Beatport: The #BeatportDecade in Techno @ Musique Non Stop |  |
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Posted: 16 Nov 2014 03:00 PM PST
#BeatportDecade is a series celebrating the past 10 years of dance music, providing insight into the artists, tracks and labels that drove the evolution of its sound and culture, and interviews with the people who made history. In many ways, electronic dance music as we know it began with techno. In Detroit, in 1981, to be precise, with a fusion of black American funk and imported electro-pop that gave birth, almost simultaneously, to A Number of Names’ “Sharevari” and Cybotron’s “Alleys of Your Mind.” It all starts there. And yet, for much of the past decade, techno has been the underdog, overshadowed by house – the yang to techno’s yin. (House music, a descendant of disco, evolved in parallel and emerged at almost the same time, but it got its name later.) You could say that the two genres have swapped places in the popular imagination. Ten years ago, if someone asked you what kind of music you were into, you might have said “techno” and meant “techno and tech-house and progressive and minimal”; these days, you’d probably say “house” to cover a similar spectrum. Everything is house these days, or it wants to be, anyway, from Tiësto to Disclosure. Techno, meanwhile, has gone back underground. But to get a sense of how wildly dynamic electronic dance music can be, techno makes for an excellent case study – both for the way the music itself has evolved and for the ways that its fortunes have risen and fallen over the past decade. Flash back to 2004, a year before #BeatportDecade kicks off. Dance music was hardly at its healthiest, and Abe Duque‘s “What Happened?” offered a lament for the ailing scene. Over a rollicking, bare-bones groove – shuffling drums, two-note bassline, careening bleeps, all of it resolutely old-school in feel – the New York producer reeled off a list of shuttered clubs and bygone styles, with one notable gesture of defiance. (“Acid… what happened? Hip-house… what happened? Techno… what’s happening!”) Tapping into a vein of steely focus that stretched back to Jeff Mills‘ “The Bells,” Robert Hood‘s “Minimal Nation,” and DBX‘s “Losing Control,” Duque’s track offered proof that minimal techno was thriving. Ironically, by the end of the decade, it was minimal techno – or simply “minimal,” as it came to be known – that would prompt such a large-scale exodus from techno to house. |
