PART ONE: A DEFENSIVE GROUNDWORK, A TECHNO KATEGORIA

I was enjoying my time in the New York City underground, riding the waves of club, juke, jungle, and techno, but I couldn’t really figure out how I found myself there. Some years before I first attended Soul Summit, I read More Brilliant than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun. Disco and House music are mentioned a little, but barely make an appearance. Just by reading it, I didn't get the impression that the genres were the precursor to the music I reveled in. I had loved all the artists mentioned like Sun Ra, Parliament and Tricky, and it introduced me to some of techno’s Black origins, like Drexciya. But with all the music I was listening to, it didn’t clarify the evolution of music to get me to where I was. I listened to so much Jazz and Funk, and then when it came to techno, I silently wondered “how did I get here?”

Sonic-intellectually I understood the relationships between the genres, but I could tell some tracks were skipped in my understanding. Detroit Techno seemed like the obvious starting point for what was playing in the clubs and raves I was going to. But House was framed like a 90’s derivative of Techno, pioneered mainly in vogue scenes, a sort of electronic Disco revival genre, that would eventually be co-opted, appropriated, and watered down by white djs, forever lost to Zara, H&M and the Aussies. I viewed Disco as a naively cheerful genre of my parents generation, a consumerist version of Funk, that nostalgic white gays loved to perfect the Black female vocalist mannerisms for their next drag performance. I would always avoid the Disco room at the Ladyfag parties. I was gravely misled and uninformed. Attending Soul Summit, and other legacy House music events, was the gateway for a deeper understanding of the evolution of the sound. Hearing and dancing to House music helped me locate a crucial link to the lineage of Black dance music to get to techno.

Since, I’ve recognized Techno to now be basking in its cultural redemption arc.

The story of techno is a story like so many genres birthed from Black creators; it traveled far and then was extracted and sold abroad, to the detriment of the creators and the integrity of the art. And through enthusiasm, marketing and maybe some malevolent conspiracy, the Black origins of the genre were obscured or minimized. Techno has had the incredible benefit of having a full circle moment in its glory today. Young Black artists are reclaiming it, and its origin story is being re-told and remembered anew. As with any Black genre, Black people never really left, or really forgot, but the force of uptake was so thunderous and spectacular, the people could not be seen or heard (or see and hear each other). The appropriation story is so old and tired, the people maneuver their captors by simply moving on or renaming things. Ragtime became Jazz. Blues became Funk. Hip-hop became Drill. Techno became Juke, Bass, Club etc. We can get persnickety about genre, and aural and rhythmic distinctions. But really, the names don’t matter. What qualifies the argument is the evolution of the sound and the abetting instruments (i.e. technologies, modalities) through time.

Genre is not a fixed position. Names and titles only come with the clarity of hindsight, or they nestle themselves into the collective psyche through repetitive synapses, that come as epiphanic and spontaneous descriptions, and after continuous usage. Adjectives and verbs, sometimes made up words, become eponyms. The emergence of ‘genre’ is a nebulous process of evolution and cross pollination, that withstands the projection of division onto the amorphous cluster of phenomena. In actuality, there are always blurs, influences, and crossovers. In art, and music especially, there really is no static position. It is a matrix of spectra, not the oft cited linearly imagined spectrum, but a gaseous cloud, of varying densities. And like the rainbow, we can only differentiate the colors of the spectrum when light is projected onto a swarm of droplets. That ‘light’ is hindsight or the observance of history. However, at the moment of emergence, creators are not so concerned with what to call their creations, nor are audiences interested in naming their experiences. At that moment, everyone is caught up in the ecstasy of arrival and the excitement of the uncharted. The birth, or rather the conception, is protected by a thick potent darkness; the black origins of creation.

