Techno

Overview

Techno is a form of electronic music that was originally developed in the mid-1980s by a small group of African-American men in Detroit, Michigan. It began as a relatively mechanical, high-tech offshoot of the soulful, post-disco sound of Chicago house music and its drug-influenced variant Acid House. Between 1988 and 1992, techno gained an international following and was crucial to the development of the rave scene during those years.

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.

Musicology

Stylistically, techno features an abundance of percussive, synthetic sounds, studio effects used as 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 bass line), and produced with the intention of being incorporated into continuous DJ sets with very long segues. Although several other dance music genres can be described in such terms, techno has a distinct sound that afficionados 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 instrumentation that appeals to the producer. This technique is not based on traditional approaches such as the playing of notes, overt tonality, melody, or on the generation of accompaniment to vocals. Rather, the electronic studio is treated as one 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, mingling them together at the mixing console. After an acceptable palette of 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 s/he 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, while staying fairly close to the 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, slower 'art techno', often influenced by [[ambient music|ambient] and jazz 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. Technotronic, 2 Unlimited, Lords Of Acid were early examples of this. 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:

Derrick May
Juan Atkins
Kevin Saunderson

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

Richie Hawtin (Plastikman)
John Acquiviva
Carl Craig
Kenny Larkin
Stacey Pullen
Jeff Mills
James Pennington (Suburban Knight)
Robert Hood (X-101, X-102, X-103, The Vision)

Other techno artists of note:

Maurizio / Basic Channel
Orbital
Underworld
Eon
Peter "Baby" Ford
Mark Broom
Dave Angel
Richard Bartz
Fred Gianelli
Slam
Funk d'Void
Heiko Laux
Johannes Heil
Cari Lekebusch
Atom Heart (Uwe Schmidt)
808 State

The bulk of New York native Moby's musical output in the early 1990s does count as techno. "Next Is The E" was a rave anthem, and its darker predecessor "Go" is a classic. His later music, while interesting and more accessible, diverged from what techno became, and is not considered relevant to the genre any longer.