What is Techno music?

[A.M. Gold]

Alright ZPH, you asked for this. I shall now throw down the gauntlet!

OMFG!!

"Fidgethouse"??

"Moombahcore"???

"Hardbag"????

[ghettosynth]

P.S. It's still Techno even though it was / is popular, and quite a classic track to top it off.

Nope, it's big beat with a 4/4 kick. Ishkur might call it Techno Dance, or some other mainstream floor stomping club nonsense. That isn't what techno sounded like in 1999.

Ishkur describes it like it is. The sample in that track, BTW, is from "The Roof is on Fire" by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

[ZenPunkHippy]

There is nothing wrong with a bit of Handbag House every now and again, camp is fun too

[ghettosynth]

Two things strike me as funny in this thread:

The fact that the terms IDM/EDM became widely used - man, they suck
The fact that the Crystal Method are described as 'pioneers'.

BTW, Chemical Brothers >>> Big Beat (another lol-worthy moniker). The day when Exit came out and we sat and listened to it we didn't think "Hey man, digging that Bg Beat sound". "Twas just 'dance music' to us.

Yes, but it was a different style, and that style is known as big beat, which, BTW, is what the previous track posted above is as well. Just because it has a four four kick, doesn't make it techno.

I see what you're saying but just disagree about the label. As someone who was there at the time (as I'm guessing you were too) CB in their prime were never BigBeat for me and my mates, regardless of what some Wikipedia editor might write.

I'm not taking my cues from Wikipedia. Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Crystal Method WERE big beat. I'm not saying that it's all bad, I still like Vegas, but, it's not techno. Big Beat was the first REALLY mainstream EDM style. If there are a bunch of distorted guitars and some breakbeat samples and it's from the mid to late 90s, it's probably Big Beat. It made EDM accessible to the college crowd that grew up on grunge.

It's not just Wikipedia, BTW.

http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/big-beat-ma0000004997
http://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Big+Beat/
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/19/139754112 ... tial-songs

...and of course, Ishkur who lists the first Big Beat song as one by the Chemical Brothers.

[ghettosynth]

Alright ZPH, you asked for this. I shall now throw down the gauntlet!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_po ... sic_genres

[djanthonyw]

P.S. It's still Techno even though it was / is popular, and quite a classic track to top it off.

Nope, it's big beat with a 4/4 kick. Ishkur might call it Techno Dance, or some other mainstream floor stomping club nonsense. That isn't what techno sounded like in 1999.

Ishkur describes it like it is. The sample in that track, BTW, is from "The Roof is on Fire" by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Big Beat does not use a 4/4 kick, and everything else in the track is clearly programmed for a 4/4 kick as well. It's Techno, get over it.

[The_Hidden_Goose]

Some of chemical bros. stuff is more like techno to me. A lot of it was what I think of as big beat - especially their earlier stuff.

But then big beat was always a bit of a loose term as I recall. A lot of what I would've called trip-hop orinstrumental hip hop got lumped with it...

But at a student-y club night it all went down quite nicely here. There was even a bit of indie, northern soul and funk/blacksploitation type stuff thrown in. None of it is the music running in my veins, but I remember having a merry old time of it back when it was popular and I was younger and doing lots of naughty things with chemicals!

Haven't liked the last couple of albums by Chemical Bros though (soundtracks excluded).

But then I didn't like Prodigy's last couple either.

No one mentioned Orbital? They are decidedly techno in my mind, but apart from the early stuff they veered away from 4/4 beats quite often....still sounded like techno to me though. Maybe it's just me.

[ghettosynth]

P.S. It's still Techno even though it was / is popular, and quite a classic track to top it off.

Nope, it's big beat with a 4/4 kick. Ishkur might call it Techno Dance, or some other mainstream floor stomping club nonsense. That isn't what techno sounded like in 1999.

Ishkur describes it like it is. The sample in that track, BTW, is from "The Roof is on Fire" by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Big Beat does not use a 4/4 kick, and everything else in the track is clearly programmed for a 4/4 kick as well. It's Techno, get over it.

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier in the thread with regards to techno. A time signature alone does not define a genre. That song has all the characteristics of Big Beat, and, that's exactly what it is. Most techno is 4/4, but just because something is 4/4 and uses some techno sounds doesn't make it techno, similarly, just because a song happens to use a 4/4 beat, doesn't mean that it's not Big Beat. If it's anything else, it's simply club/main floor/stadium house, or, as I said earlier,"techno dance", which is NOT techno. Actually, it's not really that either, it's just Big Beat dressed up as main room house/stadium house. Again, look it up on Ishkur' site, and while you're there, listen to some techno and learn what it is.

That song has guitar, a breakbeat from a vintage record, the sound components, the "punctuated with punk style vocals", etc. These are all characteristics that define big beat and do NOT define techno. Go back and read this thread, pay attention to what Ingo is saying, read Ishkur, basically, your analysis is far too simple.

