Why I Love Techno pt. 2

This is the second installment of my exploration / analysis of techno or electronica or dance or [insert genre tag]. Why I like it, why it's classified the way it is, the way it works, that sort of thing. I slipped the first part in under the radar, so if you want to be up to speed like a good student then jump over to http://casavista.blogspot.com/2009/01/iiiiive-got-big-beat-aka-why-i-love.html first.
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So yeah, big beat happened. Fatboy Slim probably ended up making out with the biggest loot from that party. From the seminal "Praise You" video (which, thinking about it now, shines like a harbinger to stupid multitudes of YouTube video'd people dancing or singing along to songs they like today) to his occasional and sometimes surprisingly incredible work on contemporary remixes/productions.. Songs on Blur's sinfully under-appreciated "Think Tank" come to mind.. he typifies what nineties big beat techno means (meant) to me. And what reinforced my classification of him this way? It wasn't anything sophisticated, certainly not an understanding of how rhythm or tone worked in dance classifications -- that would come later. It was on the one hand an understanding that Big Beat usually meant good-times party music, but on the other hand it was guidance from CDNOW.com.

Trying to hit CDNOW today will shoot you straight into Amazon's eswamp. In the past days of Napster, roughly the late nineties, CDNOW was an invaluable resource that stood on its own as an early online record shop, yet it also featured bits of criticism and commentary on the music. As I recall it was a pretty awesome site. It had the breadth of allmusic as it exists today, just about the same simplicity in its interface, and great recommendations that worked well for me at least at that point in my life. I linked the few techno records I had to the critics' label of Big Beat automatically, just saying, ok, sure, perhaps that's what popular electronica in the nineties is called. But what else was out there? I looked into some related artists, and before I knew it I, like many of you surely have also done, stumbled upon what might be #1 on the list of worst-named genres...

Intelligent Dance Music. IDM. Uh oh, OOO, smart dude, nerd guy, do you listen to difficult, abstracted music that you could never dance to if you tried because you... can't dance? Thus you punish all us slick meathead dudes with moves by playing your breakbeat drilling sounds changing meter every five seconds? Music we obviously cannot take as we are not "Intelligent" ourselves but mere fratboys still jamming Everlast's "What It's Like"?

...Hopefully someone will laugh at that. See how nasty that genre name is? It's basically the same thing as the insertion of post- in front of a genre, where a critic describes an artist who is using the same instruments, sounds, and techniques of their colleagues but mutating the result/output that those elements made previously. Post dance must not have been attractive at the time. Nomenclature concerns aside, IDM was a really positive discovery for me. This music didn't seem concerned with a strictly party or dance situation at all, but rather it rewarded close, personal listening like I was used to doing. It was almost like I had finally found some electronica I wouldn't feel silly listening to on my own.

My first IDM love was Mr. Richard D James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin. My Audiogalaxy (RIP) profile listed him as one of my favorite artists, and I'm sure I really thought so back then when the listening was fresh. Dude's still a god to a lot of people to this day. I still have a few albums of his on various formats, my favorite being the wonderful "Windowlicker" 12". It's an unforgettable album cover, and the song is pretty wicked too. Back then though, I just loved that he made tunes that seemed to be so... Advanced sounding, I guess. Like he was channeling high-speed chaos in ways that no one before him ever attempted or conceived, save some early jungle stuff (which I hadn't heard or processed at the time). This is, of course, excluding his Selected Ambient Works series... which are much less schizo but still very cerebral slices of electronica.. SAW2, the "weirder one," has been a slow-burning favorite of mine. Some differences about him that stood out first: his face was on his records and videos, reestablishing a humanity to his musical persona that other techno acts did not do/have; his arrangements were like serpentine puzzles to be untangled; his sound palette seemed so vast and mutable it suggested infinity. All this contributed to a long-lasting feeling of surprise as I listened in and found other similar artists.. This is probably the golden age of Warp Records era techno. Aphex's symbol and visage might be the most recognizable sign from the IDM camp, but he's by no means the best there was to hear. I'd give that honor to Autechre on "Tri Repetae +++."

For all the maximalism Aphex Twin's freaky beat workouts suggested at times, I thought that IDM style actually brought a much needed element to the electronica table: subtlety. Trance's hypnotic samelike-ness, and so-called HI NRG dance tracks on the radio were stoopid (think C&C Music Factory, Groove Is in The Heart, etc). IDM was adventurous and daring in comparison. New rhythms abounded. Crazy textures flew into the mix out of nowhere. Other brain-y techno trends emerged from IDM's sound palette like glitch and microtechno (minimalism in dance...). It was only a matter of time before trance's reign over the techno popularity club would erode, giving way to something a little less blunt, and hopefully more smart.

