Techno Friday - not really but.....

Wer mag den Kram eigentlich noch ausser @andyjaypowell oder @steevc - alle weg.......?

No new talents researched

Even they are out there - my current real life in job and privately is too shaky so I am not very active right now - but wanted to give a life sign. Not bothering you with my @music-communitxy stuff and all music tags - today usually was the day I tried to introduce new DJ talents from around the world. But as i get older and have not a lot time in free time I more or less re-find all these sounds I personally consider as the ther basis for techno that became famous in the 1980ies/90ies - and still influence artist and DJS

Kraftwerk of course

But his time not with "Das Modell" oder "Autobahn" - this track is probabnaly a perfect one that other famus DJs got inspured from - love tzhat song.

And when talking about the roots of electronic music, there is simply no way around Kraftwerk.

What fascinates me today is how much of what became normal decades later was already there: repetitive electronic rhythms, synthetic sounds, minimal structures and machines becoming an essential part of the music rather than just tools used to record it.

From Germany those ideas travelled much further than anyone probably expected at the time. Electro, early Hip-Hop, Detroit Techno and later European Techno and Trance all picked up pieces of that electronic language.

But Germany was only one part of the story.

Visage – the UK connection

Another one I rediscovered: Visage.

And they are much more interesting than simply remembering "Fade to Grey" and putting them into the 80s nostalgia box.

Visage started in the late 1970s and were less a traditional band than a kind of electronic project or collective around Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, involving some remarkable musicians: Midge Ure and Billy Currie from the Ultravox world, and Dave Formula, John McGeoch and Barry Adamson from Magazine.

Steve Strange himself is an interesting character in this history. Together with Rusty Egan he was at the centre of London's Blitz Club scene, where electronic music, fashion, art and nightlife came together. That scene eventually became closely associated with what we now call New Romantic.

And listen to the Visage track above with that in mind.

This was around 1979/1980.

Depeche Mode were only just emerging. New Order didn't even exist under that name until 1980. Yet so much of the electronic sound and atmosphere we associate with the early and mid-1980s is already there.

Visage connected synthesizers and electronic rhythms with the club.

And that's perhaps the interesting connection between these two tracks for me.

Kraftwerk from Germany helped create a new electronic musical language.

Visage in the UK took electronic experimentation into a completely different environment: clubs, fashion, nightlife and a new generation that didn't necessarily want guitars to be at the centre of everything anymore.

And the influences were real. Kraftwerk and other German electronic bands were among the music being heard by the people around that London scene.

Then the family tree becomes enormous.

Gary Numan. Ultravox. Human League. Soft Cell. Depeche Mode. New Order.

Elsewhere Giorgio Moroder had already shown what synthesizers and sequencers could do to a dancefloor. Tangerine Dream explored another side of electronic music. Yellow Magic Orchestra were experimenting in Japan. And across the Atlantic, completely different scenes would take those ideas and transform them again.

Eventually we get Electro, House, Detroit Techno and the European Techno and Trance scenes that shaped so much of the music I still love today.

So perhaps getting older and having less time to search for new talents has one advantage.

You start going backwards.

And suddenly realise how incredibly innovative some of this stuff was before we even called it Techno.

Kraftwerk from Germany. Visage from the UK.

Two very different approaches, but for me both are part of the basics for so much of what came afterwards.

And both tracks?

Brett!