A lot of this talk of Drumcode, Adam Beyer and so forth has put me in mind of when trance completely split off from techno.
I remember that, for a while, the snare rolls, big breakdowns, 303 lines and druggy chords that later came to characterise trance had permeated deeply into more "pure" techno. That "Access" track would get played at proper techno nights and, for the first few months at least, no-one would particularly bat an eyelid. Now these techniques were all very effective on the dancefloor, and after a while audiences were demanding to hear that sort of stuff all the time. Some techno DJs I know pretty much capitulated, with snare rolls every five minutes, but they still saw themselves as being "techno". "Because this works better on the floor and is more popular with club audiences", said some of these guys, "this is the stuff that will stick around. That noodly stuff you play isn't really techno at all!" What are these guys now? They're trance DJs. What started out as a kind of tendency among techno producers eventually hived off into its own sound, and a newly reinvigorated and purified techno scene went on to drop a number of bombs, such as Minimal Nation, in which those "trancey" techniques were rejected outright. Today, we have a similar situation. The Samuel L Sessions-style records all employ a limited range of tricks and techniques to maintain this continual flow of pounding rhythm and half-bar loops. Because it works better on the dancefloor than, say, that Delsin record or this Keith Tucker record, spw feels that *it* is the stuff that will stick around, the stuff that now represents what "techno" truly is. But I'm saying that we've been here before. A more populist variant of techno becomes successful; its advocates eventually perceive themselves as being the true agents of progress and start to direct their criticism at the "old guard", the pure techno scene. It happened in the early 1990s and it's happening again now. Brendan
