Techno is a form of electronic music that emerged in the mid-1980s and primarily refers to a particular style founded in Germany and developed in and around Detroit and subsequently adopted by European producers. The term "techno" is often incorrectly used in North America and Europe to describe all forms of electronic dance music.
History
Techno was 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 various Detroit radio stations including WCHB, WGPR, and 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 that was played on daily mixed radio programs and played at parties given by cliquish, Detroit high school clubs, it has grown to be a global phenomenon. High school clubs such as Snobbs, Hardwear, Brats, Comrades, Weekends, Rumours, and Shari Vari created the incubator in which Techno was grown. These young promoters developed and nurtured the local dance music scene by both catering to the tastes of the local audience of young people and by marketing parties with innovative DJs and eclectic new music. As these local clubs grew in popularity, groups of DJs began to band together and market their mixing skills and sound systems to the clubs under names like Direct Drive and Audio Mix in order to cater to the growing audiences of listeners. Locations like local church activity centers, vacant warehouses, offices and YMCA auditoriums were the early locations where the underage crowds gathered, and where the musical form was nurtured and defined.
The music soon attracted enough attention to garner its own club, the Music Institute. It was founded by Chez Damier, Derrick May and a few other investors. Though short-lived, this club was known internationally, for its all night sets, its sparse white rooms, and its juice bar (the Institute never served liquor). Relatively quickly, techno began to be seen by many of its originators and up-and-coming producers as an expression of Future Shock post-industrial angst. It also took on increasingly high tech and 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 Records (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" (1977), and the more danceable selections from Kraftwerk's repertoire between 1977 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, Illinois and New York City, New York at the time. The music's producers, especially May and Saunderson, admit to having been fascinated by the Chicago club scene and being influenced by house in particular. 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. At the same time, there is evidence that the Chicago sound was influenced by the Detroit Three — allegedly, May loaned Chicago-based house musician Keith "Jack Master Funk" Farley the equipment to make the classic track "House Nation"; early Detroit techno records reportedly sold well in Chicago; and Atkins believes that the first acid house producers, seeking to distance house music from disco, emulated the techno sound. [1]
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 and Robert Hood, plus certain musicians in the UK, Belgium and Germany.
Derrick May is often quoted as comparing techno to "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator". For various reasons, techno is seen by the American mainstream, even among African-Americans, as "white" music, even though many of its originators and 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. The genre has further expanded as more recent pioneers of the scene such as Moby, The Zombie Hunter's Guild, Orbital, and the Future Sound of London have made the style break through to the mainstream pop culture.
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Musicology
Techno features an abundance of percussive, synthetic sounds, studio effects used as principal instrumentation, and normally a fast, regular 4/4 beat usually in the 130–140 bpm range. Some techno compositions have strong melodies and bass lines, but these features are not as essential to techno as they are to other dance genres, and it is not uncommon for techno compositions to deëmphasize or omit them. Techno is also very DJ-friendly, being mainly instrumental, 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 genre's 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 added effects begin.
Instead of employing traditional compositional techniques, the techno musician, called a producer, treats the electronic studio as one large, complex instrument: an interconnected orchestra of machines, each producing timbres that are simultaneously familiar and alien. Each machine is encouraged to generate or complement continuous, repetitive sonic patterns that come relatively 'naturally' to them, given the capabilities and limitations of early sequencers — such sequencers, especially those built-in to old drum machines, tend to encourage the production of repeating 16-step patterns with a limited number of instruments being playable at once, yet they also allow sounds to be arranged in any order, regardless of whether live musicians could easily reproduce them. Rather than just mimicking arrangements playable by live musicians, the techno producer is free to prominently feature unrealistic combinations of sounds. Most producers, however, strive to achieve a listenable, dancefloor-friendly balance of realistic and unrealistic arrangements of mostly synthetic, semi-realistic timbres, rather than a demonstration of machine-powered extremes.
Depending on how they are wired together, the machines 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 keyboards, 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.
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Substyles and 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:
* Detroit techno - music in the style of early techno from Detroit, but not necessarily originating in Detroit. Famous for searing strings and crisp, tight but intricate hihat patterns.
* Tech house - a slightly lower-tempo fusion that often combines techno with a prominent bass line and other elements of house and dub.
* Trance and its subgenres - a form that tends to emphasize continuous synthesized, melodic or harmonic figures in the lower midrange frequencies, and that often uses build-ups, dramatic crescendos, muted bass drums, and sometimes includes vocals.
* Hardcore, which evolved into breaks as well as jungle - a form based mainly on complex arrangements of sampled percussion, often at high tempos (140–200 BPM), and often featuring loud, dub-influenced bass lines played at half time.
* Gabba, Gabber, or what was known as hardcore techno in the U.S. - a very loud, agggressive, high-tempo (140–220 BPM) techno, much of which originated in Rotterdam and often features a distorted Roland TR-909 bass drum overdriven to the point where it becomes a tonal square wave.
* Acid techno - Chicago inspired style of techno that originally featured the sound of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer.
* IDM, representing techno's "avant-garde" side - a genre often influenced by and crossing over into ambient, experimental music and even rock music, usually features complex, asymmetrical beat patterns that render it more for listening than dancing.
* Minimal is a new fusion of downbeat and Detroit techno that is gaining popularity in the UK and other parts of Europe which does not make as much use of drums to maintain rhythm.
Less well-known genres or styles directly related to techno include Yorkshire Bleeps and Bass or "Bleep," which was prominent in the very early 1990s, and Ghettotech, which combines some of the aesthetics of techno with hip-hop, house music, and Miami bass. Various other styles exist and have a fan base, although the names and encyclopedic notability of these styles are points of contention. Examples include amigacore, speedcore, frenchcore, darkcore, glitch, happy hardcore, hardbase, hardstyle, digital hardcore, splittercore, bouncy techno, Schranz, Swechno, and Wonky techno.
Occasionally, well-funded pop music producers will formulate a radio or club-friendly variant of techno. The music of Technotronic, 2 Unlimited, and Clock 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".
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Important artists
The "originators", the "first wave" artists often credited with inventing techno, are as follows:
* Juan Atkins
* Derrick May
* Kevin Saunderson
Other "second wave" Detroit-area techno producers active since 1988–1990 include the following people:
* John Acquaviva
* Blake Baxter
* Mike Clark
* Carl Craig
* Brett Dancer
* Drexciya
* Eddie Fowlkes [some argue that he is an "originator"]
* Mike Banks
* Mike Grant
* Richie Hawtin
* Robert Hood [some argue that he is an "interpreter"]
* Kenny Larkin
* Jeff Mills
* Terrance Parker
* Alan Oldham
* James Pennington
* Stacey Pullen
* Moodymann
* Theo Parrish
* THE STRIKE OF NOISE
