STOP CALLING EVERYTHING TECHNO!
By Fofi Tsesmeli
photo by Daniela Baumann
Techno was created by black communities in working-class settings, not by high-profile cultural institutions or privileged people. It emerged from industrial cities, cemented in queer and marginalized clubs, and was defined by DIY ecosystems. It spread through underground networks, pirate radios, white-label releases, independent distributors, and underground warehouse parties. It was positioned as a cultural resistance form, even though it was not explicitly lyrical; resistance in techno was often structural rather than verbal. It rejected the traditional song form and the mighty hierarchy of instrumentation. From its conception, it was purposed to eradicate the performer-centered spectacle, focusing on the collective dancefloor experience. It was meant to decentralize authorship through the DJ culture by favoring rhythm and system over the idea of a star persona. The dancefloor became a temporary autonomous zone. Not metaphorically, operationally.
Techno is one of the few genres whose evolution cannot be separated from technological evolution itself. The machines did not exclusively influence the sound - it was conceived through them. Early synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, MIDI systems, and affordable or hand-made studio hardware did not just shape the sonic canvas. They were used to shape the compositional logic. Repetition, modulation, pattern-based variation, and synthetic timbre were not just random aesthetic accidents. Τhey were structural reverberations of the new tools becoming available to independent, underprivileged creators. Reducing techno to “machine music” misses the deeper truth: the machines were used to express human conditions: alienation, futurism, displacement, hope, urban anxiety, and post-industrial imagination. The genre’s early development is inextricably tied to the Black innovators of Detroit, artists working in a city marked by deindustrialization, racial segregation, and economic collapse. Their work was not escapist, but counter-narrative futurism. It was a way of reimagining Black identity and possibility through technology and sound.
Techno emerged from a specific socio-cultural and technological context, and developed identifiable musical characteristics. Over the decades, it spread into multiple subforms: minimal, dub, hypnotic, industrial, hard techno/schranz, ambient, acid, deep techno - while retaining core structural principles. When the techno movement passed into Europe, it was not diluted, but transformed through reinterpretation and reassessment. European cities and artists built infrastructure around the sound and helped it scale globally, but through different social conditions and aesthetics.
Photo by Zoran Jesic
Frankfurt played a foundational role in the early adoption of European techno. It functioned as a bridge between acid house, early trance, and techno, even before Berlin became dominant, with Sven Väth’s Omen club being at the epicenter. In post-wall Berlin, abandoned buildings and allowing spatial conditions enabled a new club blueprint. European producers emphasized severity, hypnosis, and architectural sound design, expanding techno’s vision and endurance. The Belgian scene is crucial and often under-credited in techno’s European development. If Detroit built the blueprint and Berlin institutionalized the post–Cold War expansion, Belgium accelerated, hardened, and industrialized certain strands of the sound at a pivotal moment in the early ’90s. That lineage pushed techno’s rhythmic aggression forward. The Birmingham sound stripped down techno to brutal minimalism, metallic iteration, and industrial, high-tension loops. Rotterdam accelerated tempo and distortion into gabber and hardcore. The late ’90s and early 2000s French scene, through specific collectives and labels, helped reinject raw, loop-driven functionality into techno at a time when minimal was dominant.
The genre became widely popular, and eventually a buzzword, in two distinct waves, each driven by different forces. The first was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Detroit sound was exported to Europe and absorbed into the rapidly exploding rave movement. After the 1988 “Second Summer of Love” in the UK, British media began using the term “techno” to describe the spectrum of electronic music played at acid house and rave parties. By the early ’90s, mass gatherings across Europe were drawing tens, and eventually hundreds of thousands of people. Events like the Love Parade shifted what had begun as underground club culture into a highly visible, large-scale display. During that period, “techno” became a media umbrella term, usually inaccurately, for everything from hardcore to trance. The word’s first dilution did not come from artists, but from journalism and mass branding, which needed a simple label for a complex, not easily understandable ecosystem.
