EMD Can we get a freakin' TECHNO thread or what?

It's sometimes hard to describe unless people know other styles to compare it to. Usually though a lot of it has lots of percussion and is quite dark sounding, ride cymbals on the offbeat are a typical element of techno and generally grindey sounding almost machine like repetitive loops.
 
Good Techno, for example.

Armand van Helden
New York Loft Party
mixmag magazine 10/2004

Tracks:

Nice Cream 'Song 2'
Evers B 'Get Ready'
Metal Fusion 'Killing in the Name'
Jark Prongo 'Running Wild'
Stupid Fresh 'This is Freaky'
Chicken Lips 'Do it Proper'
Armand van Helden 'Hear my name'
Full Intention 'It's Set to Groove' [my favorite of these]
Felix Da Housecat 'Cyberwhore'
Armand van Helden 'I Can Smell U'
Tori Amos 'Professional Widow'
Sneaker Pimps 'Spin Spin Sugar'
Spectrum 'Kinda New'
Linus Loves 'Night Music'
Man With Guitar 'Man With Guitar'

Hope that helps.
 
Noodle said:

Well i would classify WARP 10+2 as IDM , & Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works as... Ambient.. ;]


I haven't digged enough into techno, though for sure I like :

Plastikman (Richie Hawtin) -in the realms of minimal/acid techno, as Plastikman he has released a lot of minimal beatless ambient music too though -

Monolake - more like Ambient Techno -

Maybe Ricardo Villalobos

And for sure a lot of the techno released by Speedy J
 
I think IDM is a terrible term that people seem to use interchangeably with the word good. I also think it is mostly used as a catch-all for music that is more difficult to access and isn't formulaic pap.

I think Aphex Twin's Ambient Works 85-92 fits the conditions of my definition of Techno rather nicely. Some of the work on that album is beat driven, a bit like some of Plastikman's work on Sheet One and B12's work on Electro Soma.

I think some of the distinctions between all of the works from the 80's and early 90's I have posted is superficial at best.

I made an effort to think back to work that helped define the core elements of a young genre, that had yet to splinter off into a myriad of sub and sub-subgenres.

It is no wonder that new listeners are so confused by the deeply ingrained hairsplitting that longtime lovers of the form seem to be swept up in.

The man asked for specific album recommendations, and I think my list is somewhat varied and has stood the test of time.

:)
 
That guy is a card.

He wrote a pretty good synopsis, even if it is a bit cheeky.

:D
 
Helios. said:
Armand van Helden
New York Loft Party
mixmag magazine 10/2004

Tracks:

Nice Cream 'Song 2'
Evers B 'Get Ready'
Metal Fusion 'Killing in the Name'
Jark Prongo 'Running Wild'
Stupid Fresh 'This is Freaky'
Chicken Lips 'Do it Proper'
Armand van Helden 'Hear my name'
Full Intention 'It's Set to Groove' [my favorite of these]
Felix Da Housecat 'Cyberwhore'
Armand van Helden 'I Can Smell U'
Tori Amos 'Professional Widow'
Sneaker Pimps 'Spin Spin Sugar'
Spectrum 'Kinda New'
Linus Loves 'Night Music'
Man With Guitar 'Man With Guitar'

Hope that helps.

not a good example of techno at all IMO.
 
This is an interesting article. I think the author is using the term Techno very loosely.

The Month In: Techno

The Long View, Pt. 2

by Philip Sherburne


Last month, in thrall to the epic nature of a number of my current favorites, I expounded-- at some length-- on the apparent lengthening of techno tracks. But I'm coming to suspect that I got it wrong. The issue isn't the length of the track per se, but rather the illusion of length. Sure, there are some fantastic 10+ minute cuts out there, and yes, a certain Chilean producer really is fashioning tracks that would seem to work best when mixed with John Cage's ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), a 639-year-long work. But the length issue is something of a red herring; there are cuts that accomplish the same effects I find so fascinating in five or six minutes-- even though, paradoxically, they seem far longer.

