What is Techno Today?
Report by Omar Muñoz-Cremers about the music programme curated by TodaysArt at DEAF07.
What is techno? One way to place the phenomenon in the context of DEAF07 would be as the unconsciousness of the daily program where civilized talk and discussion bloom, a site of language and visualization, a well-lit space of ideas getting transmitted. Into the night, at the margins beyond speech is were we find a different perspective on electronic art. Another metaphor might be the street. Techno as an open culture, based on self-organization, less dependent on institutions, the street as (mental) space which, in the words of William Gibson “finds its own uses for things.”
This careful addition of the word mental is necessary since the street as signifier of authenticity has lost much of its force. We will see it still plays a role in Detroit techno although there is a perpetual danger of it getting calcified in a set of codes that make up a certain unreal realness which has turned hip hop, with its depressingly narrow codes of clothing, speech and bodily postures, into a static genre. It can be argued that techno never was (as hip hop was during its very beginnings) a music performed in public spaces – except for the relatively late, and mainly European phenomenon of the street rave. Indeed one could make the case of techno being a music of the imaginary street. Certainly such techno classics as ‘Cosmic Cars’, ‘Nightdrive (Thru Babylon)’ and ‘Landcruising’ have this mentality in common, as science fiction fantasy, movement through paranoid cityscapes or a more existential fusing of being and mechanical movement.
The TodaysArt evening grants an opportunity to delve deeper into the
status of contemporary techno, playing off some interesting subjects and
differences. With its somewhat uneven mixing of Autechre’s
sophisticated broken layers and Tangerine Dream’s cosmic longing, the
music of Berlin-based Rechenzentrum can hardly be described as a
complete success. Even so they regularly embody a very typical European
style of techno that recently has risen to prominence. Their wide
cosmic/romantic sound at first feels at odds with their name, which
translates as Computer Center, although when it evolves there are
instances where the music suddenly feels like cascading printouts. The
visuals projected behind the group tell a different story. Digital
animations of slightly distorted forests, wildlife and mountains place
the music in a distinct continuum which has offered an alternative to
techno as an urban music with popular connotations of the inhuman,
coldness and the mechanical. It isn’t all that hard to come up with
interesting sounding sub genre tags such as nature techno, green techno
or pastoral techno to describe the somewhat paradoxical feel of this
digitized romanticism.
And yet one could make the case that there always has been a pastoral
undercurrent in techno. The original Summer of Love raves around 1988
were large outdoors affairs in the England countryside causing a
motorized exodus out of the city. Their spiritual satellites of Ibiza
and Goa organized the experience along the liminal space of the beach.
And through the years green techno has made occasional visual
appearances as in the groundbreaking animations of lush plant life
accompanying Warp’s 'Artificial Intelligence II '(1994) that later are
echoed in the hypnotical artworks of Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers.
The pivotal moment takes place when Cologne-based producer Wolfgang
Voigt starts releasing a minimal brand of techno under the name of Gas.
Voigt lets his music be guided by two daring moves. Firstly by sampling
and looping string sections from crackling vinyl records of German
classical music. Secondly through conceptualizing this music within an
unmistakable German literal and philosophical tradition by giving his
albums titles like 'Zauberberg' and 'Königsforst'. This deceptively
simple music radically dissolves boundaries between classical music and
techno, nature and technology and proposes through its ghost world of
sound memories a different space for techno as a whole. Away from the
nightlife, the black box of the club, out of the city.
Slowly this template has become the main force in European techno.
Whilst Voigt explicitly placed his music in a German tradition and one
can easily hear it infused with 'Geist', there is something of a
geographical determinism guiding the spread of this music beyond
national borders, which in techno were permeable to begin with. Much of
the green techno and its off-shoots in electronic indielabels such as
Morr and Karaoke Kalk has its basis in Germany but one suspects this is
the case simply because techno is so strong as an overarching cultural
force. Indeed a clear shift in techno is discernable away from the U.K.
with its specific adherence to the triangle of cultural flux known as
the Black Atlantic or The Netherlands, which has had tendency to keep
lines open with Chicago and Detroit. From a geographical viewpoint it is
obvious that the Dutch landscape is inherently incompatible with the
notion of green techno, simply because it is a deeply cultural
landscape, pure horizon, where nature is given its designated place. New
European techno as propagated by such diverse producers as Dominik
Eulberg, Markus Güntner, Efdemin (Germany), The Field (Sweden) and
Ripperton, Quenum (Switzerland) is a Central European affair, a
continuum drawn along forests, lakes and mountains instead of cities and
ports.
The challenge this offers to Detroit techno is obvious. The answer, if
one can really speak of communication, has until now not been one of
disregard. Detroit techno can only respond by fleeing into myth (in the
sense of a traditional story accepted as history to explain the world
view of a people.) Or better one central myth with a subset of myths. At
the center stands the city, Detroit as industrial ghost town. Techno
clings to this myth because from it flows every aspect of its being. So
during the Scan 7 set one is almost immediately bombarded with images of
graffiti branding the name Detroit on walls juxtaposed with visions of
deserted streets. Detroit stands for a brand of authenticity, of life
during urban decay that directly permeates both the hardness and
melancholy of the music. A folk music that tells of myths not of
creation but of the future, forming a permanent sense that techno is a
probe from the future, a suspicion that all cities will eventually turn
into Detroit. From this sense of frustration and loss are created
techno’s more cosmical longings, the rebuilding of the city in fantasy
and daydream, of escape beyond the stars. As such it presents a radical,
one could say alien form of pop music that in its purest form (as Scan 7
does here) adheres to new rules. So whilst this is not so much music to
contemplate but to enjoy in a physical sense (dance) it eschews the use
of personality and charisma.
The masked performance remains to this day an extremely powerful
strategy, a refusal that will only grow stronger in a mediated culture,
which demands visibility, not only of its entertainers but of all of its
participants. The other difference concerns technology. With the
unstoppable rise of the laptop in European techno there seems almost
something quaint in Scan 7’s live programming of a drum computer
combined with a hands-on turning of knobs and switches. There is a
sensation of observing craftsmanship, of controlling and channeling a
massive musical force. Indeed over the years there has been a lot of
discussion within the techno community on the dominance of the laptop
and popularity of the Ableton Live program, which gives the musician
previously unimagined possibilities in recombining and changing the
texture of existing sound files and recordings during performances.
The earlier use of the term nature opens up the danger of importing into
techno a certain strain of cultural pessimism if it also is suggested
that something seems to be lost in the relation of laptop, mouse, hand,
ear and eye when making music. A case of one link too many distancing
the mind from creative apparatus, of underestimating the status of touch
in techno, which is discernable in the difference between DJs that
still manipulate inscribed slabs of information (vinyl) and the new wave
of digital DJs with their musical carrier of choice in the form of the
frictionless mp3. Indeed the mp3 may be symptomatic of devaluation of
sound, necessary as a liberation of music from market forces but with
its uncanny negation of aura (nothing metaphysical, just simply the
so-called imperceptible spectrum of sound erased in the process of
compressing sound to mp3) that is quite dangerous as a tool for
musicians. One can’t help wondering if ears slowly getting used to
deteriorated, airless sound are then woken up by the power of direct
touch. Forcefully sounding myth, no wonder Scan 7 at times sound like
Truth.
2007 Omar Muñoz-Cremers
