Techno Music Quotes

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous.

You have to feel the mix and you have to feel the work and the sweet somehow which somebody is investing in that moment in the way that you can really feel the passion.

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.

I am Lulu Deerdancer and I am twenty-nine years old and I am perfectly legal to enter this here homosexual establishment and partake in beverages and repetitive techno music.” “Because you both have been here before.” “Yes,” I said. “Hmm,” the bouncer said. Then Paul sneezed and his mustache flew off his face and landed on the cheek of the bouncer. The silence that followed was slightly awkward. “Huh,” Paul said. “I guess that’s easier than shaving. It’ll certainly revolutionize the facial hair industry.

Oh this place is just delightful,’ replied Eric, making no attempt to disguise his disdain. ‘A bedroom that reeks of stale feet, people falling through ceilings, and German techno music deafening me. What more could I ask for?

Most girls my age don't appreciate this kind of music. In my opinion, this is real music. It's haunting, poetic, and carefully-crafted. Not that techno teeny bopper crap that only sounds good because of all the machines the record label uses to make it.

Bach was the daddy: without him there’d be no jazz, funk or hip-hop; no techno, no house, no grime. He basically wrote the blueprint for everything that was to come. His stuff is wise and witty and capacious enough to contain more than just multitudes: it contains all of everything.

techno boy -- seventeen years old. junior. red car. works at a restaurant. it hurts when he smiles. dandruff. computers, electronic music. seeking a girl that won't eat his heart with a steak knife.

Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable trauma).

It turned out that I really liked the music Lieke played. Techno, apparently. Which was remarkable, as I normally hated electronic music. Well, I had liked ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys in my younger years, and that had contained a theremin, and that is technically an electronic instrument. But you know what I mean. Music that sounds like a robot having a panic attack. Bleep-bleep music. But it turned out I had been missing out.

I’d grown up with disco in the 1970s, when I just knew it as exciting pop music on AM radio. In the 1980s it died off, but still inspired everyone from New Order to Duran Duran to Kraftwerk. And then in the late 1980s the ghost of disco came back with a fury, giving birth to house music, techno, rave culture, and even a lot of hip-hop. Disco was the crucible in which most modern music had been born, and within the disco pantheon no one had ever reigned higher or more supreme than Donna Summer.

Techno emerged in the early to mideighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class DJs who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio DJ who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.

Techno music is the foundational influence upon the modern tunes that saturate the cultural airwaves with unabashed monotony giving today’s tunes all of the lyrical sophistication of a kindergarten merry-go-round rhyme combined with the musical nuances of an electric can opener.

Club kids were generally urban and gay, ravers were generally suburban and straight, and goths lived in basements and spiderwebs. The ravers and club kids shared a love for techno and ecstasy, while the goths loved electronic music and old churches. So the Limelight became home for all three tribes.

I mean, what is electronic music? Hip hop is electronic music, but people don’t think of it in that way necessarily. Some people when they talk about electronic music mean techno, which I love, but it’s not the only electronic music. Everything these days is electronic music.

The coming together of technology, drugs, and music as exemplified in the rave scene seemed to offer a glimpse into a brave new world—a man-machine mash-up that some of the woollier theorists predicted was the future of human evolution. Made-up words such as “sampladelic” and “techno-pagan” summed up the zeitgeist.

Well, daddy?” she said over the trippy techno music. “Want to make my dream come true?” He

The passion for techno is older than techno itself. The passion for drums is older than their invention. And a time will come when the reason for both surpasses them.

Just a few days before, Jason had been part of the noisy street- scape, trying to talk to his aunt Joyce back in Shakopee, Minnesota. To avoid the blaring traffic and techno music, he’d ducked into a quiet construction site, phone pressed against his ear, eyes on his shoes. That was when a hard punch connected with his cheekbone. The phone went flying. Probably the worst text I’ve ever gotten was the one line, Jason’s been mugged. Accounting it later, he would say his military training must have kicked in. “Before I could think about it, I’d kicked the legs out from under one of the guys.” And that was when he said it. Jason uttered a phrase so outrageous, so utterly shameless, it can be used only once per life- time, and until then stored in a special box sternly labeled, In case of emergency, break glass. “It’s terrible; it’s right out of a Steven Seagal direct-to-VHS movie,” he admitted, as I coaxed the story out of him again. “Well, I mustered up my army drill sergeant voice and I barked, ‘Motherf*cker! You want a piece of me?’” Jason claims the second it came out of his mouth, he was already embarrassed. Embarrassed in front of what turned out to be teen boys, kids really, who clearly didn’t speak English. They ran off with his phone and Jason found his way back to Brian’s hospital room with a headache, a purple contusion, and a strong will to get his brother well—and the hell out of Asia.

