It’s 100% a culture, it’s more ‘culture’ than ‘art’… compare it to something like Irish folk music, the music IS the culture. Trying to measure either by high-brow academic art standards completely misses the point. If you don’t get it, that’s fine.
look, if Techno was any good Drexciya wouldn’t have made electro. Ergo it’s TERRIBLE.
guys. seriously*.
*not seriously.
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Dreams of headlining the EDC would be a fantasy come true for me. I see folks with laptops and Ableton on stage wowing millions of fans high on X and looks like good gig to get. But I would be using my Elektrons and modular synths besides just a laptop and Ableton and even play some bass and electric guitar.
I was never a part of techno culture and my clubbing experience was pretty much limited to going to see PVD and Sasha and Digweed every month in the late 90s, which was fun in the moment but not music that does much for me as an active listener, especially 20+ years later. I only started listening/exploring techno the last couple years and really don’t understand the genera with all its subgeneras and such so my perspective on the music is totally different than someone who was involved in the scene and lifestyle which I think gives the music a different sort of personal meaning to me. If you read about Burial (yes I know he doesn’t make techno) he wasn’t actually going to dubstep shows back in the day, his brother was and he was influenced through him. It shows how we can be open or experience music in different ways and derive our own personal meaning from it despite not being active participants, or whatever…
Edit: also, I often think artists who are too embedded in the culture of a music genre to the extent that they care about the culture or ethos etc. more than the actually art sort of limit themselves creatively, but maybe they have more fun…
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My proper clubbing days were even earlier than yours, and to be honest I’ve little or no fondness for any of the music that was my world back then.
Each to their own, but I find it baffling and even a little depressing when middle-aged ‘music lovers’ can’t get beyond the ‘classics.’
For 1 I think most of it is actually shit, but secondly there’s a world of new music that’s pushed the boundaries into so much more Interesting places.
I’m tentatively dipping my toe back into DJing and did a spot a couple of weeks ago.
I was asked what I was going to play and the only description was ‘no classics, no anthems.’
Nearly everything I played was less than a couple of years old and relatively new to me.
I have zero enthusiasm for playing stuff that and I everyone else has heard a thousand times.
It’s why I’ll have no success with it.
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Totally get your point but I don’t think it was dubstep his brother was going to and listening to late at night. More the proto genres like UK garage and 2-step. And he mainly heard it through a wall, or so I’m led to believe, when his brother came back for an after party. So Burial took that muffled late-night listening experience, combined it with his favourite video game soundtracks (like Metal Gear Solid), and turned it into his own style. He gets unfairly lumped into dubstep because his music arrived at the same time dubstep was popular in the UK but it has more in common with UK garage and old-school rave, imo. Anyway, it’s fascinating how he came up with his own sound world.
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Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I do love Burial but am indifferent to most dubstep so that makes sense.
Edit: do you think it’s bullshit that he made all those great albums in soundforge and never learned to use a sequencer? @craig
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No, I think it’s true, especially when you consider how wildly off the grid everything is. He’s just moving audio around and really listening to the feeling. Rather than visually creating music and aligning things to a grid, he’s micro adjusting everything with no background timing reference.
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That’s what I recall reading and that he knew he had a good drum track going when it looked like a fish scale if I remember correctly… certainly a case of someone innovating with limited tools or in part because of technical limitations.
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This has just come on iPlayer. I watched it last night and really enjoyed it. It’s not massively in-depth but it’s got some good contributors and interviews. It sort of affirms that there really is fuck all going on these days other than ‘Influencers in the wild’ 
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