Techno Studies: Ästhetik und Geschichte Elektronischer Tanzmusik
University of Cologne (Germany)
In 1995 a group of authors who were deeply embedded in the new music scene wrote and published Techno (Anz and Walder 1995), a compendium exploring both the history of the genre in its broader sense as well as its contemporary status. Techno Studies: Ästhetik und Geschichte Elektronischer Tanzmusik adapts not only the cover art of Techno but also its inherently methodological approach, combining various kinds of texts and perspectives on the subject. DJ, writer and editor of scene magazine De:Bug, Sascha Kösch contributes to both anthologies. In Techno Studies, he writes three short essays concerning the practical and epistemological problems of writing reviews of techno tracks.
Daniel Schneider’s chapter “Party im Schuber” indicates the process of historicisation and cannonisation of that which was, for a long time, considered inherently futuristic. Schneider, who is based at Archiv der Jugendkulturen in Berlin, highlights the connection between his work as an archivist and the techno scene itself, striving towards a neutral position that takes into account various factions within the scene, as well as the importance of diverse sources of information for a complete, critical research of techno (92). His ideas seem to amalgamate well with the general approach taken in Techno Studies.
The academic study of techno of various disciplines along with its social, cultural and bodily phenomena might be subsumed under the term Electronic Dance Music Culture Studies (EDMCs) and is linked to a “practice shift” in humanities, as Rosa Reitsamer points out in “Die Praxis des Techno”. Participant observation or even going native present the opportunity to collect very rich data, including intimate, internal knowledge of subcultural music scenes. However, such personal engagement may cause ethical conflicts as well as methodological complications, which is one of the classic dilemmas of sociological and ethnographical research. In his chapter “Anonym, verkörpert, anders” Luis-Manuel Garcia, along with the help of four interviewees, describes some of the more intense problems encountered while carrying out ethnographic fieldwork within queer nightlife scenes, where sexual subjectivity and physical safety are often underlying issues. Moreover, the club environment seems to allow for new methods of research to be implemented.
In her chapter “We Call It Techno!” Julia Keilbach reflects on a documentary of the same name, which attempts to reconstruct the birth of techno in Berlin through a montage of short interview samples with pioneers of the scene. However, it is exactly this technique that renders the documentary unable to explore the necessary methodical scope that can be considered to be real oral history; there lies a “hidden author” behind the narrative that is provided to the audience, illustrated through the director’s choice of particular statements and sentiments (97). The end result is a historical narrative that excludes the integral role of both gay subculture and the international artists and projects involved in the formation of techno.
In his excellent chapter “‘Das Nachkriegstrauma abgetanzt?’”, Matthias Pasdzierny investigates how techno managed to achieve its status as “Soundtrack of the German Reunion”. He explains how, in actuality, this process took place retrospectively—the memories of scene members seem to have been affected by media reports that interpreted the new sounds and hedonistic movement as indicative of a “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, a farewell to the old Germany and its Nazi past, and presenting the opportunity to cultivate a completely new German identity (115).
Besides trance, another subgenre of techno—minimal—could take on a special German resonance and image. This development, along with new discourses around minimal as a genre prefix as well as an aesthetic paradigm for any kind of electronic dance music, are analysed by Sean Nye in his chapter “Von Berlin Minimal zu Maximal EDM”. The film Fraktus (Germany 2012) portrays an obviously faked techno-myth, placing its origin within the context of the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW). Despite the fictional characters in the film, its overall argument can be backed up with some evidence—at least when observed from a modern perspective—as mentioned during the talk with musicians Jacques Palminger and Carsten Meyer, aka Erobique, in “Fraktus—in Techno-Mythos” (139).
