A Comprehensive History of Techno and Finding God in the Music with Ellen Allien

Editorial A Comprehensive History of Techno and Finding God in the Music With Ellen Allien Kian McHugh | August 3, 2020 When my Zoom call with Ellen Allien connects, at last, I feel weeks of anticipation turn to uncontrollable excitement. My fingers, sweaty from nerves, and a poorly brewed Starbucks coffee, type out the instructions on how to get her audio configured. Ellen is lounging in her Ibiza flat where she has painted all of the walls completely black so that when the sun shines through her window, the room glows yellow. The first fully formed thought I could pencil down was that her posture seemed to denote a sincere attention to detail and confidence in comfort that most others lack. For the first 2 minutes of the call, we both instinctively laugh, muted, and unaware that our discussion of Techno would soon gravitate toward, and then find unexpected momentum in… a deep consideration of Techno, God, and religion. “Rap is where you rst heard it… If rap is more an American phenomenon, techno is where it all comes together in Europe as producers and musicians engage in a dialogue of dazzling speed.” – Jon Savage (English writer, broadcaster and music journalist). In Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2019 book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, he so beautifully praises “the low end” of a track: “The feeling of something familiar that sits so deep in your chest that you have to hum it out … where the bass and the kick drums exist.” His point rings true across all music that is heavily percussion driven. Take Jazz, for example, in which Abdurraqib explains “the low end is not only desired but prayed to.” As Ellen Allien and I discuss the sound of Techno, the language shifts from “listen” to “feel”— feel the low end, sit comfortably in the vibration, lose yourself to the repetition, find God. MOMA Ralf Hütter, of Kraftwerk, explains, “The ‘soul’ of the machines has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life… in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything… so, the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance” (Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music). In techno, the low end is not only desired but prayed to. Abdurraqib’s poetry breathes life into the low end, just as Ellen Allien’s description of isolated percussion points to something bigger than her existence: “I imagine the low end to be a bassline that rattles your teeth, too. But I also consider the low end to be the smell of someone you once loved coming back to you.” Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) “I have ashbacks, that are, just uplifting, or I feel more of my soul because of the experience [I once felt] in the club.” Ellen Allien Both seem to access something that cannot be seen. Is this faith? First Techno (Kraftwerk 1970) Kraftwerk performing live in Soest (1970) Kraftwerk, a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, and the philosophy of an American writer and futurist, Alvin Toffler, were the foreign seeds that cross pollinated with George Clinton’s P Funk repertoire in Detroit to inspire the infancy of Techno. If you don’t know the name, George Clinton practically created “cool” in the 1960s and set the framework for Afrofuturism– “the concept that the future can and will be black.” He continues to break barriers today at 79 years old. George Clinton and the P Funk crew “In the inevitable movement of musical ideas from the avant-garde to pop, from black to white and back again, it’s easy to forget that blacks are equally as capable, if not more, of being technological and futuristic as whites…” Machine Soul Still, Kraftwerk is positioned at the top of the Electronic Music family tree as they were the first to assemble a futuristic orchestra of synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders that reached the mainstream ear. With this in mind, all forms of Electronic Music, including Techno, were influenced, in part, by them. Lastly, Toffler’s 1980, counter-cultural text, The Third Wave, called for “Techno-Rebels” — those outside of “the usual tiny elite of scientists, engineers, politicians, and businessmen” — to take control of technology and information to prevent the “the risk [of] irreversible damage to the planet.” In short, Toffler’s philosophy provided inspiration for the name and established the early intention behind the genre. The Belleville Three (Left: Kevin Saunderson, Center: Derrick May, Right: Juan Atkins) P Funk, Kraftwerk, Toffler, and presumably many other variables pushed three brilliant, Black high schoolers – Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson – to expand the foundations of Afrofuturism, experiment with new sounds and song structures, and change the popular culture for good. These impossible geniuses, later known as The Belleville Three, pioneered a genre and gave it a name with intention: Techno Music. Derrick May’s description of the conception of Techno is random and thus biblical, with the Motor City as its setting: Techno happened “just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator.” The sounds they partied to and discovered on Electrifying Mojo’s nightly radio show, which ran for five hours without format restrictions, were chopped, played with, and reimagined on Roland Drum Machines that would slowly pump life to the night of the industrial city that they called home (MACHINE SOUL). NPR A catalyst for Detroit Techno’s cultural prowess was the momentary renaissance and revolution that the mass-exodus of conservative white people from the inner city to the suburbs prompted just before the 70’s. In 1967, a police raid exploded into a 5-day violent protest in response to the city’s ruthless housing segregation which kept Blacks out of certain neighborhoods, the presence and blind acceptance of the KKK, police brutality against Blacks throughout Michigan, and countless other cases of rampant institutionalized racism. LA Times The riot, in which 7,231 people were arrested, 43 people were killed, 2,509 businesses reported looting or damage, 388 families were rendered homeless, and 412 buildings were burned or damaged enough to be demolished, was America’s most violent and destructive protest since the 1863 New York City draft riots (Detroit Riots History). Techno Rebels In the city’s search for a silver lining, those empty buildings that were left abandoned in the inner city blossomed like flowers in the concrete and the first Techno events outside of the confines of garages and house parties went off, into the darkest hours of the night. The Electronic Music scene in the US remained new and vibrant but was largely confined to the underground and seemingly kept safe behind closed doors, like much of the country’s creative counterculture at the hands of people of color. BBC Shortly thereafter (the late 80s/early 90s), Europe’s open-minded youth and music aficionados took Detroit’s sound international. Raves in London and the surrounding cities were popularized by “white producers [who] took the music in a harder-edged direction, replacing [The Belleville Three’s] dreamy elegance with aggressive riffs and druggy sample textures” (Britannica). This sonic shift, the emerging drug culture in the UK, and the simultaneous rise of Chicago’s Acid House scene fueled the wild start to live Electronic Music’s international prowess. Fact Mag It was Aphex Twin—widely regarded as something of a production mastermind—and his iconic 1992 album, Ambient Works, who “trashed the boundaries between acid, techno, ambient, and psychedelic [and] defined a new techno primitive romanticism” (MACHINE SOUL). THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS WOODSTOCK 99 1999 FULL CONCE… Later, “a rowdy, rock-and-roll mutant of techno invaded the American mainstream in 1997, with the success of albums by the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers” (MACHINE SOUL). And then, Techno almost entirely fell off the US charts at the turn of the decade. Happy Mag The emergence of the first UK raves coincided with Ellen’s yearlong escape to London, leaving Berlin (still divided by the wall) to learn English and get her driver’s license. Ellen had recently discovered Kraftwerk herself, recalling that the sound “chang[ed] her hearing completely” and opened a “new dimension [in her] brain [that] created new thoughts.” This coincidental immersion in the infancy of live Electronic Music – my personal favorite anecdote, a story of looking down at Yoko Ono raving the night away – led to a return to Berlin with bags packed full of mind-blowing memories and creative energy. The wall fell in ‘89 and Ellen’s first-hand experience with those disrupting party culture in the UK and her energetic character quickly garnered her recognition as a lead pioneer of Berlin’s legendary Techno scene. Badass. The Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate as viewed from West Berlin, November 1989 Stringer / Reuters Just as the mass exodus of white people from inner-city Detroit opened up countless quasi-venues, the fall of the Berlin Wall presented Ellen and other event promoters with a menu of dystopian spaces that could be turned into makeshift wonderlands. Churches, that both sides in the war left untouched, became a favorite setting for the revolutionary Techno raves. “When I started DJing, I started DJing in bunkers and warehouses,” Ellen said.“Like, big ceilings, just some lights, and big speakers… [it] was a very rough time. It was very dirty and loud. The East and West Wall had just come down, so everything was new. The first parties were in empty places, forgotten places with no owners!” ID Germany Despite my extensive research, I take Ellen’s account of the history of European Techno to be more accurate because she was there: “It was 92, 91, 90, 91, 92.

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