The Japanese drum machines that finally made the white man dance..

What is the skeleton that connects the multitude of up-tempo dance subgenres, known as house & techno? Four heavy stomping bass drums pr. bar, beating in 118-160 beats pr minute –  a.k.a. the lowest common denominator in music…

Part 1 :Flashbacks – Back in the ugly 80’s, when AIDS and complete nuclear destruction cast an evil shadow on a financially unstable world, a minor miracle happened; in the Land of the Rising Sun, visionary engineers from Korg, Roland and Yamaha made the hi-tech tools – previously solely owned by pretentious rock dinosaurs like Peter Gabriel and Jean Michelle Jarre – available for any hard working nerd or dancers bedroom setup. Clone the access to machines with a generation raised on post-punk and Moroders prototypical evergreen mantra- groove ”I Feel Love”, a strong influence from Kraftwerk and an urging need for a rebirth of disco – and POW! – techno was born. 

This changed any preconceptions of club music – and music in general – and spearheaded a musical revolution that made even punk a tiny bump on the highway. Back then, there was a longing for disco, a genre of pure joy, like soul but without the lost love and race-issues. A pure motorically motivating muzak for sheer kitchy enjoyment. And as the reality of the 80’s sucked big time, there was a urge for a new beginning, a musical utopia that forecasted the technological revolution to come, with less gloom than the dystopian industrial techno scene.Techno/House is post-production retro disco, where echoes and ghosts of the working musicians are reassembled in the digital domain to work out dancers and take their minds to the future.

At first, the primitive 4-track cassette experiments from Chicago sounded crude,  like low budget templates for future music longing for its disco past. But when a gang of sci-fi fanatics in the deserted motor city of Detroit cued in to the more serious gloom strategies of European post industrial EBM (electronic body music) and twisted house into soundtracks for the future with a dash of funk, the European producers in spe took note.A DJ back then was a nerdy hobbyist fighting for rare import 12” vinyl, only occasionally leaving his room to hand out flyers and getting his five minutes of fame on the decks. Synths and beat boxes where generally considered bad taste, and not “real music” to most people, who didn’t care for the DJ’s taste, montage and sync skills. They just wanted to hear the pop/rock hits from the radio or the funky fuzak pastel hits from the deckshoe kids on the Montmartre scene.

I played the biker-dominated Christiania back then – and was saved by the “Born to be wild” single – but mostly sneaking in electro, funk, proton-hiphop, funky industrial and dub. In my bedroom I assembled a 808 triggering delays recording it to play in the walkman stoned, but inspiring nabour and future Frankfurt hitmaker Sven-NG – we lived next to the idylic Royal Gardens in inner Copenhagen, but made the hardest beats imaginable for our own pleasure. There was no scene yet. But soon the time machine we had been loning for arrived: in 1986 the afordable sampling workstations arrived and music history changed forever.

“If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”

Part 4 : Hitting the studio

Suddenly, making music was a matter of punching some drums on a grid and sync/discipline some samples from your record collection on top and master the whole shebang with a club-shaking bassline. A world apart from the tedious rehearsal, live and studio rituals of ”real” music – and you could do it cheaply ALONE.

The Danes are not funky people, and as production before the laptop revolution required a lot of gear and a lot of time to figure it out (no youtube tutorials), most producers made Eurodance, ambient, EBM or tech house. All a bit cold, boring and blue, like most Scandinavian music.

Danish tech house only bloomed after the rise of the Internet. The biggest contribution to the house cannon is probably the Nord and Elektron companies, responsible for some excellent analog-like synths, and especially the Propellerheads Reason software, which emulates all the expensive studio hardware of yesterday – even on a modest laptop.

Part 5 : Voodoo house

House music – as sample based postproduction music – has a weird evolution. On one hand its a complete underground niche music for drug dens, on the other hand its the new pop/rock, filling stadiums. Every time house seems dead, passé and overexposed, after Swedish House Mafia or David Guetta has brainwashed us via the airwaves with another gimmicky tune, a bedroom producer finds a “new old” record to sample and a new evil bass tactic. Everything from Balearic clichés over tribal drums to Balkan has been tamed by the sequencers and made into modern druggy march music. And electronic music is everywhere, as a perfume to sell everything – but the money rarely goes back to the scenes or creators.

Newer generations play around with black downtempo styles inspired by reggae, dubstep, boogie and hiphop rejecting “big brothers music” i.e. tech house – its subcultural context gone, its sign value empty, reduced to juice bar music made by blank attention hungry DJs desperate for bookings and sponsors. But the downtempo trend will just build up to the next up- tempo house backlash, like ebb and tide. Google the house blogs or beatport for further research into future beats. All combinations are possibly tried already.

And as DJ and studio technology merge on the laptop why not make your own? Music production and DJ’ing will likely end up as a kind of “Guitar Hero” game as you read this anyway.

This text is originally published in 2009 in NORDIC MAN MAGAZINE.

BONUS TRACK: a rip of a rare acid 12″ – CONTORT –  made in colaboration with Dan Stielow – who turned the tempo up to 1993.

Listen to more current output here & here  and new albums here

The original AUM cult video: