20 tracks every techno fan should know

20 tracks every techno fan should know

8 September, 2009 | 9.00AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: 20 years of dance music

From Detroit, it spread east and west like a virus, using microchips, circuit boards, and wires as vessels. It mutated, and split into separate strains, each with their own unique characteristics - hard, deep, and dub, minimal, melodic, and ambient, tribal, ghetto, and acid - all different, but all with the indelible mark of Detroit techno forever stamped into its genes.

What started as just an after school project for Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson in the mid-1980s, became one of the most exciting genres of modern music known to man. A quarter of a century later, techno is as exciting as it ever was.

Technology, electronics, and the dreams of many have helped its evolution, but how did we get here? An attempt to build a timeline for any music genre would be a mammoth task, let alone for techno and its multitude of fractured sounds, and we do not claim to come even close with this list.

Instead, we offer you 20 tracks from techno’s forefathers that we feel were integral to the development of the genre. This list could run and run, and there are probably thousands of tracks worthy of inclusion, but we hope that techno fans will at least agree on the importance of these artists and their records.

Here are 20 tracks every techno fan should know about (by all means, feel free to add your own suggestions to this list in the comments section below).

Terrace ‘War Zone’ (Motor City Mix) [Djax-Up-Beats] (1990)

Discogs calls Terrace aka Stefan Robbers “one of techno’s true unsung heroes”, and as the first techno artist on Saskia Slegers’ hugely influential Eindhoven-based label Djax-Up-Beats, Robbers’ music helped warp the original Detroit blueprint into various conceptual spin-offs.

For most of the 90s, Djax-Up-Beats led techno as many of the world’s DJ elite followed the label religiously (including Sven Väth). Terrace’s output, which includes the phenomenal acid-tinged ‘War Zone’, was sinister, futuristic, and ground-breaking. 

Joey Beltram ‘Energy Flash’ [R&S] (1990)

British music critic Simon Reynolds considers Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’ the greatest techno track of all time, and even used it as the title for his 1998 book ‘Energy Flash: A journey through rave music and dance culture’, a comprehensive history of rave music (the American version was renamed Generation Ecstasy).

The track was originally picked up by Belgian label R&S, and then later had a US release on Derrick May’s Transmat imprint. With its throbbing radioactive bass and whispers of “ecstasy”, there is no greater rave anthem. Beltram was just 18-years-old when it was released. For more information, read our recent interview with Joey Beltram about ‘Energy Flash’.

Public Energy ‘Three O Three’ [Probe Records] (1991)

‘Three O Three’ was one of Dutch techno pionner Speedy J’s earliest club hits, and it helped introduce Jochem George Paap to worldwide audiences.

Referencing the machine that created them, the acid sounds of ‘Three O Three’ featured on his seminal four tracker ‘Hemi-Sync’ under the alias Public Energy, became a cult classic upon its release in 1991.

Along with Steffan Robbers, Speedy J is regularly named as a linchpin of European techno.

Fuse ‘F.U.’ [Probe Records] (1991)

Fuse’s ‘F.U.’ was a futuristic push for techno, that saw acid lines collide with alien frequencies. Released on Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva’s second label, Probe Records (just recently made available digitally), Hawtin’s early guise as Fuse was a blend of melodic techno and intelligent dance music before the ‘IDM’ tag was coined and connected ambient excursions to pristine techno. 

The bulk of Fuse’s recordings was primarily collected on 1993’s ‘Dimension Intrusion’ album. After that chapter closed, another began for Hawtin - Plastikman.

CJ Bolland ‘Mantra’ [R&S Records] (1992)

CJ Bolland (Christian Jay Bolland) was essential to the early Belgium techno scene, with the majority of his work released on the hughly impactful R&S label.

His 1991 ‘Ravesignal III’ EP, specifically, the track ‘Horsepower’, made Bolland one of the hottest names in the new global dance community, but it was his debut album ‘The 4th Sign’ which cemented his reputation as one of the foremost thinkers of techno.

‘Mantra’, ‘Thrust’, and ‘Spring Man’ in particular blew away clubs and home listeners in 1992.

DBX ‘Frogger’ [Probe Records] (1992)

Daniel Bell aka DBX, Cybersonic (and more) is a slave to the raw, stripped down sound of machines, and he has flown the flag for minimal since his rampant start in 1991 when he worked with Hawtin and Acquaviva.

DBX later made minimal techno history by releasing ‘Losing Control’, in which you can hear his developments early on in his Probe releases.

Content behind the scenes and relatively press-shy, Bell continues to DJ internationally, and performed a rare 100% hardware set at 2008’s Movement Festival in Detroit.

Basic Channel ‘Axis’ [Basic Channel] (1993)

Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus’ rich contribution to techno is now widely recognized (and would take over a whole chapter in the history book of techno). Their Basic Channel label was vital to the development of the genre, and with their second release ‘Phylyps Trak’ they created one of techno’s lasting legacies.