That is not to say that boundaries or differentiation should not exist, certainly everything in creation deserves a name. And that is exactly what Juan Atkins did, when he insisted on the name techno to Virgin Record label executives in 1988 for the touchstone compilation album Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, that defined the genre. However, the working title of the compilation was The House Sound of Detroit. Atkins christened the music invention with a name drawn from his own sonic philosophies and inspirations, lifted from theorist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave. Atkins had the admirable instinct to identify the distinction from House, but the name techno was entirely new and unfamiliar to audiences, which was likely why the compilation album release sales were a bit of a flop.1

The title prevented the benefit of a subconscious recognition from a network of synapses sparked by an organic name, like house. The title, perhaps a bit too intentional, was a slight revision of history (or a preemptive revision of the future), meant to package the genre as an invention rather than present it as an innovation. That revision persists today. Techno is seen as an outlier, a random aberration of Black music, or the unique brainchild of singular male genius that restarted the clock in music evolution. But this just is not accurate. Techno lies in a lineage, with clear sonic influences, just like all other genres. And specifically, it evolved from House and Disco. This is why the compilation included an artist named Members of the House, with a final track entitled “Detroit is Jacking” (jacking is a term originating in Chicago named for the way people danced to House tracks).

Techno’s predecessor, House music, is a genre understood today as having specific tonal structure and rhythmic patterns. But at the conception of house, in the late 70s and early 80s, there was no specific sound efx, lyrical designation, or polished producer synonymous with House. House named an impulse, a context, not a sound. The naming of House was a co-emergent process, and came about through a swarm of reactions, explanations, and associations. No one can claim its authorship. For some, the origin is obvious, evolving from the club Warehouse in Chicago, where the genre was pioneered. Others argue that it had more to do with the creation of original tracks on drum machines or mixes on tape decks released by dance clubs and dj collectives; produced “in-house,” if you will. Many more associate the name with the feeling and emotion of familiarity, being at home, literally at home, or cozy within the sanctuary of queer nightlife2, where elsewhere was hostile, much like the houses of the ballroom scenes. This is the impulse that led record label execs to initiate the project The House Sound of Detroit.

The new day begins tonight

Enter the new round

Enter the next phase

Enter the program

Technofy your mind

lyrics from Cybotron, Enter

Juan Atkin’s lyrics on Cybotron's 1983 release “Enter” heralded the birth of the era. Techno’s central focus is the future and realms beyond the human. Although Atkins explicitly names science fiction, futurist theory, electronic music bands like Kraftwerk, and Funk music as his inspirations, taken at face value, that playlist doesn't tell the whole story. To understand the conditions that propelled the query of Techno- Disco and its daughter House must come into question.

Eshun first mentions the Disco genre in More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction in the intro, entitled 'Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality.' He says

" AT THE CENTURY'S END, THE FUTURHYTHMACHINE HAS 2 OPPOSING TENDENCIES, 2 SYNTHETIC DRIVES: THE SOULFUL AND THE POSTSOUL. BUT THEN ALL MUSIC IS MADE OF BOTH TENDENCIES RUNNING SIMULTANEOUSLY AT ALL LEVELS, SO YOU CAN'T MERELY OPPOSE A HUMANIST RUB WITH A POSTHUMAN TECHNO.

DISCO REMAINS THE MOMENT WHEN BLACK MUSIC FALLS FROM THE GRACE OF GOSPEL TRADITION INTO THE METRONOMIC ASSEMBLY LINE. IGNORING THAT DISCO IS THEREFORE AUDIBLY WHERE THE 21ST C BEGINS, 9 OUT OF 10 CULTURAL CRITS PREFER THEIR BLACK POP CULTURE HUMANIST, AND EMPHATICALLY 19TH C. LIKE BRUSSELS SPROUTS, HUMANISM IS GOOD FOR YOU, NOURISHING, NURTURING, SOULWARMING - AND FROM PHYLLIS WHEATLEY TO R. KELLY, PRESENT-DAY RNB IS A PERPETUAL FIGHT FOR HUMAN STATUS, A YEARNING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, A STRUGGLE FOR INCLUSION WITHIN THE HUMAN SPECIES. ALLERGIC TO CYBERSONIC IF NOT TO SONIC TECHNOLOGY, MAINSTREAM AMERICAN MEDIA - IN ITS DRIVE TO BANISH ALIENATION, AND TO RECOVER A SENSE OF THE WHOLE HUMAN BEING THROUGH BELIEF SYSTEMS THAT TALK TO THE 'REAL YOU' - COMPULSIVELY DELETES ANY INTIMATION OF AN AFRODIASPORIC FUTURISM, OF A 'WEBBED NETWORK' OF COMPUTERHYTHMS, MACHINE MYTHOLOGY AND CONCEPTECHNICS WHICH ROUTES, REROUTES AND CRISS-CROSSES THE ATLANTIC. THIS DIGITAL DIASPORA CONNECTING THE UK TO THE US, THE CARIBBEAN TO EUROPE TO AFRICA, IS IN PAUL GILROY'S DEFINITION A 'RHIZOMORPHIC, FRACTAL STRUCTURE', A 'TRANSCULTURAL, INTERNATIONAL FORMATION.'

