The Meaning of Techno

Music gives voice to value. Listen to the sounds of any culture and you’re likely to gain a glimpse into the hearts of its people. From Baroque odes like The Four Seasons, to melancholy Mississippi blues, compositions make the most private of feelings manifest. Art has a unique ability to map the spaces where words fail.

How, then, should we understand techno? This most serious of electronic genres has kept the pulse of hipster youth for decades. A knowing observer sees its influence everywhere, welling up from the underground to inflect popular genres with a mechanized timbre. From Detroit to Tokyo, artists have proved that this generation revels in industrial sound – electric guitars are for the Baby Boomers.

Yet for all its popularity, techno, with its unlikely suburban Michigan roots, remains enigmatic, difficult to pin down. It’s certainly curious that followers are equally likely to describe the experience in futurist and primitive terms, embracing the otherworldliness of technology while reveling in the raw power of rhythm. In trying to make sense of it all, researchers such as Graham St. John have proposed that the genre is really an atheistic religion. As high priests spin vinyl records, adherents tune in to a primal beat and drop out of the default world. The ecstatic tribalism of techno offers a bright alternative to the destructive tribalism of modern politics.

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