UMEK Picks The Best in Peak Time, Driving and Hard Techno

Considering the amount of nagging from users who struggle to get through thousands of releases in today’s hyper-productive world, the never-ending debate on what is and isn’t techno and how tracks on Beatport are listed, I believe splitting one genre selection into two distinct sub-departments was the right decision. The separation will help people find music they are looking for faster while giving everybody the ability to dig for all genres and sub-genres freely. I believe both styles are still very much techno, but at the same time, I’ll hopefully save an hour or two every week searching for the music I need for my sets and know where most of the tracks I might like are hiding.

In a way, this also reflects the growth of the techno scene. When I started to DJ back in the early ’90s, you could hear everything from house to techno, breakbeat, drum & bass, and a bunch of other genres at the same party on one floor in one night. Fast-forward a couple of years, the scene has split, and mixing all styles in one room became very rare. Later, as the audience grew, the genre-based scenes have started to separate further, and in recent years it’s become quite normal that somebody who listens to a specific style of techno doesn’t listen to other shades of the genre at all. Beatport’s decision to divide its techno section into two well-defined categories — [Peak Time/Driving/Hard] and Techno [Raw/Deep/Hypnotic] — is merely catering to what’s happening at festivals and in clubs all over the world.

Another good outcome of the split is the fact that producers with a less mainstream sound will now have a better chance for their releases to get noticed, allowing for additional breakthroughs in various techno circles that would not have happened otherwise.