I’m kind of disappointed that you would even think that from what I wrote.
I don’t consider it high brow though, it is music for the people, that is the true beauty of it, it transcends any social barriers IMHO.
It is factually incorrect though to say that techno is entirely black music, not that it even matters, at all.
It never did, techno has always been about the music, if you wanted to attribute techno to any group then you could say it is working class music.
Detroit Techno remains one of my favourite genres, Carl Craig and Derrick May among my favourite artists, that they happen to be black has no bearing on this either way.
BTW Juan Atkins cites that track as a huge influence, and I never said it was techno either.
I think Atkins stuff sounded very electro, Saunderson’s stuff more ‘housey’ like his inner city stuff, and Mays stuff more techno but no genre springs up from nowhere , techno just developed from earlier genres such as disco and then electro and early synth pop.
There are lots of earlier tracks you could call techno like this one from 1981
Certain sounds and musical influences, attitudes and cultural/social situations have to align for genres to form and take root. You can’t have 1 element without the others. And so I personally feel that ‘Detroit’ Techno is a separate and distinct genre to anything that pre dates it or runs parallel to it. Even if the sounds, structures and concepts are similar. It’s the collective participation at that time, in that particular environment that defines that movement. ‘Detroit Techno’ is thee definition of original and authentic techno, to me anyway.
Edit: With that said, we owe it to ourselves to ignore the above criteria. Stop trying to define and re-define stylistic differences. Stop tracking genre’s by dates and timeframes and simply enjoy the incredible diversity of electronic music.
Bambaataa sampled kraftwerk, Atkins took it up a level. Phuture added a 303 to house, Hawtin took it further to minimal acid the list goes on. The clever thing is coming up with new ideas to create something new from what has gone before, everything keeps evolving.
maybe more electro than techno but for this kind of artist the classifications don’t mean much
(and the border between these genres is not very thick …)
I think that in music (and in art in general) there are good things and there are special things (everything you say, meeting of human, a conjunction of circumstances, a political situation … . …) Detroit is definitely in the special category
Another example of taking electro forward into a different direction , take a look at ishkurs guide to electronic music, click on the blocks for different tracks in the genre
I had the chance to attend a dj set of Loud-E some years ago, a pure disco set, with voices, trumpets … and the whole range of disco ( … but the guy does magic (big culture / huge feeling and the technique necessary to express all that), and that night “I understood everything”, in two hours of set the whole story was told, the path funk, disco, electro, techno … became crystal clear
Just watched the latest Rrose (one of my favourite current techno producers) Art of production on resident adviser and realised why Seth is a professional and I am not !!
Only the first sentence I wrote where I stated that I’m of the opinion that your example is clearly disco and not techno was intended as a direct response to you.
The remainder was a response to a tendency I‘ve noticed in this thread and on a lot of forums in general. I stand by what I wrote there.
I probably should have posted two separate replies though to avoid something that was intended as a general response from looking like a response to you personally. My apologies for that.
It’s not Kraftwerk, YMO, Kurtis Mantronik doing the whitewashing. It’s people who state that the music these artists made should retrospectively be considered techno, suggesting that they are the true originators and not the people from Detroit who actually originated the genre.
Maybe you should ignore all the music history and create your own fantasy what “Techno” is. That would netter fit to the Techno Ethos of “forward ever, backward never”. I personally enjoy to listen to second or third wave Detroit Techno artists from the 90s but have the feeling nowadays is a lot of stagnation in that genre. There is more futurism and Innovation in other electronic experimentations and genres that are not based on 4 to the floor beats. But I would love to here a new take on this very danceable rhythm.
I’m completely ignorant in regard to these genres, but I would have thought this is more housy…?
really nice though. some parts could be on four tet’s later albums
my entry points to electronic music were warp, border community and BPitch Control. Only techno in parts though, I guess