As the song-oriented forms of electro-pop fade, they're giving way to a more linear instinct in techno. It's not restrained to any one genre, though you may hear it called minimal, electro-house, or (new) trance. Since it's easier to understand what I'm talking about if you can listen along, I'd recommend heading over to Beatport, Kompakt-mp3.net, and Bleep.com to preview or download some of the following:

Audion, "Mouth to Mouth" (Spectral)

Cobblestone Jazz, "India in Me" (Wagon Repair)

Brtschitsch, "Twirl" (Ostgut Ton)

Daniel Stefanik, "The Bells" (Mobilee)

Dinky, "Home on a Sunday" (Horizontal)

GummiHz, "Gomma Elastica" (Mobilee)

Kissogram, "My Friend Is a Seahorse (Radio Slave Mix)" (DefDrive)

The Knife, "We Share Our Mother's Health (Radio Slave's Secret Base Mix)" (Brille)

Lazy Fat People, "TV 20" (Wagon Repair)

Loco Dice, "Seeing Through Shadows" (Minus)

NSI., "Clara Ghavami Edit" (Cadenza)

My Robot Friend, "Dial Zero (Modeselektor Remix)" (Soma)

Superpitcher, "Enzian" (Speicher)

Henrik Scwharz/Âme/Dixon, "Where We At" (Innervisions)


What all these tracks, and others I'll detail below, have in common is a kind of morphology in which innumerable loops are layered in irregular fashions, with the judicious use of effects applied to create the idea of a track that could extend into infinity. In these compositions-- streamlined, undulating, teasingly convoluted and yet somehow endless as a desert highway, there are no verse/chorus structures like those found in pop music-- although, paradoxically, some of them are possessed by mammoth riffs and sweeping chord changes. There are also no discernable A/B/C passages, only a seamlessly shifting view as impossible (and futile) to describe in detail as the landscape as glimpsed from a moving train.

At the root of each track is the idea of modulation-- the application of effects to subtly vary the quality of a given sound over a long stretch of time. In Pan-Pot's remix of Anja Schneider & Sebo K's nu-rave anthem "Rancho Relaxo", modulation takes the form of a perpetual, microscopic tuning of the snare drum as it beats out a rigid, martial tattoo, lilting up and down, twisting its ankle in potholes of delay, so that every bar sounds almost imperceptibly different. Audion's "Mouth to Mouth", on the surface one of the simplest tunes going, consists of a single riff that toggles up and down a minor-third interval. But as it does, the synthesizers wax and wane in tonality, soaking up different timbres and passing through different waveforms, to create the sense of newness with every bar.

Can't quite picture it? Imagine playing a plink-plonking series of notes on a piano, over and over. Without varying note length, it would sound the same every time, getting duller and duller. Now imagine driving your motorcycle behind a flatbed truck carrying a player piano playing that same riff, speeding up and slowing down as you track its path. Suddenly a Doppler effect will shift the pitch of that sound ever so slightly; as you turn your head, the timbre of the sound will likewise shift, the filtering will vary, and suddenly you've got a never-ending, imperfect repetition you could listen to forever (or at least until your performance piece got pulled over), as your ears subtly retune themselves to hear not the repetition, but the overarching difference.

Of course, the other thing that distinguishes "Mouth to Mouth" is its massive, bleating synthesizer squeals, roughed up with white noise and ascending so slowly you can't predict when they'll reach their zenith. No longer resolving the song in four-bar increments, you're eventually left unsure where the passage will end, or how. And in that uncertainty, the song comes alive, as gripping as a cliffhanger.

All of this, ultimately, is about the games musicians play-- but in this case, the game is structured to facilitate the free play of the aleatory and the interplay of independent (and interdependent) patterns, highlighting the inexorable beauty of the manifold ways they match up. A kind of anti-composition, in a way, its greatest payoff is the simplest: the pleasure of surprise.