Cinematic describes the effect on your imagination when you listen to our music. I want us to leave enough space between the lines to let people’s imagination run free. Pop forms the contrast to show that our music is not just niche music and should not be seen as such. As a representative of my artists I don’t want to tell someone like Ólafur (Ólafur Arnalds) that his music is “niche”. I mean, you would never ever say that to your kids, would you? “You’re kind of niche.” Nobody wants to hear that. Literally, Erased Tapes could be described as a crossover from extremes such as techno or classical music to pop. What I like about the word pop the most, is its universal meaning – it knows no boundaries. So if people feel the need to pigeonhole our music, I prefer our box to be open.

I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori. It took awhile, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning. The entrance was flanked by two black men, each of sufficient bulk to have been at home in the sumo pit. Their suits were well tailored and, given the size of the men wearing them, must have been custom-made. Nigerians, I assumed, whose size, managerial acumen, and relative facility with the language had made them a rare foreign success story, in this case as both middle management and muscle for many of the area’s entertainment establishments. The mizu shobai, or “water trade” of entertainment and pleasure, is one of the few areas in which Japan can legitimately claim a degree of internationalization. They bowed and opened the club’s double glass doors for me, each issuing a baritone irasshaimase as they did so. Welcome. One of them murmured something into a microphone set discreetly into his lapel. I walked down a short flight of stairs. A ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking Japanese man whom I put at about forty greeted me in a small foyer. Interchangeable J-Pop techno music was playing from the room beyond. “Nanmeisama desho ka?” Mr. Ruddy asked. How many? “Just one,” I said in English, holding up a finger. “Of course.” He motioned that I should follow him. The room was rectangular, flanked by dance stages on either end. The stages were simple, distinguished only by mirrored walls behind them and identical brass poles at their centers. One stage was occupied by a tall, long-haired blonde wearing high heels and a green g-string and nothing more. She was dancing somewhat desultorily, I thought, but seemed to have the attention of the majority of the club’s clientele regardless. Russian, I guessed. Large-boned and large-breasted. A delicacy in Japan. Harry hadn’t mentioned floorshows. Probably he was embarrassed. My sense that something was amiss deepened.

Screenplay is a company that provides music videos to businesses. Music and video screens are such common attractions in city businesses that court sexual minorities that many of them subscribe to this service. Via disc-based or direct-to-system download, Screenplay subscribers pay for access to a service called “VJ Pro,” where they choose from different genres of music videos that loosely resemble radio formats: HitsVision, a Top 40 mix that promises subscribers “nothing but the hits from every source”; DanceVision, featuring “exclusive remixes, hard to find imports and popular mainstream hits and everything in between designed expressly for the fast paced dance environment”; UrbanVision, a rhythm and blues/hip-hop hybrid that purports “to be all inclusive”; RockVision, rock music featuring songs “from Classic . . . to Disco, New Wave to Old School”; CountryVision, “an upbeat mix of current hits and classic favorites”; and LatinVision, “designed specifically for the sophisticated Latin dance crowd that demands only the hottest and best in tropical, Caribbean, merengue dance and Latin pop.”48 Many gay bars subscribe to ClubVision, which features a mix of “techno, trance and euro-flavored . . . tracks.”49 For dance-themed bars, this subscription features “an extended autoplay feature and individual chapter stops for single track selection.

In general, dance music had long been overlooked in the US. While house music and techno had become mainstream genres in England, Germany and the Netherlands, they were still subcultures here. Of course, there had been sudden outbursts, moments when the scene had sparked – most recently in the late 90s when Brits like The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim had enjoyed successes on the charts.

Reputation laundering works because it’s assumed that the folks who support fine music would be less likely to commit heinous crimes than the human flotsam that frequent a honky-tonk or a techno club. Participating in the scrums and mosh pits at pop concerts must be less morally and psychologically uplifting than sitting stock-still in complete silence at the ballet.

