At 06:51 PM 4/20/96 -0700, you wrote:
quoted 6 lines remember that several "electronic" bands of the 70s and early 80s are still
>>remember that several "electronic" bands of the 70s and early 80s are still
>>making music and most of them are labeled as techno or ambient.
>
>I'd like to know specifically which bands you mean - certainly Cabaret
>Voltaire is still a going concern but I'd hardly call anything but their
>post-'Code' work ambient or techno...
Precisely my point. These bands started as electronic and at some point they
were labeled techno. At what date precisely, it's hard to say but it did
happen in the 80s, with Hillage however taking the turn only after he had
heard that Alex Paterson was playing his old records in clubs, with just
rhythms added to mix with the rest of the music (ambient house and techno)
and we were not in the 80s anymore.
quoted 1 line Eno's active but he doesn't make techno...
>Eno's active but he doesn't make techno...
Well, depends if you count the remix or not. In fact most early 80 material
that i consider techno is instrumental,"club mixes" sometimes from the band
itself (Rational Youth even has a song that has the word techno in the
mix name, for the song Cite Phosphore).
quoted 2 lines Steve Hillage's pre-System 7 work has some brilliant ambient
>Steve Hillage's pre-System 7 work has some brilliant ambient
>material but nothing I know of that has anything to do with techno.
Hillage made music but also produced other groups. Check out
the brilliant instrumentals on Simple Minds 12". Very idm. Plus,
add a rhythm to some of his early works with Miquette and bang,
idm (see the Orb comment earlier in the text).
Check out space (or is it space art - a french group from the seventies -
i have the album somewhere i'll check it): electronic spacey music with
disco beats - and this is still "a la mode" in techno with the rhythm king,
univox, electro-harmonix, rhythm ace and other preset drum boxes with disco
beats still in use.
Speaking of rhythm ace, i remember at "Reseau Art-Scene" (Art-Scene network)
in 1979 there was a band playing electronic music (very similar to the new
electro wave present in idm these days) and their drum machine was a rhythm
ace, with disco preset. They also had a modular synth. Probably a Roland 100
or something like that. And of course, predating pretty much everybody else
(Pierre Henry did electronic music to which you can dance and has a
construction similar to techno but is definitely electro-acoustic), Kraftwerk.
OMD, Soft Cell and the other bands from the new wave era of the early 80s
also had some interesting b-sides, but still sounded new wave even
if it was instrumental, but i believe that instrumentals from all these
different styles influenced the evolution of techno. Then there are groups
like New Order... I think someone could pinpoint the birth of techno somewhere
between 77 and 83, depending on what is exactly techno. Surely the rhythms,
gear, and absence of vocals are some of the things that generaly define techno.
Again, as i said this is not as clearcut as some would think. There seems to
be a continuous morphing going on from around 1977 to present day. In the
previous paragraphs i used french or french canadian bands for my example,
but this is simply because i know this scene better than the American, but
i'm sure you can dig in those old records and find something.
Ciao,
--
Francois Dion (IdMEDIA) [> Email: francois@hyperreal.com <]
' [>
http://www.hyperreal.com/~francois <]