What makes techno techno?

[Meffy]

IMO the most prominent feature of techno is a complete lack of gypsy-jazz violin solos.

[nuffink]

You've obviously never heard the Jeff 'n Grappelli sessions.

[Chuck E. Jesus]

or the German Gypsy Kings...

[Klemperer]

If you start making techno, Hans, that means one person that is NOT talking like some german (so-called...) underground stations, hihi...

"only techno is revolution - wearing cashmere is revolution and techno is, all other music is ZUM ABSPRITZEN"

and so on, sigh...

Since about 2004 those guys with their oversimplifications and vollidiotischen Einordnungen in der Sprache pseudohochgelehrter Postmoderner had radio-shows which included many - to me - good techno-sounds.

If you don't mind listening to the always-the-same-sentences, = bashing all not-techno- musicians and quoting some bits of Foucault or Deleuze because that sounds like hatespeak, you might still listen to a german radio station called "Zuendfunk". They don't send much techno now (years before I heard "everyone who plays or listens to guitars must be stone dead" , a few months later they played loads of guitar-bands ). They had to go "mainstream" a bit, as listeners got lost somewhere... they even were in danger of being "closed down", which caused a little uproar in Bavaria...

But every 2 weeks on Wednesday, one hour before midnight, a DJ called Thomas Meinecke has his hour,

http://www.br-online.de/bayern2radio/

from there to "live Radio hören", and sometimes he plays the newest sounds from Detroit.

If you'd like to listen to the bashing, look out for "Radio Alice" inside this "Zuendfunk", he he... I recorded stuff of these shows, and now have a million stupid remarks like "Kraftwerk is music for old old people " ("Altherrenmucke") or "musician X is stone dead" or "only Foucault knows how the world rules" and in the next sentence "everyone who claims he knew anything about the world is a complete idiot and hasn't a clue about postmodernism"

and so on

And don't mind your age, mate - those guys TALK like "everyone over 30 is dead and loves Punk or classical music and Rotwein", but for example Mr. Meinecke, one of those bashers, is 51 or so himself.

So I think you have to find the great music behind this ridiculous, poshy rubbish. A friend who likes techno once said to me: "we are so many and many and more, we have to talk this shit and hatespeak to get known, otherwise we'd be one of millions of others".

[Meffy]

@nuffink & Chuck: [pompous] Not real techno. Those are sub-sub-sub-genres. [/pompous]

[Igor 4000]

Look up "Steve Stoll" and listen to some of his music. You can't get much more techno than that.

[the way]

thats because theres two "definitions" for techno:

(1) the wrong definition: anything dance. so that means trance, techno, house, hardcore ... i sent my mom Pendulum - Hold your Colour once and she thought that was techno too . I blame that stupid DANCE MIX bullshit which is just trancey covers of 80s songs but calls itself techno .

Reminds me of the time I was at my Grandpa's and put on some DnB and he asked if it was heavy metal!

I agree that most of what people refer to as techno now has f**k all to do with techno.

(2) the right one: machiney music, focused on the drums - the drums provide the main melody, the synths, if present at all, are there for backup.

That comment is just plain wrong arke. You nearly had it with "machiney music", I remember back in the day certain Techno artists used to refer to their music as "machine music" but the bit about drums is way off the mark! Lots of techno tracks don't have any drums at all or at least only uses drums as a simple rhythmic device to underpin the melodies. For example, one of the most famous pieces of Techno is Rhythim is Rhythim's "Strings of Life" and that track is very simplistic rythmically, it's the strings and piano that are the main points of interest. A lot of early Techno was like this particularly on the Detroit and Berlin scenes.

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of tracks that fit right into your definition, Plastikman's "Spastik" immediately springs to mind, but your definition is much too simplistic and narrow. Then again all definitions of Techno are...

[eduardo_b]

...There are no definite statements about a category. The borders exist only into attempts at explanation....

This is the essence of the difficulty with dividing up music into discrete categories that most people will agree upon most of the time. As soon as there is a consistent variation, it gets a category or sub-category. It becomes increasingly problematic to keep track of what "belongs" where, and why.

I used to be on an ambient music mail list, and it became obvious over time that ambient was turning into a mish-mash of sub-categories, including industrial ambient, a category so stupid IMO that it represents the antithesis of what Eno started. Worse, anyone who didn't agree with the proliferation of categories within ambient was deemed by some as simply a timid soul who didn't have any sense of musical adventure. Bollocks would be too kind a response to this.

Deciding what techno is seems like a goal doomed to failure...for so many reasons. I know it makes life more convenient when music is identifiable by category, but as soon as the category is in place, it fragments. It becomes too much work, at least for me, to keep up with this. I'll leave that to others.

[M'Snah]

I just found inspiration for my perfect first techno song... I already played the music but forgot to press the record button . Next time I use my cross-trainer I will record it. .

Your German is quite excellent Hans

My Dutch is even better .

[soundzone]

Good samples! Styles are differenciated by rythm and sounds. Rythm is quite obvious and there nothing to dicuss. but sound.... I use very techno oriented stuff from http://www.sf2-files.com.

any other sugesstions?

[soundzone]

sorry, bad link on previous post. this will work: http://www.sf2-files.com

[aallvor]

I just found inspiration for my perfect first techno song...

Please, stop calling it techno song. And start listening to some Basic Channel and Wild Planet tracks

[emdot_ambient]

Kraftwerk invented techno, and they used plenty of chords...

Kraftwerk invented Electro. Techno came out of Detroit a few years later with artists like May, Atkins and Saunderson being the driving force.
But I would also have thought we were talking about 2006 Techno and not 1986 Techno which sounds quite different.

well, we called it techno back in the day, techno pop, etc...some kids came up with electro later i suppose...in chicago there was house, and the techno made with the 303's and such sounded more like Kraftwerk so everyone called it techno, like Kraftwerk...i still call it techno, call it anything you want...

AFAIK Kraftwerk not only called it Techno Pop, but they came up with the term. What turned out to be the Electric Café album was originally going to be called Technicolor, but was changed to Techno Pop to avoid problems with that trademarked name. That album project started as early as 1982 but was delayed when band member Ralf Hütter suffered a near-fatal cycling accident. By the time he was well, technology had advanced enough that a lot of their work had to be re-conceived in order to bring the mix up to then modern standards.

Techno was primarily developed in basement studios by "The Belleville Three", a cadre of 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 Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream, among others....

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.

So it would appear that Kraftwerk not only inspired the genre later to adopt the term "techno" but they also used the term earlier.

But to answer the original question: What makes "techno" "techno"?
Technology!

[M'Snah]

I just found inspiration for my perfect first techno song...

Please, stop calling it techno song. And start listening to some Basic Channel and Wild Planet tracks

lol.

My daughter just told me that when she had used some of my music at school last year (12 year olds), the boys in her class had told her that it was 'techno' music... so she doesn't understand my quest

[aallvor]

Hehe. Techno is probably the most misused term within music, much to my grief!