The Origins of the Berlin Techno Scene
Via Unsplash
By Charlie Standen, Third Year History
Last August, I stood amidst a sea of party-goers that swelled the pavement for a couple of hundred metres outside Tresor, Berlin. Tresor is a club located in the vault of a disused department store, one of the many clubs that cropped up in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin wall. While in the queue, my friend and I were nervous. Berlin has a notoriously strict door policy and Adam-X, a spritely grey-haired legend of the scene, was playing. I, feeling as much of a Berliner as I ever would, decked out in black, freshly shorn off all my hair, and with bug-eyed sunglasses atop my head, snobbishly commented on the Americans in front of us who clearly didn’t know ‘what it was all about’. ‘Normies! Posers!’, I whispered excitedly. My friend reminded me that Adam-X was in fact American and I ended up sulking for a couple of minutes.
This sulk brought on silent contemplation. It seems a given that techno is a European phenomenon, with Berlin as its Mecca. Berghain, Fabrik, Hex, Fold, Spazio 900, RSO Berlin; such clubs are seldom in such dense clusters outside the continent, and they lure in many party-goers from abroad every year. Across the musical spectrum, from the slower, hypnotic sets of Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, to the teeth-chattering BPM of Klangkuenstler and SPFDJ, European names spill out the mouths of techno-enthusiasts. This has been the case for twenty years. But is it fair, and has it always been this way?
The Berlin techno enthusiasts, dressed up in their finest bondage gear and armed with chewing gum, amphetamines, cigarettes, and water, owe their hedonistic pleasure to a very non-European origin: Detroit. Out of the Motor City, creating a clean break from the pre-existing disco culture, was born techno. Straight from the bedroom of a certain Juan Atkins. The mid-1980s saw Atkins, along with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, utilise various synthesisers such as the beloved Roland TR-909 to create bizarre sounds utterly distinct from any obvious musical antecedents. Weird. Jarring. Alien music. However, this group quickly became adept at utilising electronic equipment and experimentation soon turned to mastery with the production of tracks such as ‘No UFOs’. Detroit producers soon influenced, and lent equipment to, their friends in Chicago and so was born the Chicago house scene. A flourishing electronic music scene spread across the American landscape and soon began to turn European heads.
A whole generation of Black Detroit producers and DJs were encouraged to play in mainland Europe, enticed by big venues and enthusiastic audiences. Jeff Mills and his group 'Underground Resistance still play regularly across the continent today. Though, unfortunately, the legacy of Atkins and other pioneers has faded into the ‘dustbin of history’. Black American influence on the techno scene is seldom appreciated if acknowledged at all. Atkins himself laments the current ignorance and confesses that he has struggled with seeing European DJs completely dominating the club scene. A phenomenon which he believes to be steeped in tacit racism. Such racism can only be challenged by the techno-enthusiasts of today giving a quick glance at the history of the music they are so passionate about. Eurocentrism is not only a narrow perspective when applied to techno music, but it is also fundamentally incorrect.