An intricate three tracker that laid the foundations of dub techno, ‘Phylyps Trak’ and ‘Phylyps Base’ are celebrated, but ‘Axis’ had just as much of an impact in clubs.

The Martian ‘Stardancer’ [Red Planet] (1993)

The Martian is a mysterious project from Detroit’s Underground Resistance camp, and the artist’s full identity has never been disclosed but there are some links to Drexciya, James Pennington (aka Suburban Knight), Octave One and UR.

Pure interplanetary techno, ‘Stardancer’ pushed the tempo up while staying true to Detroit techno. Released during the era when the Detroit sound, especially the hard-hitting sounds of UR, went global, surpassing the ego and creating myth behind faceless dance music.

Cari Lekebusch ‘Live And Direct C’ [H-Productions] (1994)

Before Adam Beyer brought Swedish techno to the masses, fellow Swede Cari Lekebusch had a number of international club hits as Braincell on Sven Väth´s Harthouse label, as Fred on Missile Records, and on his own freshly started Hybrid label.

His early productions, especially under Braincell and Agent Orange (on the Swedish Loop imprint), were hybrids of trance and techno, but it didn’t take long for Lekebusch to establish his unique style of reductionist techno, as characterised by his 1994 hit EP ‘Live And Direct’.

Robert Hood ‘Museum’ [Axis] (1994)

A milestone for techno, Robert Hood’s album ‘Minimal Nation’ stripped techno down to its framework, and is now widely considered to be the blueprint for the modern minimal techno sound.

Released on Jeff Mills’ Axis imprint, to this day it remains strikingly lucid and powerful. ‘Minimal Nation’ is truly timeless, and ‘Museum’ was one of the LP’s standout moments (although there are many).

Hood was a founding member of Underground Resistance along with Mad Mike Banks and Mills, and he continues to DJ and produce today.

Neil Landstrumm ‘Custard Traxx’ [Peacefrog] (1995)

Cristian Vogel and his friends Neil Landstrumm, Tobias Schmidt, and Subhead, created their own unique techno sound, often referred to as the “Brighton sound”, because all of the artists at the time lived in Brighton, England.

Most of Landstrumm’s albums were released on the legendary Berlin label Tresor (as was most of the work of the Brighton collective), but this track, taken from his seminal debut album ‘Brown By August’ on Peacefrog, was the pinnacle of his opus.

The album’s ‘Shake The Hog’ could also feature in our list of 20 integral techno tracks.

Carl Craig ‘Science Fiction’ (1995)

Carl Craig broke out ahead of the pack with this futuristic soundtrack that had a very positive lift in production quality from his work as 69, Psyche/BFC, and Paperclip People. Gone was the sexiness and dirty loopy punches that made his sound funky. 

‘Landcrusing’ was the original title of the album in 1995, released on Warner Brothers in the UK through Blanco y Negro. It was a sonic leap for ‘listening’ techno and Carl’s future production sound. 

A few years ago, Rushhour re-issued the album with many new edits by Carl and re-titled it ‘The Album Formerly Known As...’. 

The one single from the original album was ‘Science Fiction’, which was tight and tough techno but with a European influence (think Giorgio Moroder, Yello, Kraftwerk) and finesse which helped launch Carl into his own extraordinary orbit.

Cristian Vogel ‘Bite And Scratch’ [Tresor] (1996)

Cristian Vogel is one of the true geniuses of electronic music, and the original creator of the “Brighton sound”. He was the first British artist signed to Berlin’s Tresor imprint. 

His debut full-length ‘Beginning to Understand’ was released in 1994 on Mille Plateaux, but it was his ‘Body Mapping’ album on Tresor that perhaps represents the peak of his techno brilliance.

‘Bite And Scratch’ was the hit of the LP. Later Vogel launched his own label Mosquito, and formed the band Super Collider with Jamie Lidell.

Jeff Mills ‘The Dancer’ [Purpose Maker] (1996)

Jeff Mills kept pressing plants alive in the 1990s. His Axis sub-label, Purpose Maker, was pure gold for his unique otherworldly sounds, with ‘The Dancer’ at the core of his rhythmic and atmospheric blend of techno. 

Minimal attributes were aligned with sneaky samples and jacking beats all designed for the DJ. 

This was during a time when Mills had moved from New York (where he lived in the early 90s) to Chicago to establish Axis, so there was a new influence to his recordings on Purpose Maker.

In his own words, Mills explained the Purpose Maker sound in an open letter:

The Purpose Maker formula is the accumulation of basic ideas and methods that I had been taught as a DJ in my early years while living in Detroit. At that time, it was the weekday ritual to search out all the local record shops in the area to find obscure records that either had dub versions or enough breakdown or ‘break’ so that DJs could extend those parts to a point that literally appear to be instrumental versions, made by mixing the two or three copies together or stripping certain frequencies out of each track to manually construct a new record.

