Techno

Eras

• Radio, The distribution mechanism that the club-centred telling loses. In Detroit the Electrifying Mojo was on air from the late 1970s, running Kraftwerk alongside Parliament and Prince in a Black radio format, and was playing the future Belleville Three's own mixes by 1981; this archive holds dated airchecks from 1981 through 1992 of a man who is rarely filmed. Jeff Mills was The Wizard on WDRQ and WJLB, Derrick May had a WJLB slot, and Stacey Hotwaxx Hale was on FM98. In West Berlin, Radio Mars announced where UFO was that night. Mixshows, pirate broadcasts, station studios, and sets made for air rather than for a room.
• Records, The objects and the labels. Sleeves, centre labels, runout grooves, catalogue numbers, the shops and the pressing plants. Cybotron's "Alleys of Your Mind" on Deep Space in 1981, "Clear" as a 1983 single on the album Enter which the 1990 reissue renamed, Model 500's "No UFO's" as Metroplex M-001 in April 1985. Then Transmat, KMS, Underground Resistance, Warp and the Sheffield bleep records, R&S in Ghent, Basic Channel and Chain Reaction in Berlin, and Hard Wax as the shop that functioned as an institution.
• Machines, The instruments, most of which failed commercially before they were repurposed. The Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, the TB-303 bass line that was built to accompany a guitarist practising alone and instead produced acid, the SH-101, samplers and sequencers and the modular rigs that came later. Roland discontinued all three of the famous boxes; the used market and the people who could not afford anything else decided what they were for. Objects rather than nostalgia: this is the best documented material in the whole subject.
• Crowds, The people it was for. Dancefloors, fields, warehouses and free parties, gabber in Rotterdam, hardcore, the fashion and the sound systems. Also the parts that get sanded off in retrospect: the drugs, as documented social history rather than instruction, and the policing. The music was made for rooms full of people and this segment is the only place they are the subject rather than the background.
• Detroit, Where it was made, and the largest segment here. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, who met around Belleville High School, plus Eddie Fowlkes, who says of the label attached to the other three that "it's four originators and not three". Cybotron from 1981, Metroplex from 1985, Transmat, KMS, and Underground Resistance and Submerge on East Grand Boulevard. Then the generations after: Carl Craig, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Drexciya, Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Mike Huckaby, Kelli Hand, DJ Minx and Stacey Hotwaxx Hale. The city itself is here too, Hart Plaza and United Sound Systems and Eastern Market, because free photography of the originators barely exists and the honest answer is to show the place and let them speak on video instead.
• Berlin, The city, and why it suited this music. Not a birth: UFO was running in the West from 1988 and Frankfurt had a techno club from 1984. What the Wall's fall supplied was space, a vacant middle of a city with power still connected and nobody clearly holding the deeds. Mitte and Friedrichshain, the vault, the power station, the squats, the river, Hard Wax, and the closures and rent rises that keep taking rooms back. In March 2024 "Techno Culture in Berlin" was added to Germany's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage, administered by the German UNESCO Commission, which is not the same as UNESCO's international list however the headlines ran it.
• Parades, Techno in the street. The Love Parade began in West Berlin in 1989 and grew from a few dozen people to a crowd in the hundreds of thousands, then over a million, before Berlin ended it in 2007 and it moved to the Ruhr. On 24 July 2010 in Duisburg, 21 people died and 652 were injured in a crowd crush at a ramp that was the only way in and out. Charges were brought against ten city employees and organisers. The case was rejected in 2016, reinstated in 2017, and the trial ended in May 2020 without a verdict: nobody was convicted and responsibility was never legally established. Also the Techno Parade in Paris, Zurich's Street Parade, and Rave the Planet, which Dr. Motte founded and which filed the heritage application.
• Clubs, Rooms and doors. The Music Institute on Broadway in Detroit, which lasted about fourteen months in 1988 and 1989 and of which no footage survives. UFO in West Berlin from 1988, before the Wall fell, with no sign on the door. Tresor from 1991 in the vault under the old Wertheim department store. Ostgut from 1998 and Berghain from 2004, whose interior is essentially unphotographed because the no-photography rule is enforced at the door, so what you see here is the building. Frankfurt's Omen and Technoclub, Ghent's Boccaccio, Tokyo's Maniac Love. Note a sourcing artefact: the photographs skew to Munich and Nuremberg venues because that is what German contributors uploaded, not because those rooms outrank the ones above.
• DJs, People playing records to rooms. Booth footage, sets, back to backs, and the craft itself: mixing, programming a night, reading a floor. Held deliberately to under a tenth of this archive, because DJ set footage is effectively infinite and would otherwise crowd out everything that explains where the music came from. What is here favours sets with a documented time and place over generic recent uploads.
• Studios, How the records were actually made. Sequencing, sampling, mixing desks, studio walkthroughs and gear talk, much of it published by the artists themselves. This is where the machines in segment two stop being objects and start being decisions: which drum machine, how quantised, how much of the 303 to let through.