On my personal timeline of music analyzing, this puts me right about 1999 or 2000. I was still pretty naive to the way that electronic/dance music got classified, but I started buying more and more of it anyway, learning what I could. Spin magazine, my music subscription of choice through these years, basically demanded my purchase of Moby's "Play" after it was released. At the time, this record felt really good. I heard it was a house record, which didn't mean much to me, but I appreciated the lighter, more emotive beats matching with good pop structure, some things that trance definitely lacked. I knew "Play" wasn't the braingame that anything from Warp was putting out, but I didn't want to feel like I was flying through a jagged minefield of percussion all the time as I kept listening to IDM, drum n' bass (basically IDM's more jungle-y cousin, perhaps) and that sort of thing. That was refreshing.

It might sound a little silly for me to admit that my first experience of a live electronica/dance show was Moby's headlining tour when he played Austin Music Hall. Because for one it really wasn't that kind of show at all. He was just touring with a band. Still, I knew he used to make purely electronic music, so I totally thought I was going to a rave and was nervous. The funnier parts are the amazing, perfect rave cliche memories I have from the experience. I rode downtown with a girl who was older than me and we parked somewhere nearby the venue, and almost immediately as we exit the car a guy with soooo too much candy jewelry, neon bracelets, and tiny backpack gear comes up to us offering to sell us "rave toys." I asked what he meant... 'oh you know, glowsticks, water, other.. fun.. things?' Too bad I wasn't very interested in that sort of thing at the time, I probably could have scored some E pretty easily. Still, we left that guy laughing to ourselves only to see that the standard outfit for the evening was definitely "rave style." Good thing I wore orange, a v-neck tee with an Atari logo from Urban Outfitters... I had a pair of Jnco's once, but nothing like the really hardcore kids wore. I'm talking 3 or 4 feet of bellbottom so their feet are gone under a denim blanket. In the venue, you saw The Liquid, you had strobe lights going off, fog machines... the whole shebang. I had fun at that concert, it felt somewhat devious even though I barely did more than giddily sing along to some of the songs.

The story of what became of Moby's "Play" is one of complete and utter media saturation from what I remember. America's great techno hope got pretty played out in every sense of that phrase. I recall that he licensed every single track off the record to some commercial purpose... The Southside single featuring Gwen Stefani probably still gets daily play on some radios... but I totally knew that the original version on early "Play" copies didn't feature her vocals. I was such a true Moby fan for knowing that. Spin named it pretty high in their best albums of the nineties list and I felt cool for liking him. "Play" still sits in my CD collection but it doesn't get too much love lately. I wonder why Moby became so uncool? No singles really after Play was the shitstorm album of those years. Perhaps he ran out of new tricks. Going back, all the classifications of that album as a house record don't really make too much sense, but back then I thought of it as house music, and I thought I liked house music...

I can certainly say that my introduction to house via Moby lead me to Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx, and that "Digital Love" was the first electronic song that totally made me lose my shit when I heard it. The Jaxx's "Remedy," another record worshipped by Spin at the time, was pretty fresh then too... I dug it. Moby was my bridge into better, more fun times in dance music. While I didn't recognize what made house "house" (much less why Daft Punk was labeled acid house) at this point, I dug it as a better version of historic trance. Daft Punk, you gotta love 'em don't you? Crazy beats, nasty breakdowns (Harder Better will forever have an undeniably amazing outro), very good production level.. Today I love Discovery as one of the greatest dance albums ever, but I listened to Digital Love so much back then I can barely stand to hear it again these days. When I come back to Discovery at any time, some song I didn't love quite as much before will suddenly be the song I have to hear on repeat 20 times. It demands a dance but it's got amazing pop quality to it. By now, I don't think I gave a damn whether electronica was "meant for clubs and parties"; maybe I stopped caring about music "purposes" altogether. So even though I was still playing guitar a lot, trying to make a band happen (hail Iconoclast), and becoming obsessed with Radiohead, I tried to keep the pace with new techno sounds.