In “Klangzeitgeschehen”, Barbara Volkwein describes her musicological approach to techno. As a consequence of the methodological difficulties involved in analysing techno tracks, she suggests a combination of traditional and new methods including participant observation, and descriptions of sounds and aural textures. In the case of the latter, Jens Gerrit Papenburg refers to the importance of sound systems and other technical aspects, such as the cutting of maxi singles for reproduction and perception—but also the production of dance music—in his chapter “Boomende Bässe der Disco- und Clubkultur”. He convincingly argues that traditional musicological analysis is not able to grasp the bodily aspects of sounds experienced in the club and therefore misses a central aspect of the specific aesthetics this genre of music emits (195).
Kim Feser recognises another technical aspect of the production of electronic music that has had an immense impact on its aesthetics—sequencers. In his chapter “Ein Sequenzer kommt selten allein”, he shows how electronic devices like Moog synthesizers, the Roland 808 and especially a combination of the two might blur existing differentiations between instruments and machines, musicians, composition and automatic processes, as well as between digital software and analogue hardware. Techno-related styles are characterised by the complex interplay between technical innovation, aesthetic discourses and musical practices (235) that include a “false” use of gear (232). This approach should be called experimental, which is something that becomes evident in Stefan Goldmann’s chapter “Kreuzmodulation” (162). Goldmann begins with an interesting attempt at developing the aesthetics of techno, which is based on the aural perception of musical material itself, created with specific line-ups of electronic instruments manipulated by filters, effects and FM-synthesis.
While Goldmann refers to the theoretical concept of neuronal learning, Martha Brech again draws on the familiar connection between techno and the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in “Zwischen den Ohren”, most evident in releases from the label Mille Plateaux. This kind of highly conceptualised “intelligent” techno and the intellectual reflections on its “deterritorializing” effect had its heyday during the second half of the 1990s. However, deterritorialization might today be found in genres such as glitch hop—following developments in this area would likely be a much more interesting focus for contemporary research.
In “Vom Ereignis erzählen”, Diedrich Diederichsen refers to the frequently assumed countercultural dimension of techno and argues that the music’s immediate bodily experience is in line with the non-political aspects of the foregone hippy movement (62). The question of “meaning” in often instrumental techno tracks is evaluated by Jochen Bonz in “Am Nullpunkt der Identifikation”. Opposing the ideas inspired by poststructuralist perspectives of alternative identifications for the individual and one’s liberation via techno, Bonz claims that the expressive culture of techno is characterized by weak and often short-lived forms of identification, which correspond with the semantic and semiotic openness or even meaningless of the music itself (47).
One might argue against Bonz’s view that many people deeply identify with certain techno labels, artists or tracks, as is often the case with many other genres of music. The idea that techno is the not-too-distant-cousin of other forms of pop emerges again while reading Techno Studies and it raises its head once more in the chapter “Kommunikative Strategien und Ideologien von Liveness bei Laptop Performances”, musicologist Mark Butler exploring how the famous issue of “authenticity” was revived by DJ performances. Rosa Reitsamer goes on to show that physicality is as much a part of the DJ’s subcultural capital as both their musical selection and knowledge. The resulting scene hierarchies, which are often linked with categories such as gender or race, have to be seen critically (32).
Today’s “techno ideologies” and idealized historical narratives often seem to result from not too much more than a series of events that usually begin with the politically-driven ideals of influencers, spread by scene media and eventually being picked up on and backed up by some academic analysts afterwards. Furthermore, it is still all too common that the Afro-American roots of the genre are ignored (or even “whitewashed”), causing further misinterpretation. In light of its Afro-American heritage, characteristics particular to techno, such as pattern repetition or extensive sound manipulation, appear as neither the mere results of new technical possibilities nor as a sudden break in musical or cultural history, but as central stylistic devices to be found in various other genres like rhythm ‘n’ blues, funk, disco or hip-hop. However, despite these general critical remarks, Techno Studies surely provides some immensely important and critical contributions to the discourses surrounding the field at large, whether that be as subsumed under the umbrella term techno or under today’s more popular term EDM.
Anz, Philipp and Patrick Walder (eds.). 1995. Techno. Hamburg: Rowohlt.