In the early 90’s, as minimal techno took effect and the growing need to have tracks that simply ‘stood still’ became more sought after, it gave me the idea to create a label that was completely devoted to this technique. Percussion or the feel of percussive sounds is a common thread that runs throughout most Purpose Maker tracks. In most cases, actual percussion sounds were not used, instead, inverted percussion sampled loops took their place.

In the beginning, I knew that all the tracks had to be mix compatible and designed in a way that was very easy for DJs of all levels to quickly program. Rather then using the norm of allowing the track to grow after a few minutes to the best part, I decided to put the best part at the very beginning of the track: making the first few minutes of the track feel as if the DJ was mixing in the breakdown or break.

Also, I had assumed that DJs would greatly apply the use of the Equalizer (EQ) to alter the impression of the track to create more depth and various textures and transitions. Certain sounds are strategically inputted in the tracks, sounds that would be more sensitive to frequency modifications.

Of all the symbols and insinuations around Purpose Maker, nothing is more noticeable than the ghostly label artwork that is used. The Dancing Female became the insignia of the feeling one might achieve by listening to the music. Similar to a natural high or orgasmic feeling one would get through physically moving, the figure of the woman refers to an ultimate feeling or enlightenment. Spiritually touched.

The Purpose Maker is not a person or sound. It is a process where upon one person passes or receives warm and genuine feelings on to another. It is the unconditional act of connecting.

-Jeff Mills

Regis ‘HE.3’ [Downwards] (1997)

While most of the techno artists from the UK had their background either in acid house, early progressive, or funk and hip hop, the Birmingham camp, which was based around Regis and Surgeon, had their roots in industrial.

Regis and Surgeon were close friends of Mick Harris (Scorn) of Napalm Death fame, and he helped them out with their initial productions and studio experiments.

Regis aka Karl O’Connor began his own label Downwards, which enabled Surgeon and himself to breakthrough and at one point, it was one of the best selling techno labels worldwide. The imprint’s sound was inspired equally by Throbbing Gristle, Basic Channel, and Jeff Mills.

The label’s compilation ‘Hard Education’ featured its entire artist roster, with Surgeon, Regis, Portion Reform, and Female each contributing two tracks.

There are so many Downwards tracks that could be included in this list, but in the end we settled on Regis’ ‘HE.3’, for its heavy minimal drum patterns and meticulous sonic details were exactly what Downwards came to represent.

Steve Stoll ‘Captive’ [Proper NYC] (1997)

At the height of the New York techno sound, Steve Stoll was front and center with his raw cuts of acid, bendy synths and driving rhythms. A mixture of east meets west, his style and focus had Detroit and Chicago roots but an alliance with the European sounds from Holland and Germany in the early 1990s. 

Stoll’s Proper NYC label released mainly his own output, under Blunted Boy Wonder and other aliases but also the likes of Cari Lekebusch, Freddy Fresh, Damon Wild, Kaay Alexi, Woody McBride and others.

‘Captive’ remains one of Stoll’s all-time classics.

Steve Rachmad ‘Skyance’ [Music Man Records] (1998)

Steve Rachmad championed the soulful and deep sounds of Detroit in The Netherlands, and alongside Stefan Robbers, he is considered a forefather of Dutch techno.

Now a globally respected producer, DJ, and remixer, Rachmad’s productions tend to centre around instrumental grooves that combine fragmented melodies, funk, and soul.

A producer for over 25 years, Rachmad’s career began to reach new heights from 1996 onwards, and ‘Skyance’ on Belgium’s Music Man Records perhaps represents some of his finest work.

Damon Wild ‘2112’ [Synewave] (1998)

A product of the south, Damon Wild was an important part of the New York collective pushing their take on techno forward in the 1990s. Tougher and bolder than what was coming out of Detroit, his work was central to the core movement along with Lenny Dee, Frankie Bones, Adam X, Function, Steve Stoll, and others. 

‘2112’ took the glitzy waltz into a lighter mood while keeping the distortion at heart. Noise was always an element of his sound, and this is melodic and moving.

Surgeon ‘LaReal Part 1’ [Counterbalance] (1999)

Surgeon had his breakthrough on Regis´ Downwards label and after releasing on Tresor Records, he later started his own imprints.

First came Dynamic Tension, then later Counterbalance. ‘La Real’ is one of his biggest hits and helped bring Counterbalance to techno’s centre stage - a sublime concoction of tribal techno and electronic funk.

Richie Hawtin ‘Minus/Orange 1’ (1999)

Riding (cleared) Yello samples from the band’s classic single ‘Oh Yeah’, Hawtin delivered one of the 90’s biggest bombs by re-editing, re-looping and re-introducing the 1985 hit to many new DJs. 

The industrial influence of Skinny Puppy, Front 242, and Nitzer Ebb had a big effect on a teenage Hawtin and you can feel that energy in ‘Minus/Orange 1’. 

It closed out a certain era for him and dancefloor hits as he took Plastikman deeper into space and focused more on exploring and re-inventing the mix album through his ‘DE9’ style of performing with turntables, effects and a live 909 drum machine in the late 1990s.

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