..Techno
Techno is a form of electronic dance music that had its early beginnings in Western Europe in the late 1970s and later developed and established as a genre in Detroit, Michigan during the 1980s. It was influenced by Chicago house, electro, New Wave, funk and futuristic fiction themes that were prevalent and relative to modern culture during the end of the Cold War in industrial America at that time. Following the initial success of Detroit techno as a musical culture — at the very least on a regional level — an expanded and related subset of genres in the 1990s emerged globally.
The term "techno" is derived from the word technology. Music journalists and fans of the genre are generally selective in their use of the term, careful not to conflate it with related but distinct genres, such as house, trance and hardcore. At the same time, "techno" is commonly confused with general terms such as electronic music and dance music.
History
Origins
In the United States, techno was primarily developed by "The Belleville Three", a cadre of men who were attending college, at the time, near Detroit, Michigan. The budding musicians, former high school friends and mix tape traders Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, found inspiration in Midnight Funk Association, an eclectic, 5-hour, late-night radio program hosted on various Detroit radio stations including WCHB, WGPR, and WJLB-FM from 1977 through the mid-1980s by DJ Charles "The Electrifying Mojo" Johnson. Mojo's show featured heavy doses of electronic sounds from the likes of Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, among others.
Techno has since been retroactively defined to encompass, among others, works dating back to "Shari Vari" (1981) by A Number Of Names, the earliest compositions by Cybotron (1981), Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love"(1977), "From Here to Eternity" (1977), and the more dancefloor-orientated selections from Kraftwerk's repertoire between 1977 and 1983. These electro-disco tracks share with techno a dependence on machine-generated beats and dancefloor popularity.
Techno became more of a phenomenon in Europe than in the United States; American artists such as Moby and The Crystal Method who started their careers making techno were initially successful in Europe, but did not gain a presence in the US until branching out into other styles such as breakbeat and electronica. The popularity of the techno movement peaked in the late 90's, particularly in 1999 at the Berlin Love Parade with an attendance of over one and a half million techno enthusiasts.
Developments
In the late 1980s, different subgenres of techno music began to emerge, including hardcore techno, an intensified style typified by a fast tempo (around 160 bpm) and the rhythmic use of distorted and atonal industrial-like beats and samples, and ambient techno, with artists such as The Orb and Aphex Twin producing dub music and ambient influenced techno that later had an influence on artists dabbling in the minimal techno and what was originally techno's experimental offshoot, IDM. Techno in the form of acid house, influenced by the heavy use of the Roland TB-303 for bass and lead sounds, enjoyed a surge of popularity in the mid-1980s and went on to influence acid trance and acid techno. Tech house, which came to prominence in the late 1990s, imports concepts of techno into the basic structure of house music but with a softer, deeper sound and an almost jazzy touch - partly in convergence with progressive house.
Less well-known styles related to techno or its subgenres include Yorkshire bleeps and bass or bleep, a regional variant which was prominent in the late 1980s; wonky techno; ghettotech, which combines some of the aesthetics of techno with hip-hop, house music, and Miami bass; and the subgenres of hardcore techno, including gabber, speedcore, terrorcore, breakcore and digital hardcore.
Techno had also a big influence on main-stream European disco-pop music from the late 80s with Technotronic, and the evolvement of euro-techno during the early and mid 90s, with artists such as 2 Unlimited, Snap!, Culture Beat and Corona.
In recent years, the publication of relatively accurate histories by authors Simon Reynolds (Generation Ecstasy aka Energy Flash) and Dan Sicko (Techno Rebels), plus mainstream press coverage of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, have helped to diffuse the genre's more dubious mythology. Techno has further expanded into the charts as more artists such as Orbital and Underworld have made the style break through to the mainstream pop culture while producers and DJs such as Laurent Garnier, Dave Clarke, Richie Hawtin and Jeff Mills have continued to explore newer sounds.
Musicology
Techno features a largely percussive feel, like the synthetic sounds, studio effects used as principal instrumentation, and usually a regular 4/4 beat with a tempo of 130–140bpm, sometimes faster, but rarely slower. Some techno compositions have strong melodies and bass lines, but these features are not as essential to techno as they are to other styles of electronic dance music, and it is not uncommon for techno compositions to deemphasize or omit them. Techno is also very DJ-friendly, being mainly instrumental, and produced with the intention of being incorporated into continuous DJ sets wherein different compositions are played with very long, synchronized segues. Although several other dance music genres can be described in such terms, techno has a distinct sound that aficionados can pick out very easily.
There are many ways to make techno, but a typical techno production is created using a compositional technique that developed to suit the genre's sequencer-driven, electronic instrumentation. While this technique is rooted in a Western music framework (as far as scales, rhythm and meter, and the general role played by each type of instrument), it does not typically employ traditional approaches to composition such as reliance on the playing of notes, the use of overt tonality and melody, or the generation of accompaniment for vocals. Some of the most effective techno music consists of little more than cleverly programmed rhythmic foundations and musical phrases that interplay with different types of special signal processing and frequency filtering, mixed in such a way that it is not easy to distinguish the natural timbre of an instrument from the digital effects applied thereto.
Instead of employing traditional compositional techniques, the techno musician, usually acting as producer, treats the electronic studio as one large, complex instrument: an interconnected orchestra of machines, each producing timbres that are simultaneously familiar and alien. Each machine is encouraged to generate or complement continuous, repetitive sonic patterns that come relatively 'naturally' to them, given the capabilities and limitations of early sequencers — such sequencers, especially those built-in to old drum machines, tend to encourage the production of repeating 16-step patterns with a limited number of instruments being playable at once, yet they also allow sounds to be arranged in any order, regardless of whether live musicians could easily reproduce them. Rather than just mimicking arrangements playable by live musicians, the techno producer is free to prominently feature unrealistic combinations of sounds. Most producers, however, strive to achieve a listenable, dancefloor-friendly balance of realistic and unrealistic arrangements of mostly synthetic, semi-realistic timbres, rather than a demonstration of machine-powered extremes.
After an acceptable palette of compatible textures is collected in this manner, the producer begins again, this time focusing not on developing new textures but on imparting a more deliberate arrangement of the ones he or she already has. The producer "plays" the mixer and the sequencer, bringing layers of sound in and out, and tweaking the effects to create ever-more hypnotic, propulsive combinations.
Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/
