"It must be said that techno is not just "mindless repetitive dance music" made automatically by computers. Nor is it just kiddie music, made to listen to while sporting really big clothes. Nor is techno the bastard child of rock n roll." ele-mental.coil.com/ele_ment/think/think.html
Techno music has it’s own history, parallel yet unique and distinct from the origins of rock and guitar based music. There are a lot of global cultural influences, with different genres of music styles arising across different times and places.
70s: Funk, disco, performance art, ambient/environmental soundscapes, rise of early industrial
Beginning of club culture -disco was previously an underground scene grown from private gay house parties - primarily black and Hispanic communities that were further marginalized by both straight and white gay culture. In disco we see the rise of the 12" records for Djs - these included long instrumental sections that made it easier to mix tracks. In the early 70s, Djs in the Bronx would take 2 12" remixes of the same song, and would cross back and forth between the tracks using the instrumental "break" as their mixing point. The instrumental break was the drum line with no vocals. As a result, you would get long tracks for the crowd to dance to, featuring the body of the song intercut with drum breaks that would be used to bring up the crowd’s energy - building the energy over and over again while mixing between tracks.
80s: breakdance/hip hop, electro, synth pop, industrial-dance, hi-nrg and the rise of HOUSE
Hip hop arising in New York as transplanted Jamaicans into dub and reggae began to play with turntables and rapping on top using the language of their culture. The cheapness of Rolands and the ease of creating rhythm lines meant DJs could mix new rhythms into the tracks they were mixing and scratching.
House - comes from the Warehouse club in Chicago, 1977-1983. A predominantly gay and black male market. Back in the early 1980s, Frankie Knuckles played a mix of disco, soul, funk with drum tracks created on Roland machines. Called house because it was played at the Warehouse and had a distinguishing sound. DJ Pierre played around with a Roland 303 and made some squeaky acid sounds that he recorded and were played by DJ Ron Hardy in the Warehouse and The Music Box. Called acid house, it was unique and defined by its use of 303 sounds.
UK experimental/industrial-dance artists like Psychic TV were in the US while acid house was picking up, bought the music and brought it back to the UK in the mid 80s. By 1986, house was getting air play on pirate radio. In the UK, laws for bars meant that to stay open all night, an establishment had to be licenced and serve liquor. Underground and illegal warehouse parties began to start, as a way for people to dance and party all night without having to drink alcohol. A sound system would be set up in an unused warehouse, patrons would pay at the door and be able to dance and party all night.
‘In a nutshell the UK scene stole the interesting bits from Chicago and Detroit, added their influences and drugs and labeled it hardcore/rave" www.breaks.com/journey/acid/acid.html
By 1992, raves were legal, but the scene had become very commercial. The intense media focus on illegal raves from the 1980s by writers from outside the culture meant there was a huge lack of understanding about what happened at raves. Tracks that were popular at underground parties were being picked up by newcomers to the scene, helping the tracks move to the mainstream charts based on their popularity. Newcomers to the scene, fueled by the media hype, saw raves as a chance to take drugs and go back to being a child. The ease of making tracks meant more and more poor quality music was being released. Mainstream labels, in an attempt to make some money of the popularity of rave culture, began releasing compilations easily available on cd. The rave scene is thought to have fallen apart at this time, where a once underground scene was taken over by the media and big business and rewritten as a culture.
And since then? Well, the rave scene got bigger and bigger in North America, with parties being thrown in major cities swelling in size. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver saw the growth of a huge techno scene, where by 1994 in Toronto, several large scale parties were being thrown on both Friday and Saturday nights and Ecstatic (a techno clothing store) had to start arranging bookings so that too many promoters were not throwing parties simultaneously. 1994 also saw the first North America jungle event happen - Judgement Night in Toronto- featuring UK MCs toasting live over DJs spinning hard drum lines. Eventually, like in the UK, the techno scene began to move away from the margins and into the spotlight. Clubs were featuring techno DJs, corporate sponsors were found so that larger and larger parties could be thrown and promoters began competing for audiences by fighting with each other.
As the techno scenes began dying slow deaths in larger cities as the music and culture became more mainstream and less underground, a slow change was happening. In the larger cities, the true techno communities went back to the basics and started to again focus on smaller scale parties that were kept low profile. Greater diversity can be seen in the styles of music that DJs were spinning and the types of parties being thrown. With the larger population of people from urban centers interested in techno, more and more bars and parties could cater to specialized markets, so that if you liked gabber or hard techno, you could find an event planned that featured this style of DJs and music. Bars became a more popular choice for people who had been involved with the culture for several years, and wanted to be able to hear the music and dance without dealing with younger people into the culture because it is trendy. They are over the legal drinking age while the second wave of club kids are 16-21 and still more focused on attending the events.
In smaller cities, the techno scenes began to grow as transplanted city dwellers moved away and began looking to create new communities. But with a much smaller population base and a subsequent smaller techno community, there was less diversity in the styles of music being played and the size of the parties being thrown. For example, Halifax has seen the rapid growth of its techno community in the past 2 years as more DJs and people from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal moved back to Atlantic Canada who had been into the scene in urban cities. However, the majority of events have been house and techno based, with hip hop and jungle moving slowly into attention in the past year. (Not that these were absent before but that they have been slower in becoming accepted and part of the culture). Halifax is now hitting the stage of having a relatively flourishing scene - over 1500 people at Family Circus, more diversity at events (jungle and live hip hop along with techno house at Circus), more imported DJs, more permanent locations available where parties can be hosted, the opening of a techno music store, and clubs featuring local DJs on a weekly basis.