The term techno has been used for many kinds of electronic music. Here, it is reserved for the abstract variation on house music. Whereas house grooves smoothly, techno kicks furiously. Techno is a harder edge driven dance music that has the same rhythmic patterns as other house genres but uses a harder synthesizer and a harder sample, featuring mechanical beats and found sounds that range from apocalyptic sirens to sampled television and movie dialogue. It was founded in Detroit in the early 1980s.
Like house, the original techno is characterized by the four quarter bass drum: 1 2 3 4. It is somewhat faster than house (126-130 bpm) and does not always contain the disco handclap. Lots of creative variations on this theme are made, ranging from the intensely hard percussive sounds made mostly of white noise to the disco sounds that were around in the seventies and undefined beats and atmospheric situations. The speed varies from 0 to 70 bpm in ambient to 140 in trance and to 220 bpm in hard core.
Detroit Techno
Around 1986, there was a scene in Detroit - the city of Motown and P-funk - which made a futuristic kind of music. DJ's played their own music in clubs. It was other music then; now it sounds familiar. The experts say it is a fusion of American P-funk and European synthesizer music (New Order and Kraftwerk). However, the revolutionary thing in Detroit techno is the layering of rhythms, almost polyrhythmic. Although it is not formal polyrhythmic as in African tribal percussion music: Detroit techno is highly syncopated and often features triplets over quarter notes.
The three heroes of Detroit techno are Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. The last one is the most pure and the most heroic. Juan Atkins is still making music, even combining jungle rhythms as in his album "True People", and Kevin Saunderson was the most popular one in making music on the edge of house music. Derrick May made "The Dance". There is a basis beat (all four on the floor). There is a fast hi hat, a normal speed drum (break beat) and sometimes a slow anarchistic snare drum. Further, there are the strings and the rhythmic tone line, as I call it. Follow one rhythm and the others clash together as in the renaissance polyphonic music.
Minimal Techno and Trance
Minimal techno is just a simple rhythm and some sound. It is a techno beat with a small number of different noises and lots of empty space in the track. From the editorial point of view, this is not an interesting genre; one sentence is enough. But, musically this is interesting, because minimal beats are basic. One could compare the editorial point of view and musical point of view with the complexity of a big orchestra against the simplicity of a string quartet.
Trance can be described as an ambient with more pronounced drum tracks, and more upbeat tempos, but like ambient, it's used as relaxation music in clubs. In general, it is fast, 140+ bpm, soothing and meditative; not as furious as other styles. Goa trance is one degree more psychedelic, by using more trippy sounds and funny noises layered on each other. Rhythmically, the music does not have that many layers as Detroit techno and listening techno. The basic rhythm in general is 1 2 3 4.
More or less in this style, Underworld makes almost hypnotic tracks on which you can dance during their long performances. But you can listen to their albums as well. They experimented with vocals, just using words from their journal, sometimes the lyrics are almost verbatim.
Hardcore
Hard versions of techno are known as hardcore, faster versions as gabber. Hardcore is aggressive, frenzied and occasionally abrasive, and generally sounds like chaos. The beats per minute are about 180-190. A variant is art core, a heavy, dark style with dark and heavy synthesizers and dark voices. It's called gangsta as well. This is the traditional ruffneck. In 1998 the new style, slow hard core (150-160 bpm) with accessible sounds and synthesizers was created.
Gabber is the hardest and fastest style. The number of beats per minute can go up to 400, but is in general about 200 bpm. The genres came up circa 1989 in Rotterdam, Holland. Gabber means 'mate' in Dutch. It is often with quirky cartoonesque samples. Circa 1995 it evolved into a more commercial happy hardcore. The speed did not change that much, but the samples sounded more commercial.
"Listening Techno"
In England in the beginning of the nineties the Detroit techno became popular. The Orb started to make the first relaxing music, to be played after the dance, at the after party. In Sheffield the Warp label was founded. They released artificial intelligence or listening techno. It is similar to Detroit techno due to the polyrhythmic layers, while the soundscapes are more rich. So the point is to do less dance and more listening. The example is the Black Dog Productions from 1993. The two volumes of artificial intelligence are classics in the genre.
Various
-Experimental: Minimalistic, continually groundbreaking techno.
Live Performing Techno is more usual in techno than in other electronic genre. Underworld, Orbital and The Prodigy were the first and most prominent of these artists.