Ohrenschmaus

Though the various components repeat themselves incessantly, it’s how they interact and build that determines the sound — and that’s the essence of most electronic dance music, that complex interplay between several repetitive elements.
(The AMG on Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 which was recorded in 1981)

Formulated like this it seems to make sense. The repetition of the elements drum machine loop, guitar line and synth figure is not 100% linear. There is a dynamic operator fusing those three in the equation. But as can be heard in this small extract the variational element is too small to not bore the listener even after less than five minutes. This piece actually goes on for almost one hour. A torture for anybody who hasn’t taken the adequate drugs. The funny thing about this track is that it is actually by Manuel Göttsching who was in Ash Ra Tempel from Berlin, one of the early krautrock bands. They were electronic pioneers playing similar spherical music as Tangerine Dream. Klaus Schulze was even a member of Ash Ra Tempel. So in the end techno was just one little twig from a particular branch of the huge krautrock tree. And it became a German speciality again.

This hypnotic live song is originally from 1983’s The Crackdown. Totally different from the two tracks I posted before which were machine music whereas this has a very human touch. Especially the phantastic tribal drumming together with the deeply resonating bass gives it a funky down to earth groove. This sounds very much like something from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Eno & Byrne. It has a world music vibe which is married with some out of this world synthesizer sounds and Stephen Mallinder’s singing which in places sounds like scat, i.e. random syllables. It’s great that there are still amazing bands like that out there for me to discover.

There is 70 billion people over there. Where are they hiding?

This is from 1982. And I like it. It sounds like techno. But techno didn’t exist (under that name) at the time. Why in the world do I find techno so brainless? And this inspired in comparison? One reason might be that I don’t really know techno, another that techno arrived too late in my life. In 1990 I was 27, my music taste was more or less forged already. Which is actually not true. I discovered indie in form of the Pixies, the Blue Aeroplanes, My Bloody Valentine, PJ Harvey etc. And I loved all of them. I always found that techno was a stupid name. Which was actually fitting the music very well. I think namewise I would prefer a genre called no tech. Another reason why I like this song is that sentence with the 70 billion people. Either there are billions of people on other planets or the song was recorded in the future. And the future is bright as mankind will not only survive but propagate.

they sound like music played by really shitty robots, like if you’d buried an early prototype of Kraftwerk in toxic sludge, then accidentally uncovered them two hundred years later and OH SHIT THEY’RE STILL ALIVE WHAT AN UNSPEAKABLY HORRIBLE EXISTENCE (q)

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I never really got into them before tonight. But right now they seem to be the greatest band of all-time. Or at least of post-punk. After having listened to them I understand even less what all the fuss about techno was about. They made techno in the early eighties. And it sounded so much better than any techno I have ever listened to. It was inventive, varied, obsessed. Besides that they were into synths, dance, dub, funk, punk, tribal rhythms, industrial, noise, goth, trash, medieval choirs almost anything that gave music a distinctive flavour in the past 30 years. Put Suicide, New Order, The Pop Group, Einstürzende Neubauten, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, the Talking Heads and PIL into a mixer and the result will be something like the Cabs.