My listening habits post-IDM discovery, post- Kid A, post- post-rock and all that stayed eclectic through the years.. well, this puts me near the tail end of high school, I think. At that point, Audiogalaxy was still live and I was using that to learn about music. I took a chance following an obscure recommendation whilst perusing the lovely racks of Waterloo Records and picked up a slightly pricey import of "Textstar" by Farben, aka Jan Jelinek. Some online buddies gushed about the greatness of Jelinek, the so-called master of microtechno. I think a P-fork review would call this release "music for neat freaks" and a study of "beat structure" then rate it very, very favorably. I didn't know what I was getting into at the time... it seemed to me to be a really great headphones-listening album, with all its discreet parts coming together to form a complicated, ticking beat mechanism. But I got into it more and more, I think, for the same kind of reason I love records like Tortoise's "TNT" so much -- they are definitely paradigmatic showcases of the "less is more" maxim. While "Textstar" still remains one of my favorite albums ever, listening to it back then for the first time would cause at least three important realizations for me.

For one, I was crazy for this injection of minimalism in dance and techno. I couldn't get enough of it. I'd go on from "Textstar" to discover I loved the rest of Jan Jelinek's catalog quite a bit, but also introduced myself to other favorites like Ellen Allien's "Berlinette," the skittering electro-pop of The Notwist, et al. When DNTEL's "Life Is Full of Possibilities" was released, I thought it was absolutely some of the most forward-thinking songwriting ever done. I haven't listened to that one in a while though. It'll probably be worth going back to soon... When The Field made a big splash with "From Here We Go Sublime," I was a bit sad that Jelinek wasn't being trumpeted as a big hero alongside Go Sublime's fanfare. For as much as I would grow to love The Field's music, I always thought Farben had the superior sound and hoped people would be encouraged to go out and try Textstar on for size at least for good measure against The Field's sound. but for minimalism's sake, I think it was finally the cure for my doubts about the genre of dance and techno as a whole. It was the ultimate expression of subtlety in a genre that desperately needed to tone down the tendencies of its past mistakes in trance's somewhat rock n' roll maximalism. The releases that are still steadily being pumped out by electronic artists today are tempered by this introduction of minimalism as a sort of guiding principle, I think... No one would dare produce a stoopid, repetitive trance record and expect to be taken seriously these days because the music has improved since microtextures were introduced. As it goes with most trends or sounds, especially in the quickly mutating world of techno that creates new ideas nearly annually, there's been an eventual backlash for minimalist techno fans in recent years.. but while it was fresh, it was truly amazing stuff.

Slightly more significant for me was how these minimalist albums introduced the concept of tone to my ears. Sheer sonic timbre and how artists manipulate it wasn't something I really listened in for before... I just stuck mostly to the vibration of guitars and drumkit hits. But an album like "Textstar," being virtually without melody throughout, forces the tone into the foreground of the tracks. Suddenly, I was really interested in "purely" tonal artists like Stars of The Lid, Keith Fullerton Whitman, or Fennesz, when before I didn't really get what could be interesting about so-called "drone" music. Around this time I also began to dig pretty deeply into a habit of listening to bands like Mogwai and GYBE! It also allowed me to go back and recognize what I had been missing out on before when I didn't consider a tonal analysis to be that prescient to the listening experience... I now have a deeper appreciation for the stuff I was listening to before techno came along, and can see how the different tones of rock styles have changed throughout its history.

But I guess I can finally say for certain that minimalism brought the component parts of dance music to my ears in a "simple" or "clean" way such that I finally recognized what designated different techno styles. In the words of Simian Mobile Disco's track, "It's The Beat." It wasn't totally obvious to me, for some reason, that "house" meant four-on-the-floor bass patterns and a fairly particular tempo range. "Jungle" or "Drum n' Bass" featured groovier, more complicated bass patterns and upped the tempo. "Disco" means alternating bass and snare on the one, two, three, four. Call me ignorant if you want but I guess it just took a discovery of microhouse for these dance and rhythm principles to become obvious to me.

Going back to why I started, the rise and fall of big beat (and how it may be the solution for techno's current dearth post-minimalism), will be the next part of this series of posts.

Until then, dig this awesome site, which is a visual timeline of the development of electronica / dance styles complete with samples of pretty much every style. Check microhouse or something in there for a Farben reference! It's at http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/music.swf.





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Iiiii've got the Big Beat AKA Why I Love Techno

Preamble, written after I completed this entry: This is an intertwined account of why I love techno and what I understand techno to be. I hope that makes some sense. It's going to be spread over a few posts if I can keep it up, so here's part one...

