Someone I know wrote a review of a movie trailer (Speaking in Code) that, for me, exemplified a deeply problematic view of techno versus house.
*** Here is my friend's post: Short story: it's not been an easy journey to stay on target. There's a few things the electronic music world has going against it in terms of popular appeal. First off, there's usually no vocals. How many number ones in North America have you heard in the past few years that had no vocals? I'm slowly clicking through Wikipedia and coming up blank. There was that weirdo period in the '90s featuring Moby and Fat Boy Slim and the like that only featured samples, but I don't think the majority of the public realized they were samples -- they just heard weird, staccato vocals. It seems like we North American folk need a spoken narrative to get into music on a mass level. Techno doesn't have a vocalized narrative, it has an abstract narrative that diverges from the mainstream in that very basic sense. Techno enthusiasts, I would propose, operate on a generally more abstract level than just "having a beat you can dance to" along with a sung allegory of lost love or pursued-yet-unrequited love. Much along the lines of Western Classical enthusiasts, they giddily freak out about an unexpected bass-modulated, gated atonality, and derive blissful pleasure from well-placed syncopation and juxtaposing the minimal alongside the maximal. Even more modern architects have aimed for the same response with the physical environment. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unitarian Church in Oak Park creates a compressed-released feeling as one steps into the spacious nave from the sort of cramped '50s-ish dropped-ceiling lobby area. In that sense, modern, innovative electronic music is the "new classical" for the electronic generation. Classical is a misnomer though, as modern electronic music only refers to established patterns, but sounds not at all like anything classic. "While house was happily based on reheating black disco, techno strove consciously to reject tradition and avoid copying previous forms... where house rejoiced in funky, soulful disco, techno was transfixed by Giorgio Moroder's computerized version," says author Bill Brewster in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. "Where house stole melodies and basslines wholesale, techno preferred to compose new ones from synthesized notes and layers of tiny, sampled sounds, supporting claims that it is a genre with greater musicianship. Techno is about going back first to principles, to notes and composition, to sounds and structure -- continuing the synthetic agenda laid down by artists like Depeche Mode, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk." And this is why I think techno has been so maligned... its purveyors are not re-hashing established hooks and samples for the sake of being popular and accepted, they are pushing the boundaries of music and emotion -- place and space -- and creating something new and exciting. Yes, that can be scary. No, there is no safety net. But yes -- it's completely thrilling. Let's see if Speaking in Code can convey this quintessential idea sympathetically to a greater audience in order to open up the world to a new way of thinking about innovative sound, sound arrangement, its loyal culture, and what is possible for the future. *** Here is my response: I call "Bull$h!t"! First of all, half of those artists make what is really "techno-pop". I'm not sure how putting a few synthetic sounds over what is essentially a stripped down pop song structure really constitutes "avoiding tradition". Furthermore, it sounds to me like Europeans are engaging in a form of subtle racism in their positioning of the relative value of techno vs. house, in their choice of European artists as opposed to American (often black) artists, and in stating that techno artists are inherently more likely to "push the boundaries of music" and innovate, while house music just "rehashes" things for the sake of being popular. Especially problematic is the idea that techno is a genre with greater musicianship. Furthermore, techno is clearly in a phase of rehashing as opposed to innovation, and very little of it could really be said to be innovative in any sense. Putting together a few clickety-clack sounds in Ableton to make a track is not exactly rocket science, and this is the year 2009, not 1989. If anything, techno is unable to innovate because it is limited by its inherently self-referential musical vision, with roots that really only extend back to Kraftwerk, synthpop, and industrial music. Rather than exploring new sounds horizons, techno tends to exist within a really narrow spectrum of sound, in the same way that the sound horizon of death metal is pretty much defined by loud guitar riffs and fast drum fills. I think techno needs to get over its sci-fi 1980's vision of reality and integrate more of the rich legacy of human music making. For me, that means techno should not be afraid to use sounds and ideas coming from free-form improvised music, jazz, classical, and world music. ~David
