Electronic, Techno & Dance : Technofy Your Mind: Cybotron and 30 Years of Detroit Techno

Technofy Your Mind: Cybotron and 30 Years of Detroit Techno

Techno is black music. True, there’s more to it, but that statement can be justified on both general and specific grounds. General: its genealogical forbears, whether it came of age in Europe, America or elsewhere, are Disco and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the black roots of which are not in dispute. Specific: the earliest releases of bona fide Techno—not to mention the genre name itself—came from four black dudes trying to imagine the future in inner-eighties Detroit. And if you want to get technical, you can throw in the foundational influence of Chicago’s mostly black inventors of Acid House, which together with the “Detroit sound” swept post-industrial Europe in the late eighties and created electronic dance music as we know it. None of which is to diminish the importance of such Euro-pioneers as Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, and Gary Numan, or of Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. But Americans often mistake modern Techno for a foreign import. It is not.

Preliminaries out of the way, let us now praise Cybotron’s Enter, released in 1983 and reissued last month by Fantasy Records. Enter is not really a Techno album. You see, it has guitar solos in it. But it is a Techno album. You see, it has the driving beats, the hollow snares, the squelchy bass lines, the sweeping atmospherics. Most of all, Enter is an unlikely album, the product of a Hendrix-riffing Vietnam vet collaborating with a precocious teenage futurist within the very specific context of deindustrializing, urban-crisis Detroit. There will never be another album like it.







http://theappendix.net/posts/2014/01/technofy-your-mind

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