The Chemical Brothers are one of the top 5 or 6 groups that are almost universally cited as being the founders of Big Beat. They might have made some techno, but nobody in this thread that's trying to call CB techno has posted an example of that yet and I certainly don't know of anything from them that I'd call techno.

Some reviewers suggest that this was a transition record from them, but they don't say, "it's techno", here you go, here's a description:

By the time of the Chemical Brothers' third album, Surrender, the big beat phenomenon they had done much to engender was more apt to be heard on a soft drink commercial than the world's hipper dancefloors. And with the growing omnipresence of big beat's simplistic party vibes threatening to cave in the entire scene, Tom and Ed came to grips with what is -- compared to their previous work -- a house record. The pounding four-on-the-floor thump of tracks like "Music:Response," "Got Glint," and the duo's take on KLF-style stadium house for the single "Hey Boy Hey Girl" signals that this is a transition record for the Chemical Brothers, one that could eventually take them back into the straight-ahead dance mainstream status enjoyed by acts from Daft Punk to Armand Van Helden.
The irony here is that even considering the changes, Surrender still feels very similar to its predecessors. The focus on wave-of-sound production, buckets full of old-school vocal samples, and various sirens and beatbox effects sound like they were lifted wholesale from their breakout album, Dig Your Own Hole, or their first release,

In short, they don't know how to do anything other than Big Beat, and even when they try to create a something else, it still sounds like Big Beat. They have always made "Stadium style" music that appealed to the masses.

Big beat tends to feature distorted, compressed breakbeats at tempos between 120 to 140 beats per minute, acid house-style synthesizer lines, and heavy loops from 60s and 70s funk, jazz, rock, and pop songs. They are often punctuated with punk-style vocals and driven by intense, distorted basslines with conventional pop and techno song structures. Big beat tracks have a sound that includes crescendos, builds, drops, dramatic sound effects, such as explosions or sirens, and extended drum rolls. As with several other dance genres at the time, the use of effects such as filters, phasing, and flanging was commonplace.

Big beat is also often characterized by a strong psychedelic influence comparable to a wide range of artists, from Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Jacques Perrey to Funkadelic and the acid house movement of the late 1980s. Celebrated instigators of the genre such as Fatboy Slim tend to feature heavily compressed loud breakbeats in their tracks, which are used to define the music as much as any melodic hooks and sampled sounds. Based on the primary use of loud, heavy breakbeats and basslines, big beat shares attributes with jungle and drum and bass, but has a significantly slower tempo.

Look, you gave a bad example of techno, supported by a third ranked genre on a wikipedia page, that's sad. The Chemical Brothers were part of the contingent that defined the Big Beat sound. They have never had any credibility as techno artists, and other than people who confuse the mainstream understanding of the word "techno" with it's underground meaning, I've never before heard anyone argue otherwise.

[ghettosynth]

Some of chemical bros. stuff is more like techno to me. A lot of it was what I think of as big beat - especially their earlier stuff.

Post an example, stadium house isn't techno and I don't listen to much mainstream electronica so I'm not familiar with their recent stuff. That said, I don't really know of much of anything that's both mainstream and techno. So, I have my doubts that they have produced anything that is "proper" techno.

But then big beat was always a bit of a loose term as I recall. A lot of what I would've called trip-hop orinstrumental hip hop got lumped with it...

All styles have some variance, but the key characteristics of Big Beat have to do with the elements and the production. Big Beat isn't as clear as say "Speed Garage", but it's pretty clear. Big distorted guitars, looped breakbeats from hip hop records, big stadium sounds, punky vocals (often also distorted), are what define big beat.

No one mentioned Orbital? They are decidedly techno in my mind, but apart from the early stuff they veered away from 4/4 beats quite often....still sounded like techno to me though. Maybe it's just me.

Someone did earlier, but, I'd call a lot of their stuff IDM.

[ghettosynth]

There is nothing wrong with a bit of Handbag House every now and again, camp is fun too

In small doses. That said, I enjoyed hard house, not the U.K. crap, but proper Chicago hard house, e.g. IHR.

[Halma]

Some good old roots stuff:



Some other classic Stuff because obviuosly nobody has posted stuff from Juan Atkins or I haven't seen it:




No love for Drexciya here? RIP J.M. Stinson...btw his partner Gerald Donald is now a member of aformentioned Dopplereffekt.




Some earlier stuff from Jay Denham ...




The track of the new millenium ...




And if you guys are looking for some real bangin' new stuff check out Ben Sims "Funk You" Radioshow...

https://soundcloud.com/ben-sims/ben-sim ... s-funk-you


Regards
Sebastian

[jupiter8]

[ghettosynth]

[Halma]

Great video until this dubstep sheldon nerd appears...

"Just when you think we are in galactic ecstasy..." ...*imaginary drumroll*... "..we go acid. It's hardcore electronic modulation..." ROFL

You made my day.

Regards
Sebastian

[Shabdahbriah]

LMAO!!!