I was watching "Hackers" today. You know, that movie where Angelina Jolie looks all cyberpunk and seduces Jonny Lee Miller. From 1995ish. I used to be pretty obsessed by that movie just cuz I was already basically a computer addict mixed with gamer (crazily playing Doom 2 all the time.. and it was on five A drive disks, those little 3 1/2 inch hard ones y'know). First of all, if you're not aware already, YouTube is a great place to catch free flicks. The formula is "[movie title here] part 1" in the search bar. Usually you'll get some results that are real, but sometimes you may have to dig around somewhere else if you really are trying to catch a freebie... Hackers is on YouTube, or at least it was this afternoon. I'm not gonna break out a post about that movie though.. The real point I wanted to talk about here was the concept of Big Beat techno. Also, a little bit of trance is in here too. "Hackers" is flooded with some of the biggest hits of early to mid nineties electronica (which is a word you don't really hear much anymore?)... And from my massive, steady diet of techno tracks I ingested over the last three years or so, I've come to some interesting conclusions about the older sounds that this film uses.

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I am fairly certain my first exposure to Electronica was via Mortal Kombat -- the film, that is -- which featured the archetypal "trance" song, Orbital's "Halcyon + On + On" in its soundtrack. It's also in Hackers when the main character flies over NYC near the beginning. OK done talking about Hackers. The song's all soft reverb, quasi-spiritually-via-world-music sounding, four-to-the-floor stretching the length of the track with a few synths flying in here and there. I'm surprised that this song holds up so well even today, which is probably a testament to Orbital more than anything; still, I'm pretty sure I was intrigued with the idea of that song back then, as a clean, nice sounding track that was pop, dance, and purely electronic sounding all at once but without being boring. Later I learned that it was part of the rave tradition of trance music.

Of course, due to my being born in 1985 I have to concede I'm already a latecomer to the rave game (see Britain's Second Summer of Love and the Madchester scenes, or any classic American scenes for house...) so my understanding of trance and/or rave, and I guess therefore my usage of the terms, doesn't really concern anything before 1990. Sorry to anyone who thinks I am overlooking classic Detroit sounds or stuff like that. Disclaimer? Yeah.

Today when people hear the word "trance" it's basically the butt of a joke already and you're thinking E tabs, K holes, candy bracelets, huge Jncos, glowsticks et al, and that's probably because the music the genre was named for kinda sucked. Is that archetypal track from trance called "Sandstorm"? I think it is. I'm not looking it up right now because I it's late and my wife is asleep next to me as I write. You'll have heard it if you've been to a roller skating rink before when you were younger.

The complaints that trance songs were just long, same-like pulses with little to no change in them aren't too far off the mark. Any trance I found besides that song from Orbital and maybe a few other exceptions seemed to prove to me that this music wasn't worth my time. Personally, I was convinced that electronica was a very limited genre that was designed only for dance situations, maybe just parties or clubs, instead of close or personal listening. I was much more into listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam at that point in my life. Techno / electronica, to me, was mostly uninteresting, repetitive, and lacked a human element that rock obviously contained. On top of that I certainly wasn't going to dance clubs at that point in my life so I figured the only place I'd ever hear techno would be the occasional music video on MTV.

With all this in mind: Queue me watching MTV in 1997ish. I sit on my couch to watch an apparently hotly anticipated video of a song we all know today, "Block Rockin' Beats." By Chemical Brothers. It filled in all the spaces of teenage fantasy I had accumulated about the idea of raves. It's a pretty humorous depiction (ironically speaking) of people dodging the cops while trying to make it to the crazy electronica party full of eccentric, progressively dressed dancers in a dingy part of town somewhere. Youtube it, you'll laugh. And yet, this song kinda kicked my ass. I still think this song is good, not great or anything. Back then though, I thought it might be the point of rave culture entering into a wider consciousness and, more importantly, the death of boring trance with a more exciting sound for electronica to rise as a phoenix.

I went out and bought "Dig Your Own Hole" from the Blockbuster Music that was around the corner from my house on Shoal Creek (shout out to ATX, what what). I think I also bought "The Color and The Shape" at this time too cuz I really liked the song Monkey Wrench. It rawked me. Anyway, for all my prior excitement my first listen into Dig Your Own Hole by myself left me a little disappointed -- while it was definitely more listenable than any "trance" I had encountered prior, it still seemed to me it was specifically designed for dancers. Sure, there were recognizable A to B to C pop structures in some of the songs, which was the biggest improvement for me -- some guest vocals here and there... But I guess it didn't scratch my itch enough. The songs were shorter, they didn't meander, but they also didn't grab me. I blame my early grunge addiction; I had to have a human element, something more visceral and rock, I guess. As such, I listened to The Color... a ton, ton more. Yep, loved that record back in the day, scrawled Foo Fighters lyrics on my school notebooks, on tables and chairs. And as I went to a private Baptist school you bet your ass I was rebellious for it.

At that point I was a blossoming music nerd already, so I had to test the waters around me to see what my friends thought about the rise of electronica. People were definitely aware of stuff like Block Rockin' Beats, but what mattered more to a lot of my friends were the radio hits at the time, which were songs by Crystal Method and, more significantly, Prodigy. People were pretty nuts about "Breathe" at my school. There were some definite music cliques forming about my junior high class -- some people who "dared" to listen to harder stuff like Metallica which was about as rebellious as most of us could get, some people who were grunge with me, some punks, some radio listeners, some pop kids -- but it seemed like Breathe managed to cut through most of the lines as the most liked song. Prodigy definitely had an intense image thing going on that allowed them to rise above first impressions of typical electronica. Hell, their lead singer gave Rancid a run for their money for punk looks. I think it's more significant that "Breathe" utilized more organic sampled tone, namely the distorted "guitar" (cuz it maybe isn't one) riff that drives it, coupled with a pretty rock and roll vocal and some pretty intense lyrics that any disgruntled kid could latch onto and sing later, sounding cool.

While I saw everyone digging Breathe and heard it on the radio, I was convinced that it was more of the same electronica that turned me off for the same reasons Chemical Brothers managed to at first. Thus, it didn't set me off very much. Techno still wasn't my thing. Electronica was still a fad to me. It was still for dancers in my head. Same for Crystal Method. I kept returning to my rock records more often than not. Seemingly, I was trying to enjoy the new sound of electronica, or at least understand so I would know where music was going, but it wasn't working out for me. That is... until one day...

I was at an arcade (do people still make arcade games? Like, are there amazing arcade machines that have come out in 2008?) somewhere, I think in Austin, hanging with some friends. Carrying a backpack with me, I stored my discman with headphones, wallet, and an album I decided to pop in just to see if I could finally enjoy electronica again -- Crystal Method's "Vegas." It's strange how vividly I can recall this situation. So, like I said, I am a big gamer, always have been. I am particularly good at those top-down fighter jet games where you can fly around shooting upwards at the enemies who fly down shooting at you, and your progression from level-to-level depends on your ability to survive their downflow attacks and you kill everything in sight. Some people call those games total bullshit but I love them. I love Galaga, I love Aero Fighters... they are awesome. At this particular arcade I was rocking some Aero Fighters type game though. I'm off by myself, pump in the 25c and hit start, and slipped my headphones on, hitting play. "Vegas" fades in with a synth tone that pans the stereo field, then drops into some dance-y fast paced electronica (it's pretty much a big beat record). As I frantically fought off the high-speed onslaughts of my enemies, I found that my ears were basically getting a perfect, high-tempo soundtrack for my eyes' input. Suddenly, I found myself loving the hell out of songs like "Busy Child" and "Keep Hope Alive," singles I had definitely heard before on the radio but never enjoyed nearly as much as I did then.

It was a big epiphany for me cuz I had finally removed my categorizations of electronica from rigidly defined dancefloor situations to personal listening situations, albeit at first I was like "Maybe I can only listen to these records when I'm gaming." But as I went back to those electronica albums I had already bought again with a more open mind, I found myself able to enjoy them on my own as I never had before. I went back and bought Prodigy's "The Experience," which has the amazing track "Voodoo People." That song was somewhat of an anthem for me back in those days. It features prominently in "Hackers" too.

Now, I hadn't surrendered to the dance craze totally yet. I was still much much more of a rock and roll kid. At that age, I would begin to pick up the guitar, realize I loved Pearl Jam enough to buy all their albums, go through a totally exclusive punk rock phase, etc etc. This was far more important to me than realizing I could and did actually enjoy electronica/techno music. But looking back now, and given my taste now leans much more toward dance, techno, and hiphop than it did before, I can see how these experiences laid the seeds of my later music loves.

At this point I am making an executive decision based on 1) the length of this entry 2) my wife trying to sleep while I type, and extend my analysis of big beat/electronica into a later entry. This will basically a history of my love of techno that also talks about where techno has been, where it is going, and how I came to understand it. Part two will go from here to my discovery of IDM, house, my first raves, to my pivotal discovery of microhouse/minimalism in techno. Part three will talk about how I jettisoned all rock music for a few months as a sophomore in college, listening almost exclusively to hip-hop, microhouse and disco. This is about when I realized how the categorization of techno happens, so it'll have to be then that I talk about what I think about big beat vs. the rest of dance music. I'll analyze the effect of minimalism on dance music, discuss the rebirth of trance, the rise (again) of techno, and how big beat could reintegrate itself into the consciousness of listeners.

This might take four parts but I think the personal anecdotes combined with my insights could work.

Okie dokes?





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