Another loop of influence and inspiration occurred when African musicians imitated the imported Cuban recordings they heard—which were themselves a mutation of African music. The African guitar-based rhumba that resulted was something new and wonderful, and most folks hearing it wouldn’t think it was a poor imitation of Cuban music at all. When I heard some of those African bands, I had no idea that Cuban music had been their inspiration. What they were doing sounded completely original to me, and I was naturally inspired, just as they had been. The process never stops. Contemporary European DJs were blown away when they heard Detroit techno.

Trevor Horn: Punk was awful. I mean, I didn’t get it at all at first. I understood the liberating aspect of it, but the actual music I detested, although I have to say I thought a couple of the Sex Pistols’ tunes were quite clever, especially ‘Pretty Vacant’: ‘Pretty va-cunt!’ But it didn’t appeal to me much at the time. It wasn’t the route for me, as I was more interested in the techno/dance route. I was also more interested in working with keyboards rather than guitars. Keyboards were new, guitars were old.

Silver confetti falls from the ceiling. The music launches again, and the sleek young mob dances feverishly, arms in the air. My head throbs along with the bass. Why had I agreed to this? I plug my ears with my fingers. I feel ridiculous beside these twenty-somethings. Marie and her friend apparently do not. They’re drinking the champagne and bopping their heads to the music. I watch a group of girls pucker for a photographer. They’re practically falling out of their tops. I hear Emily’s voice. Prude. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I tell Marie, and slide out of the booth. And I’m thinking of those catacombs, seemingly endless. I can see Emily, the version of her in that coffin. Embalming, the displacement of blood and interstitial fluids by embalming chemicals. I had looked the process up, after Mom insisted on a viewing. She was so beautiful, she cried. I want to see her one more time. The body is washed in disinfectant, limbs are massaged and manipulated, eyes glued closed, mouth and jaw secured with wires. The embalming solution contains dye to simulate a lifelike skin tone. A warm peach tone, the funeral director told us. I could barely stand it. I make my way to the second floor, where the music isn’t techno, only sultry R&B.

Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap—every music genre you could name (or couldn’t)—(and a few that probably didn’t really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devoured—and paid for—more music than ever before or since. The average citizen purchased CDs in numbers that look shocking now, and even shocking then. Every week, thousands of people bought new copies of the Grease soundtrack, from 1978, and nobody knew why. Even critics had trouble finding things to complain about (though we sure tried).

Humans have created too many beautiful songs to settle on one particular genre. Whether techno or opera, it doesn’t matter, as long as it has that certain edge, that something that makes it more. You just have to be able, or simply in the mood, to listen to it.

Unless the South Beach techno-dance clubs outbid them. They don’t have live bands, just DJs up in a booth. And the DJs are now celebrities like Mick Jagger, with their own dance-mix followers who make pilgrimages club to club to hear them turn on the music. When did a stereo become a musical instrument?” Serge leaned forward and clicked on the car radio. “There, I’m an artist. Thousands of women on ecstasy now want to have three-ways with me.

Everyone experiences grace, even if they don't realize it. It's kind of like Moby's music. You could ask your average sixty-something-year-old retired banker in Connecticut if he's ever heard of Moby and/or his music and the response you'd receive more than likely would be a resounding, “No—what's a Moby?” But if you say, “Remember that American Express commercial where Tiger Woods is putting around New York City? Remember the song playing? That was Moby.” “Oh, then, OK. I guess I have heard Moby,” our theoretical retired banker in New Canaan might say. “So … what exactly is a Moby?” That's like grace. Not that grace is a pretentious vegan techno-rocker, but you get the idea. Grace is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. We only need the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it.

18 “Cybotron coincided with the birth of a sound known as ‘electro,’ presumably a shortening of ‘electronic funk.’ Electro was one of the great dance music developments of the early 1980s that was neither a derivation nor an extension of disco. Instead, it was a ‘switched-on’ funk variant, exaggerating the electronic sounds that Midwestern groups like Parliament-Funkadelic had perfected in the studio and brought onstage. Most critics point to New York, however, for the genre's watershed moment.” Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk [1999] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 45.