The second wave came in the 2010s, with the global expansion of festivals, the rise of digital streaming platforms, and the convergence of social media. As electronic music was rapidly entering the peak era of commercial visibility, techno acquired symbolic value: it began to signify seriousness, underground credibility, darkness, and cultural depth, regardless of the music’s actual structure. Platforms such as Beatport standardized genre categories, while algorithmic systems were rewarding recognizable tags. Simultaneously, the fashion industry absorbed techno’s visual codes - black minimalism, industrial imagery, warehouse semiotics - turning the word into a marketable aesthetic descriptor. By the mid-to-late 2010s, “techno” functioned not only as a genre tag, but as cultural branding shorthand. It applied to events, lifestyles, and identities that often bore little to no partial sonic relation to its Detroit foundations. As the genre’s reach expanded, its definition loosened. The term’s transformation into a catchword was not accidental, as it followed visibility, scale, and commercial amalgamation. Plus, profit.
After COVID, the word “techno”, but also the genre as perceived by the masses, made a twisted comeback, and the whole scene expanded, accelerated, and fractured under new pressures. When clubs shut down in 2020, the global electronic music industry paused abruptly. Touring stopped, local scenes were disrupted, and digital streaming temporarily replaced dancefloors. But when the restrictions were lifted, there was a massive, almost explosive and uncontrollable rebound. Audiences, especially younger ones, flooded back into clubs and festivals with heightened energy. Post-lockdown crowds were thirsty for higher tempos, heavier kicks, and more dramatic climaxes. A harder, faster strain, often drawing from early 2000s Schranz, industrial, and hardcore influences, surged into mainstream visibility. Social media amplified short, high-impact drops and built moments in TikTok videos, creating new “superstars” overnight. For many new listeners, that sound was techno, regardless of its hybrid, distorted lineage. Demand surged faster than infrastructure could recalibrate. In that vacuum, branding played its role again.
Enter the game of digital stores and streaming platforms, now, and the way they reshaped and classified the genres to be consumed. Beatport played a substantial role here. Their categorization system is built for sales, not musicology. It didn’t take long for chart logic, trend cycles, and paid promo by specific labels or privileged artists to create genre bin merging, a blind type of relabelling based on trends or optics. The result was cross-genre tracks and festival-oriented hard tracks defined as techno, dominating the charts. When chart position affects bookings, and genre bins affect chart position, producers adapt their work to category behavior. The store classification starts feeding back into the music itself in an accumulating, detrimental way.
In April 2018, the Berlin-based producer Shifted coined the term “Business Techno” in a Twitter discussion about genres and commerciality, saying, “Business Techno is the new tech house.” Of course, everyone knows that
tech house is the worst thing that has ever happened in the universe since the Big Bang,
especially on the techno bros planet. Apart from the irony, this critical term came to describe and expose where techno was going and how the business was being transformed. It targeted directly the formulaic and trend-optimized tracks, the branded DJ identities, the spectacle, which had started to value more than the music, and the heavy use of the algorithm as a form of promotion, exposure, and metric of success. Though it has offered us stellar memes for a lifetime, the sarcastic term can be used as another purity weapon.
It is no secret that techno has elitism issues. At first glance, you cannot blame the elitists, seeing what is happening in the scene today. Techno purism has nourished a strong disposition that protects the genre’s indisputable underground roots against commercialization, though it can easily lead to snobbery and gatekeeping. It is apparent that people tend to confuse knowledge with superiority and treat taste as a moral status. Obscurity is used for exclusion and history as an all-mighty tool against the despicable ignorants. But wasn’t techno created against that mentality as a whole, in the first place? The whole story can spark endless discussions, but removing boundaries to avoid elitism leads to semantic collapse. If everything can be techno, then techno is no longer a meaningful term. Snobbery and gatekeeping can be rejected without eliminating definition. Where elitism says “you don’t belong”, definition is there to clarify “you belong somewhere else”.
But what exactly is techno?
The word originates from the Greek word “τέχνη” (tekhnē), which means art or craft. According to musicologists, techno is a music genre born in the United States, especially in Detroit, which quickly established itself worldwide. “It is a primarily rhythmic genre that commonly revolves around a four-on-the-floor beat (4/4 rhythm). Stylistically, tracks usually lie somewhere between 130 and 150 BPM, with some producers choosing to go above or below this tempo bracket. The tracks are characterized by a substantial amount of repetition, which endows them with an immersive feel. Rhythmic elements are programmed with drum machines or sequencers included in Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and are combined with melodic, harmonic, and textural elements. The experimental approach toward sound selection is facilitated by the usage of analog and digital synthesizers, sometimes vocal samples, textures, sound effects, arpeggiators, and various effect plugins. It is often described as "music that sounds like technology" rather than technology used to make traditional music. Techno is a futuristic genre, essentially rooted in a machine-like, sci-fi aesthetic”.