Perlon's Zip played me a track in progress in his studio in Berlin; consisting of lots of short repeating loops and irregular patterns, it had an unstable quality to it, something that made every bar seem ever so slightly different. The impulse behind that difference was a tiny loop, a sort of wobbly, rolling drum rhythm-- the sea shanty of a Weeble Wobble on the deck of a sinking ship. Stretching over the other four- and eight-bar loops, wrapping around them like excess thread, it was imperceptible. But then Zip muted the loop's audio channel and let the track play out without it, and suddenly the song seemed much more basic, though it was almost impossible to hear what had changed. It sounded good, but this lone ghost element changed everything. Listening to the wobble rhythm by itself, it was impossible to ascertain what role it had played in the arrangement. But with the sound reunited with the rest of the tune, everything fell back into place, as natural as gravity.

///

Different forms of music require different modes of listening. Classical music is the most obvious example: Scholars spend their lives exploring the mathematical relationships and patterns within Bach's music. The rest of us are content to listen to the tune, the pleasing counterpoint. But for those who know how to listen, attending to the underlying structure can give a different-- dare I say, deeper-- understanding of the music. Learning to appreciate electronic music-- beyond "it's got a good beat, and I can dance to it"-- sometimes requires re-training the ears to listen for patterns and methods unique to the genre, or at least unfamiliar in other styles.

I suspect that listeners raised on rock music often miss out on these unpredictable elements, expecting things to run in convenient increments of four bars. Listening for the verse and the chorus, the bridge, the middle eight, they assume that repetitive music is simplistic, underdeveloped, and they respond with the "I could do that" dismissal that Abstract Expressionists used to provoke. But on the contrary, it takes a lot of skill to juggle elements in this way, to modulate them so that every bar offers a surprise and every repeated riff sounds subtly, imperceptibly different.

I'm increasingly interested in the craft of electronic music. I realize that my choice of word can sound rockist-- "craft" itself conjuring something homespun, folksy, like arts and crafts. But sometimes craft simply is setting up your machines so that they interact in a fascinating way. You can tell when someone's put together a few loops in Reason or Live and simply let them run, without really listening to how those elements interact, without paying attention to what their true potential is.

I'm trying to explain to listeners who discount techno for being facile, uncomplicated, monotonous-- and many of these are listeners raised on rock-- how to listen for the hidden complexity, how to appreciate what is unique about certain strains of electronic music. Unique, and thrilling.

This kind of musical logic doesn't need a genre to describe it. Certainly not "minimal," although much of what is traditionally considered minimal techno has employed these sorts of logics; today, too often, what goes under the name of minimal is merely a busybodies' convention of small sounds pinging off each other without reason or rhyme. At its heart, this is trance music-- trance-inducing in its purest sense. The strategies I'm talking about create a kind of endless, infinitely shifting constellation of repetitions, a motion at once horizontal, following the timeline, and vertical-- plunging straight down through the overlapping layers of every bar, every beat, like an oil rig sinking its drill and pumping out hidden riches. Trance, as it has come to be known, is a collection of effects or, worse, affect-- bright, overbearing arpeggios set to a thumping, static beat. But that's not trance; that music is dead on arrival, a corpse left on the listener's doorstep with the disdain of a kidnapper who's lost interest in the payoff.

I'm composing much of this column while I walk, speaking into a voice recorder, which might account for the breathless quality of my prose. But I'm trying to come up with a way of talking and thinking about this music that follows the music's own course, that doesn't hover above it but lurks inside-- an epiphytic criticism. And as I walk, it's Martin Buttrich's "Full Clip" that gives me the spatial metaphor I'm looking for. Forthcoming from Carl Craig's Planet E label, it's bound to be one of the autumn's big anthems. And yet there's almost nothing here: It’s a monochromatic moiré of overlapping octaves and fifths, and not much more-- a series of waves moving without obvious logic, swells advancing and retreating, with no melodic gestures or figures to indicate either the peaks or the troughs. There's only perpetual motion, and without fixed reference points, motion itself becomes your only compass. The peaks are too high, the troughs too low, to grasp the totality of the track from any perspective. From any one vantage point it's impossible to imagine what the rest of the track might sound like; finding yourself at the very end, it's hard to remember what came before. In one track, 12 perfect minutes, Buttrich has captured the hoped-for infinity that is the goal of every techno dance floor. The slope is so slippery, so full of twists and turns, that it's like the opposite of the Panopticon-- it's the nonopticon, sound as a blindfold, the only sense that matters.

