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Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

I am quite familiar with techno culture and this piece is extremely misrepresentative. Reads like a promo piece from the artist's clueless PR agent. Maybe the Detroit scene sees things like this (I am from Europe), but no, techno is definitely not "a combination of technology and funk" or "a term to describe and introduce all kinds of electronic music". Nobody familiar with the scene would refer to drum and bass, dubstep or trance as "techno". I am genuinely surprised both how this can come from an apparently significant record label and how an empty promo piece like this appears in Wired.

On the note of techno culture, B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin[0] is a great documentary/autobiography on the emergence of Berlin techno culture and the Berlin Wall.

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4291066/

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>"I am quite familiar with techno culture and this piece is extremely misrepresentative. Reads like a promo piece from the artist's clueless PR agent. Maybe the Detroit scene sees things like this (I am from Europe), but no, techno is definitely not "a combination of technology and funk"

I'm not sure why you would be disputing this. Historically that part is correct and non-misrepresentative at all. Derrick May even has pretty famous quote that.

[techno is]"like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator, with only a sequencer to keep them company."

Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker were also very much influenced by Kraftwerk's peculiar "funkiness"(Planet Rock)[1] and what was coming out of the South Bronx at that time influenced Detroit Techno as much as the European influences. And Kraftwerk themselves were also influenced by James Brown[2]. It doesn't get any funkier than that. And then of course there is P-funk which was a huge influence on electronic music(Bernie Worell alone for that matter.) And P-Funk has root in the JBs - James Brown's band.

Honestly this is really less about just knowing "techo culture" and a lot more about music history.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/arts/music/06kraftwerk.ht...

[2] http://www.electronicbeats.net/juan-atkins-about-kraftwerk/

Techno was the precursor for drum and bass, dubstep and trance. Back in the day, it all existed under the rubric of 'techno.' That was the generic name for it.

And it did originate in Detroit. Kraftwerk and others were early adopters based on what was happening in detroit.

Actually- it's the other way around.

If you have access to BBC (UK), there's a 3 part series on the history of EDM. The first episode was shown last week and it touched- quite significantly- on the Detroit scene:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkz064

I disagree completely, drum and bass came from Jungle music, and Jungle came from the 1980's ragga scene. Classic Trance came from High Energy and Italo Disco..

You might even say techno and detroit techno was inspired by electro/electrofunk/early hip hop music (MANY OF THEM SAMPLING KRAFTWERK, not the other way around)

"Get with it!" - Dynamik Bass System

Here is a source: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

> and Jungle came from the 1980's ragga scene.

Not really, it heavily sampled the dub basslines and ragga vocals from that scene, but it grew out of the hardcore/rave scene. The hardcore scene had already been heavily using the dub basslines, it was just the vocal element and the more two-step oriented and heavily 'chopped up' Amen breaks that distinguished jungle from the sound of rave which was a more straight break-beat, with lots of analogue synth stab lead riffs.

The hardcore/rave scene grew directly out of the Belgian techno and acid-house scenes.

> Classic Trance came from High Energy and Italo Disco..

That's a real stretch too. Trance and techno were almost the same thing in the early 90s, with the likes of Jam & Spoon - Stella. They clearly share the same origins. The shite that came later (Euro trance) is not what I would call the 'original' trance.

> Here is a source

Inskur's guide is well known to be full of errors, I wouldn't use that as a source.

>> Classic Trance came from High Energy and Italo Disco..

> That's a real stretch too.

I'm going to row back a bit on this absolutist comment. The origins of trance were definitely Goa in the mid-80s and had chopped up Italo Disco, Disco, and Hi-NRG (chopped up to remove the vocals, extend them, and make them more 'trancedental'). So, I will admit that it's where trance came from. And in some ways it always stayed 'parallel' to the other scenes, and always had a certain hippy-vibe to it (well, until Ferry Corsten got hold of it).

But, the actual production style moved pretty far away from the Italo/Disco/Hi-NRG sound - and I would consider trance from the 90s onwards to be fundamentally 'techno with pads' as they share so much in common.

And, so that's why I think it's debatable what the origins of the production are, if not necessarily the origin of the scene.

>"Kraftwerk and others were early adopters based on what was happening in detroit."

This is backwards. Detroit was very much influenced by Kraftwerk and the Eno produced stuff- specifically Autobahn and Trans Europe Express which were mid 1970s.

This timeline does not work.

Have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUiLJnEYJI

'Techno' was definitely not the generic name for everything before Drum & Bass, Dubstep, and Trance.

Jungle was the precursor to Drum n Bass, and Hardcore/Rave were the precursors to Jungle. Rave came from Belgian techno and Acid House. Acid House came from House.

Techno and House developed in parallel to each other (in Detroit and Chicago respectively). House coming from Disco origins, Techno coming from Disco and European electronica (Kraftwerk) - and Prince (yep, really).

Dubstep is much later and was actually a product of UK Garage, which grew from the Drum n Bass scenes.

Dimitri Hegemann, who opened Tresor, has always said that techno was brought to Berlin via Detroit.

Your comments also suggest that you don't even know how important the interviewee, Juan Atkins, is.

In the old days, the only terms people had to describe electronic dance music were "techno" and "house."

acid house

Before that, even.

> In the old days, the only terms people had to describe electronic dance music were "techno" and "house."

And then "garage". Out of those three genres, only one isn't named after the place it started at... otherwise we might have had "school" I guess :)

This is from 1994. My recollection is that the average American of that time would refer to any electronic music as “techno”, especially if it had a strong beat. Checking a few cultural markers (Wipeout and its soundtrack: 1995. Pi, the first movie I saw with a soundtrack full of the music I was listening to: 1998.) matches my memories.

The Wipeout packaging and some in-game graphics were made by The Designers Republic, which also designs the EP/LP covers for Autechre (which is featured in the movie Pi).

If you have got Flash:

http://thedesignersrepublic.com/

Note how awful the design actually is from a 'user experience' point of view.

Most record sleeves of 'Warp Records' were from the 'Designers Republic', with both companies being Sheffield Based. Every one of the creations from Designer's Republic was awesome and cool. Just seeing the Warp logo going round at 33 RPM had some statement value.

I do find it funny that looked at objectively the web version of the Designer Republic legacy is so far off the mark of 'good design'.

By the time their work made it to WipeOut they had already become a pastiche of themselves, all of the best work was probably to be found on Warp Records from the early nineties.

I completely missed the "from 1994" part (tag was not there at the time of my comment). Things have changed and I don't have my music history down it seems. But Kraftwerk was still first, no?

I think the album "Future Shock" by Herbie Hancock, while technically electro, is a good example of techno's roots in funk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFM9bbfF0P4

I too am from Europe and I organized my first commercial techno party in Berlin in 1997 and every single artist named Atkins as a pioneer wrt electronic club music.

Wrt your music categories, your ontology is screwed just by its existence: Dutch techno would pass as hard-tek in the US or UK and as gabber in Germany. Lots of Central and South African DnB would pass as triphop in Western Europe.

When I moved from organizing local to international events, I had to learn the hard way that the categorizations of electronic music are a very national thing (probably influenced by the few magazines per country that wrote about it at all).

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