structure as the soulful, minimal, post-disco style that was emanating from Chicago, New York and London at the time. The music's producers, especially May and Saunderson, admit to having been into the Chicago club scene and being influenced by house. This influence is especially evident in the tracks on the first compilation, as well as in many of the other compositions and remixes they released between 1988 and 1992. May's 1987-88 hit "Strings Of Life" (released under the nom de plume Rhythim Is Rhythim), for example, is considered a classic in both the house and techno genres.

A spate of techno-influenced releases by new producers in 1991-92 resulted in a rapid fragmentation and divergence of techno from the house genre. Many of these producers were based in the UK and the Netherlands, places where techno had gained a huge following and taken a crucial role in the development of the club and rave scenes. Many of these new tracks in the fledgling IDM, trance and hardcore/jungle genres took the music in more experimental and drug-influenced directions than techno's originators intended. Detroit and "pure" techno remained as a subgenre, however, championed by a new crop of Detroit-area producers like Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Drexciya, Robert Hood, and others, plus certain musicians in the UK and Germany.

May is often quoted as comparing techno to "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator", even though very little, if any, techno ever bore a stylistic resemblance to Clinton's repertoire.

For various reasons, techno is seen by the American mainstream, even among African-Americans, as "white" music, even though its originators and many of its producers are Black. The historical similarities between techno, jazz, and rock and roll, from a racial standpoint, are a point of contention among fans and musicians alike. Derrick May, in particular, has been outspoken in his criticism of the co-opting of the genre and of the misconceptions held by people of all races with regard to techno. In recent years, however, the publication of relatively accurate histories by authors Simon Reynolds (Generation Ecstasy aka Energy Flash) and Dan Sicko (Techno Rebels), plus mainstream press coverage of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, have helped to diffuse the genre's more dubious mythology.

Table of contents

Musicology

Stylistically, techno features an abundance of percussive, synthetic sounds, studio effects used as principal instrumentation, and a fast, regular 4/4 beat in the 130-140 bpm range. It is very DJ-friendly, being mainly instrumental, relatively atonal (often without a discernable melody or bass line), and produced with the intention of being incorporated into continuous DJ sets wherein different compositions are played with very long, synchronized segues. Although several other dance music genres can be described in such terms, techno has a distinct sound that aficionados can pick out very easily.

There are many ways to make techno, but a typical techno production is created using a compositional technique that developed to suit the sequencer-driven, electronic instrumentation. While this technique is rooted in a Western music framework (as far as scales, rhythm and meter, and the general role played by each type of instrument), it does not typically employ traditional approaches to composition such as reliance on the playing of notes, the use of overt tonality and melody, or the generation of accompaniment for vocals. Some of the most effective techno music consists of little more than cleverly programmed drum patterns that interplay with different types of reverb and frequency filtering, mixed in such a way that it's not clear where the instrument's timbres end and the effects begin.

Instead of traditional compositional approaches, the techno musician treats the electronic studio as one large, complex instrument: an interconnected orchestra of machines, each producing timbres that are at once familiar and alien. These machines are set in motion one by one, and are encouraged to generate the kind of repetitive patterns that are more 'natural' to them. Depending on how they are wired together, they sometimes influence each other's sounds as the producer builds up many layers of syncopated, rhythmic harmonies and mingles them together at the mixing console.

After an acceptable palette of compatible textures is collected in this manner, the producer begins again, this time focusing not on developing new textures but on imparting a more deliberate arrangement of the ones he or she already has. The producer "plays" the mixer and the sequencer, bringing layers of sound in and out, and tweaking the effects to create ever-more hypnotic, propulsive combinations. The result is a deconstructive manipulation of sound, owing as much to Debussy and the Futurist Luigi Russolo as it does to Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.

The techno producer's studio can be anything from a single computer (increasingly common nowadays) to elaborate banks of synthesizers, samplers, effects processors, and mixing boards wired together. Most producers use a variety of equipment and strive to produce sounds and rhythms never heard before, yet stay fairly close to the stylistic boundaries set by their contemporaries.

Related Genres

In the early 1990s, adventurous techno producers experimented with the style, spawning new genres that have taken on a life of their own. The most prominent of these techno offshoots are:

trance, an even more repetitive, minimal psychedelic variant that is still fairly close to 'pure' techno, though often formulaic by comparison;
a short-lived subgenre called hardcore that evolved into Drum and Bass, based mainly on complex arrangements of sampled percussion, and now almost completely divorced from techno;
IDM, typically undanceable, and 'avant-garde,' usually features complex, asymmetrical beat patterns. Often influenced by ambient and experimental music; and
tech-house, a fusion that is usually more techno than house.

Occasionally some well-funded pop music producers will formulate a radio or club-friendly variant of techno. The music of Technotronic, 2 Unlimited, and Lords Of Acid were early examples of this phenomenon. Established pop stars also sometimes get techno makeovers, such as when William Orbit produced Madonna's "Ray Of Light".

The term "techno" is often used by the uninitiated to describe electronic dance music as a whole.

Important Artists

Techno's originators are:

Other Detroit-area techno producers active since 1988-1990 include:

Eddie Fowlkes[?] [some argue that he is an originator]
Richie Hawtin (Plastikman[?])
John Acquiviva[?]
Carl Craig[?]
Kenny Larkin[?]
Stacey Pullen[?]
Jeff Mills (The Wizard)
Mike Banks[?]
James Pennington[?] (Suburban Knight)
Robert Hood[?] (X-101, X-102, X-103, The Vision)
Blake Baxter
Alan Oldham (DJ T-1000, X-313)

Other techno artists of note:

Aphex Twin
Maurizio / Basic Channel
Orbital
Underworld
Eon
Peter "Baby" Ford
Mark Broom
Dave Angel
Richard Bartz
Fred Giannelli
Slam
Funk d'Void
Heiko Laux
Johannes Heil
Cari Lekebusch
Adam Beyer
Atom Heart (Uwe Schmidt)
808 State
Moby (1990-1995)

External links

Sites focusing specifically on techno music:

Sounds Like Techno (http://www.soundsliketechno.com.au/) - an online documentary exploring techno music, from its roots and early influences in the USA to its place in Australian music today
Techno: Detroit's Gift to the World (http://www.detroithistorical.org/promo-techno/index.asp) - exhibit at Detroit Historical Museum (Jan 2003 - Jun 2004)