When you think or listen to techno, you should always look for intensity, novelty, force, power, and movement, the immersive beats. You should be able to identify the repetition and minimalism, the industrial, dark feel it gives, like something that could be produced in a factory-like or spaceship-like setting. Techno relies on textures, sound design, squelchy synths rather than on vocal melodies. In a discussion I had some years ago with the Wizard himself and one of the most influential and pioneering personalities in the history of techno, Jeff Mills, he cited again that
“techno is like a spaceship that no one is actually piloting. This genre just floats aimlessly and doesn't travel in any particular direction. And for me, that's its greatest strength”.
Some years after this exchange we had, and during the last year, Mills started posting various images through his Facebook page under the quote “this is techno”. Art pieces, pictures of specific artists, visual artists’ works, images from space, films, robots, black African tribes, spaceships, alien abductions parade in front of our eyes, sparking discussions in the comments as to what influence or reality the taciturn genius of Mills points to. I personally find it a soul-stirring, sentimental, esoteric, and utterly eloquent way of setting the record straight and educating the listener on the origins and the true meaning of techno. After all, he is the one who described it as "everything you haven't imagined yet".
So, dear gentle reader,
have we finally come to a point of understanding what exactly techno is?
Of course not. Techno is vast, an endless sonic exploration and experimentation; it has no boundaries, but at the same time, it draws distinctive lines. As a result, it is easier to identify what is not techno.
Few tracks on the Beatport Peak Time / Driving list are techno - they are big room EDM, or peak time trance, instead. They heavily borrow from trance, hardcore, industrial and are structured around hooks, drops, and builds. Their aesthetics may look similar, but their structures are not. Hard style and commercial festival “hard dance” is not techno: their lineage is rooted in the Dutch scenes. The 150+ BPM, distorted kicks, and reversed basslines evolved from techno influences but manifested as a different genre. Let’s say it out loud for the people at the back: “Melodic techno” is actually sped-up progressive house that gives emphasis on harmony, emotional build-ups, and dramatic releases. Remember, techno avoids emotional stories like the plague. Jungle or breakbeat-derived tracks are not techno. Even though they share a common lineage and can sometimes overlap, the 160-180 BPM tempo, broken drum patterns, and heavy basslines point to a different, more chaotic, separate genre. Tech House is a hybrid, a fusion of the two genres. It is groove-oriented and swing-driven, relying heavily on the house rhythm. When you hear funk and groove, you are definitely closer to house than techno.
Schranz is actually perceived as a sub-genre of hard techno, as its high BPM and extremely loop-based structure point to its connection to a derivative spawned in early-millennial Germany. The new “hard techno” should take the offence for borrowing from this genre and distorting its history. Electro is a parallel genre, visibly influenced by the early Detroit days and electro funk. It might sound robotic and futuristic, but the broken rhythms and the existence of groove tell a different story. EBM / Industrial preceded techno and influenced its sharper apexes. But they both rely on the classic song structure with a heavy use of vocals, which means aggression is not techno by default. We must listen deeper, closer, and constantly educate ourselves to reach the understanding that yes, genres can overlap, but hybridity should be recognized and addressed head-on so that we refrain from perceiving it as a dominant genre.
There was a time in history during which, when we were labelling something as “techno,” it meant we were pointing to a specific heritage, a deep philosophy of sound, and a cultural position. Today, the term is nonchalantly applied to anything electronic, fast, dark, loud, or simply “exotic”, out of our usual comfort zone. Festivals, streaming platforms, ticketing companies, brands, and even artists themselves shamelessly stretch the label until it becomes nearly meaningless. The result is a whirlwind of confusion for listeners, a despicable distortion of history, and a flattening - let me bluntly say, white-washing of one of electronic music’s most conscientiously constructed forms. Yes, genres can evolve, dissolve, and be reinvented. They can build on their history, transforming into something current. These thoughts are put out there as a concern with no intention of gatekeeping. It is a plea for precision, context, and cultural literacy. I am one of the biggest fans of polyphony - I have always adored and championed the coexistence of many sounds, frequencies, approaches, takes, and scenes. But I am also a devoted advocate of “tekhnē”, art as a vehicle of human expression, and in troubling times, language can be a weapon. Popularity and simplification have the power to erase stories, people, foundations, innovation, and most importantly, resisting ecosystems.
read more from Fofi Tsesmeli: Stop Calling Everything“RAVE”!
