Berlin's techno scene added to Unesco intangible cultural heritage list

Also be prepared to be denied entry. It's allowed and not uncommon, especially for some specific clubs.

I'm travelling there for the first time, as a woman alone I wouldn't like to have nasty looks tbh (or even be yelled at as other user suggested), not want to bother, know to behave and just want to get to know the city along with other places in Europe.

I get it though, where I live we have desert undergrounds and parties up in the mountains with a vibe that is threatening to be overrun by tourists. To say nothing of all the plug-in camps popping up at Burning Man...

Thanks for the tips :) ! Will make sure to rent a bike while there.

Genre elitism is why I stopped spinning, it is such a boring thing to bike shed over and contributes zero to the music.

Almost immediately after the term started being used, though, it became strongly associated with a particular type of dance music -- namely the mainstream house music that got played at big "EDM" festivals -- think David Guetta and Afrojack and Avicii and Tiesto... They used a blanket term when putting the festival together because the festival booked all kinds of dance music, but the main stages were dominated by a particular kind of dance music, so for most people that went to those festivals, that was the kind of music they associated with EDM.

"Techno" went through a similar evolution. It was originally a term for a particular subgenre of disco and kraftwerk influenced dance music coming out of detroit in the 1980s, around the same time that house music was starting up in Chicago and garage music started up in New York. It pushed further into pure electronic sounds than house and garage did (at first) and early techno compilations solidified in people's minds that electronic music was "techno", especially in america, so "techno" for a while became a catch-all term for all kinds of electronic music. That faded away when "electronica" and then "edm" sort of took on that role, and techno continued as a subgenre of music by itself.

So, I think, properly, techno is a _sub genre_ of "electronic dance music" in the general sense, but is a different genre than what a lot of people think of as EDM (the kind of house music played at large festivals).

That's the case for a lot of "normies", but it really feels insulting to the electronic music fans in general. Unlike say rock nobody's gonna ask you to know every band in existence and every album they put out decades ago, but you should be able to distinguish between major electronic music genres like house, techno, drum and bass, trance, hardstyle and what not. Sometimes the line gets really blurry, sure, but 90% of the time it's pretty easy to know what you're listening to.

The vibe is different, the tempo is different, the people that go to those places are different, pretty much everyone develops some sort of a very specific preference, and European countries kinda "specialize" based off of that. If you want techno, you go to Berlin. If you want grime, you go to London. If you're into house, you go to a beach in Croatia. I'd say the Netherlands are a bit all over the place, but what really sets them apart is hardstyle, which is pretty much not a thing anywhere else. And so on, and so on.

That's not to say you can't find other things in those places, but they're always gonna be a bit more niche and you kinda have to know what you're looking for to find them.

* Plastikman: Spastik: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TYsOMYaz6E (minimal techno)

* Fred Again: Pull Me Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl6Rz1Uvi2M (house / "EDM")

(EDM is more a US term than a European one, IME.)

I think the differences in style are quite obvious.

Are people there talking about this?

If we want to shorten the name of City of London, the short form is the City, not London. The only people who ever calls City by the name of London is people who have just learnt of the oddity.

Greater London makes up the formal boundaries of London. It's the legal and administrative boundary, and the city limits of London. Unusually, unlike the city limits of many other cities, you'll find plenty of people including people who live here who not quite consider the outer parts to be part of London. People where I live sometimes still consider it part of Surrey even though it's been part of London since 1965.

There are forests and agricultural areas almost entirely separating parts of the borough I live in from the rest of London.

Yet in other areas, the Greater London urban area expands well past what anyone would call London, including e.g. entirely separate towns in other counties, like Watford in Hertfordshire, Gravesend in Kent, Epsom and Guildford in Surrey.

So yes, these comparisons are tricky but that is the point.

E.g culturally, London is likely reasonably described as smaller than it's city limits, while indeed some other cities are often larger than them, but rarely as large as the urban area they are within. It's extremely common for towns on the outskirts of large cities to have their own separate identities and not be considered part of the adjoining city, but still form part of the same urban area.

Depending on what you want to compare and which cities you are comparing, different measures will be more or less appropriate, and may require different considerations.

Often there are cultural aspects at play too. I live in London. I also live in Croydon - it'd be one of the largest cities in the UK in its own right if it was separate to London (and on more than one occasion the council has tried to make that happen). Most of the borough is part of the same urban area, but some are fairly well separated. Several parts of the borough are really separate towns, separated not just from London but from Croydon by "relatively rural" land (by our standards), with their own town centers, train stations, and culturally distinct.

All of this is within the administrative city limits of Greater London ("London" doesn't really exist as an entity of its own - and before anyone else says City of London, that's one tiny constituent part of Greater London - nobody means City when they say London)

So when you say Berlin, everything might be within city limits, when you say London, odds are you wouldn't think of every part within the actual city limits as part of it, nor even a city, but the Greater London urban area includes tendrils extending beyond Greater London too that nobody other than perhaps extra audacious real estate agents would call London. When you say Paris, odds are you might include some parts beyond the formal city limits but very unlikely the entire urban area.

Even then, you won't even get people living each place to agree where the line goes.

It might well still be the biggest in the EU if you drew limits based on what people considered part of the city - I don't know - but it certainly would not be as big as its urban area.

In fact, I'd argue you're unlikely to find any major city anywhere in the world where most people would agree that every part of the outer boundaries of the urban area are part of "the city" (or even "a city"; parts of urban areas will still often be considered fairly rural by those who live there or in the nearby city) even in a loose colloquial or cultural sense. Even coming close would be exceedingly rare. This because the ways urban areas are designated by design tends to include commuter regions far outside, with their own identities, and often very separated from the biggest city in the urban area.

So while going by city limits will be misleading, so will going by urban area. Unfortunately, no single metric will be accurate for these things.

Whom?

But I agree that there's a lot of cross influence.

Detroit's population has decreased. It was the 5th or 6th largest city in the US around 1980, iirc.

> Detroit techno producers and DJs spent most of their time touring in Europe (where they could get paid), not here in North America.

> The Detroit Electronic Music Festival events were kind of a rare acknowledgement by a larger audience (I went to the first two only, though).

Yes, they were virtually unknown in Detroit. I also remember the first DEMF. Detroiters had no idea what was going on - what was this music? Why were people coming here from all over the world? One of my favorite memories was Derrick May finally taking the stage as the headliner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4xqV9_7rf0

And in that complaint I don't see any irony.

Techno came from an already gentrified African-American community in Detroit, the Belleville Three [0] were from a more affluent part of Detroit at the time, inspired by the 70s/80s German and Japanese electronic music scene, it was never like the roots of hip-hop...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belleville_Three

Generally speaking, money is for bookkeeping among agents that produce and consume value and the production and consumption has natural speed within the laws of physics. When people who move around faster and demand stuff to consume than the people who produce, then you have local bubbles that disrupts the society.

Also, since the output of the people is finite the larger is your elite class the less stuff to consume for everyone. Better have you elites becoming elites because they dramatically increased the production of the stuff they consume(for example, they might have invented the internet and the services on it and improved efficiency of trade or they might have made great music and improved the working conditions of people who work in insulation, thus more people accepted the job etc.). If you have an elite that is growing faster than they improve the yield, then you have a parasitic class that might end up destroyed if grows too big.