A form of 20th-century club dance music. As its name suggests, it is mostly electronic and at its genesis was a mix of Chicago house music, funk, early hip hop and electro. The term was first used in 1988 to describe the music of the DJs and musicians Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May in Detroit. The style was relatively simple in structure and tempo: like practically all club dance music it was in 4/4, with a pounding bass-drum effect often driving through the music. It was more relentlessly percussive and artificial than the contemporary house music, without which techno, however, would not exist. Beyond the rhythm track and bass line, instrumentation was basic and invariably electronic, a minimalist approach that owed as much to Kraftwerk as to other concurrent dance music. The term soon expanded to take in more mainstream pop such as Saunderson’s Inner City, whose approach was more song-based than before. The synthesized artifice of techno developed still further in the early 1990s, so much so that almost any dance music that could not reasonably be described as house or garage was given the label, from the ambient techno of The Orb or the acid house-influenced music of Baby Ford to the dub reggae-influenced sounds of Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise.
WILL FULFORD-JONES