http://www.philipsherburne.com/

link
 
Noodle said:
I think IDM is a terrible term that people seem to use interchangeably with the word good. I also think it is mostly used as a catch-all for music that is more difficult to access and isn't formulaic pap.


:)

Well not exactly.I agree it's an abstract term though. For me a good description would be :
A 2001 monthly editorial in Audiogalaxy stated that IDM producers use "squelched beats, jagged synth lines, static washes, electrical shorts" and other odd sounds, and that IDM "defies rhythmic convention," introducing sudden changes in rhythm. Besides these musical features, the editorial points out that IDM is typically difficult to dance to.

experimental,generally unpredictable beats, usually accompanied with melodies,complex rhytms etc...

I insist on Selected Ambient Works being ambient though... heheh
 
i think its getting a little too technical in here. When someone says its rock music or its rap music i think we all know what everybody is talking about. Thats like the retarded arguement about what's hip hop and whats rap. Rap is hip hop. I don't have break it down and say well i like east coast or west coast or crunk or whatever. Techno, i was always under the impression was the title for the entire genre. Like Rap to hip hop to east coast etc etc yada yada. Why do we all have to be so technical?
 
illuminati stylez said:
i Why do we all have to be so technical?

I'd say the main reason is to convey an accurate representation of a specific concept. For instance, color to a painter can be broken down into lots of subgenras even though there are only 3 primary colors. It's like the difference between blue and aqua. For a painter sometimes you need sky blue, not navy. Since music paints a picture in the listener's mind one needs to be able to accurately describe the concept in order to convey that "sound" to someone else that may not have ever heard that before.

The beautiful thing about dance culture is that every genra can be broken down and accurately described.

:)
 
ThreeOweThree said:
I'd say the main reason is to convey an accurate representation of a specific concept. For instance, color to a painter can be broken down into lots of subgenras even though there are only 3 primary colors. It's like the difference between blue and aqua. For a painter sometimes you need sky blue, not navy. Since music paints a picture in the listener's mind one needs to be able to accurately describe the concept in order to convey that "sound" to someone else that may not have ever heard that before.

The beautiful thing about dance culture is that every genra can be broken down and accurately described.

:)

Legend, that will make explaining the reason a fucking lot easier.
 
So then what are people suppose to call this genre as a whole? I have a hard time calling it electronic music, because all musics could be called that,unless its accoustic. And another thing most people, atleast those that don't DJ, like me, don't have the freakin time all the time to listen to the BPms and count them. And then listen for this and that to then catagorize it.
 
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illuminati stylez said:
So then what are people suppose to call this genre as a whole? I have a hard time calling it electronic music, because all musics could be called that,unless its accoustic. And another thing most people, atleast those that don't DJ, like me, don't have the freakin time all the time to listen to the BPms and count them. And then listen for this and that to then catagorize it.

To be fair it's not a case of counting BPM's, everyone I know that is remotely into this sort of music can tell the difference between at least Trance, House and Techno.

In the UK we generally just call it dance music - and if anyone mentions clubland CD's you can just get all high and mighty and tell them it's a little more underground than that. ;)
 
Tranced said:
To be fair it's not a case of counting BPM's, everyone I know that is remotely into this sort of music can tell the difference between at least Trance, House and Techno.

In the UK we generally just call it dance music - and if anyone mentions clubland CD's you can just get all high and mighty and tell them it's a little more underground than that. ;)

correct. illuminati, just keep listening and it will make sense. you definately don't have to know fuckall about bpm's to tell the difference between those three. at least, i didn't when i figured it out.
 
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