Techno Music History and Stereotypes
Techno music, as we know it, was born in the early 70s in America after almost 100 years of studies and intuitions that led to the discovery of electronics and the increasingly modern ways of reproducing sound waves.
In fact, Techno is precisely this, the use of TECHNOLOGY (computerized instruments and “machines”) that allow to emit and sample sounds. The sounds around us have been fundamental for the development of music from the early centuries to today. In fact, the human being has always tried to communicate and transmit the messages that came from the environment through the art of music.
In the 1980s, the development of the industrial era, factories, the development of metallurgical industries, the development of the first production machinery, led man to listen to sounds never heard before. Sounds emitted by machines, repetitive, computerized, and it is from these sounds that the need arose to reproduce a new reality in music, made up of “modern”, cyclical, irregular and unpredictable sounds and from there the so-called “da dance”.
The Birth of Techno and House Music
The cities that are the home of the first dance music were Detroit and Berlin for Techno and Chicago for House (name coined by the famous club “WAREHOUSE” born in Chicago).
The substantial difference between techno and house is that while techno defines a dance genre whose musical heritage is to be found in artists such as Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, KRAFTWERK and in other European and American musical realities linked in some way to rock, with the characteristic of the use of synthetic sound (generated by signals and not acoustic vibrations), house defines instead that music that comes from the marriage between drum machines and samples of already recorded records belonging to the disco scene. This difference is the only one found among those that divide the world of techno and house together with the geographic one.
In the 90’s electronic dance music arrives in Europe with the London phenomenon of ACID House, that of HARDCORE in the Netherlands, Progressive (80s / 90s), only then Techno was able to break away from these sub-categories to return to be the one that was born in Detroit, that is electronic dance music totally independent from the black musical scenes such as funk or disco.
Membership in the Club was the thing that determined the greatest division between House and Techno in the 90s, in fact the House was played more in clubs while Techno, being independent, found its path in the wildest and most scattered spaces that they took the name of RAVE.
Techno was a form of rebellion, a message that the people tried to communicate in cities or environments where degradation had the upper hand, and precisely for this reason they sought abandoned places, old factories, places forgotten by God, to break away from what you didn’t want it.
But the world we live in, the lobbies that command it always manage to benefit from situations that start to get out of hand, stereotyping the Techno genre and then making it “commercial”.
Many of the bands of the late 90s that were real techno bands like Prodigy or The Chemical Brothers were given a new name to their genre, BIG BEAT, to make them more commercial and try to take them out of that world of rebellion that characterized them. those years!
Now Techno is on the global market for all genres and tastes but to truly appreciate it you always have to go back to where it was born, there the message is still strong and clear!