|
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 and played at parties
given by posh Detroit high school clubs such as Comrades, Weekends,
and Rumours, the music soon attracted enough attention to garner
its own club the Music Institute. The institute, though short-lived,
was known for its all night sets, its sparse setup, and its juice
bar (the Institute never served liquor). Over what was really a
short period of time, 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" (1977), 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 and 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. However at the same
time, there is also evidence that Chicago was influenced by the
Detroit Three. Allegedly May loaned Chicago producers the equipment
they would use to make the classic House Nation.
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", 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. The genre has further expanded as more recent pioneers
of the scene such as Moby, Orbital, and the Future Sound of London
have made the style break through to the mainstream pop culture.
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, often without a discernible 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 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 effects begin.
Instead of employing traditional compositional techniques, 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.
Information taken from www.answers.com
|
