Dr. Nutcracker wrote:
So can we conclude then... that in early stages a lot of so called 'Detroit
Techno' classics are at
least very simular to Chicago House?
first time i heard fingers inc - distant planet, i thought it was some early
rhythim is rhythm [adventurous drum programming] derrick may has been
extremely influenced by larry heard's productions. but at the same time did
something completely different with it.
chip e - it's house ...is it?
I also remember a story wherein these heads were driving up to Chicago
every weekend to check out >those 'Disco' parties with DJ's like Ron Hardy.
i remember either from that channel 4 documentary on house music 'pump up
the volume' or from another interview derrick may's quote: "everyone i took
there ended up heavily influenced by that experience" about visiting the
muzic box.
alex bond wrote:
where as in detroit, there wasn't really a big club scene? and the records
weren't really remakes.
dunno how big the scene was, but i do remember from 'techno rebels' that the
scene was intence. and eclectic aswell. the same as chicago, but maybe with
a bit more industrial influences. i remember reading something about having
a 'house'party on one floor, and a flog of seagulls on another at the same
building.
and what was the sequence again for the first night they payed sharivari
[two copies of kano - holly dolly] ?
kraftwerk - the robots
quartz - beyond the clouds
number of names - sharivari
... and the people were climbing the walls!
Lester Kenyatta Spence wrote:
Yep. But also remember that the Chicago artists were either borrowing the
equipment of Detroiter's >or getting the equipment they used.
i think frankie knuckles bought one of derrick may's drumcomputers
marc christensen wrote:
... got nothing to add here, so i'll just paste all of it beneath:
The canonical history holds that it was indeed out of the marketing of the
Ten Records Techno comp that the term "techno" first came to be used to
describe the 313 sound and differentiate it more
concretely from the sounds of Chicago's scene. But there's more than one
example of May in particular mentioning that he doesn't like techno as a
term. "Techno" was clearly Juan's afterthought, and it
suited Rushton and the marketing campaign just fine.
Up until '88, "techno" did not exist in Detroit. It was house, or "Detroit
house" at best. I think this fact is often covered over because it's felt
to undermine the genre differences between techno and house, or to undermine
techno's claim to independent consideration. But it would be clearly
incorrect to consider techno as "merely" a cousin of house. The scenes in
Chicago and Detroit were related, but LKS uses very good concrete examples
to show the differences.
If we can give up just a touch of our collective 313-centricity, just for an
instant, and ask seriously what House/Techno would have been without the
terms to stabilize them, I think the relatively provisional and even kind of
arbitrary limits of the genres become clearer. Sure Chicago & Detroit had
rather different sounds, but the sounds within each city's scene were also
wildly divergent. "House" today rarely sounds as broad, or experimental, as
it did when it was local, and stood as a local practice. The earliest
tracks (and mixing practices) of the belleville three, plus d-wynn, mills,
baxter, fawlkes, and *all* the other folks who were already well-established
by '87-'88, were also very different, track-by-track, from each other.(1)
There was a *lot* of musical experimentation going down at the time, in both
cities.
This is not to say that the experimentation of 313-related artists today is
insignificant. But it's worth thinking through how "house" and "techno"
came to be understood, sometimes out of listening for a
common thread in the music of the 313, and sometimes by ignoring interesting
ventures into its early outer reaches...
My overly academic .02, at any rate.
-marc
(1) I'd be more than willing to bet that this incredible diversity of sound,
and movement which seemed to *defy* rather than produce genre, also helps to
account for the individualistic strain in
Atkins-May-Saunderson-Mills interviews. May relentlessly hits on individual
innovation, and on *not* sounding like the thing before.
Atkins and Mills both say techno (which they use as a descriptor in the
early 90's, rather than a categorical definition) should be the sound of the
new. When they say "It should (or did) sound really
*techno*" they clearly meant that it sounded wild, and really out there.
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