THE MUSIC OF ALICE COLTRANE AND SUN RA, OF UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE AND GEORGE RUSSELL, OF TRICKY AND MARTINA, COMES FROM THE OUTER SIDE. IT ALIENATES ITSELF FROM THE HUMAN; IT ARRIVES FROM THE FUTURE. ALIEN MUSIC IS A SYNTHETIC RECOMBINATOR, AN APPLIED ART TECHNOLOGY FOR AMPLIFYING THE RATES OF BECOMING ALIEN. OPTIMIZE THE RATIOS OF EXCENTRICITY. SYNTHESIZE YOURSELF.

FROM THE OUTSET, THIS POSTSOUL ERA HAS BEEN CHARACTERIZED BY AN EXTREME INDIFFERENCE TOWARDS THE HUMAN. THE HUMAN IS A POINTLESS AND TREACHEROUS CATEGORY. "

'Futurhythmachine' and the 'discontinuum' are terms from the lexicon that Eshun ingeniously develops to be able to linguistically translate the logic, effect, and instantiations of what he calls, Machine Music, Alien Music, or 'the Outer Side'. He writes, "More Brilliant than the Sun's achievement, therefore, is to design, manufacture, fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit a so-called artificial discontinuum for the Futurhythmachine." What he is describing is a resistance to western eurocentric ‘humanist’ principles, which requires an adherence to a rational, chronological, and evolutionary (read: hierarchical) logic.

From this description, a dichotomy between Disco and Techno is impressed on the historical perception of these two genres. Although Eshun seems to anticipate this by precluding that "all music is made of both [the Soulful and the Post soul synthetic drives] running at all levels," the remnant impression of More Brilliants' intro is that Disco music carries a 'pointless and treacherous' humanist impulse that is antithetical to the 'Futurhythmmachine's discontinuum' mythology that Eshun profoundly elucidates, as his impetus for writing More Brilliant than the Sun.

Eshun wants us to remain vigilant against urges and common traps to prove our humanness, by defining our history within the precepts set by the contemporary formation of colonialist logic, which entrapped and enslaved us in the first place. In order to do this, Eshun repeatedly upholds a 'rhizomorphic, fractal structure', and a 'transcultural, international formation" for an ‘AfroDiasporic futurism’ banishing a Black Humanism that vies to be accepted by a paradigm that was never meant to include us in the first place. Our subsumption into the category of Man3, has only ever meant an adherence to a con-centric conception of an individuated self, and a shedding of the co-adaptogenic, modulating, and fractal based perception that encodes AfroDiasporic people and technologies.

I want to take heed to Eshun's call to disavow the chronological, rational and normative descriptions of Black music. However, it is the very continuousness that Eshun disavows, that, I believe defines the rhizomorphic form and entrenches Afrodiasporic futurism within all Black music. Throughout its creation, Black music always pre-sets an innovation for the future and generates itself out of a contiguous relationship to its past and other instantiations of Black music in space. In other words, I believe that Black music, in the post-colonial era (our contemporary now) is always 'alien' and of the ‘Outer Side.' The capture by industrialist factory re-production and the inevitability of subsumption (read: appropriation) into the normative western music cannon does not cancel out any of Black music's futurist fugitivity at the ecstatic moment of its creation. Eshun makes the statement: "Disco's remains the moment when Black Music falls from [grace]...into the metronomic assembly line," as a read into a past defined by the normative western cannon, rather than reading from a disposition of an ecstatic future that defines Disco in its presence. It is Disco's present that pre-sets the innovation that Black music continues to generate from the future of today; the horizontal continuousness of the rhizomatic form, the beat goes on; the DISCO-ntinuum rather than Eshun's dis-continuum.

According to Portia K. Maultsby's African American Music flow chart, Techno lies within the secular branch of Black music. The chart indicates three sectors of African American music: the spiritual, the secular, and the instrumental. In the earliest version of the chart (1992), a Techno Funk genre appears as a descendant of Funk, and House sits below Disco as its sole descendant. In a 2020 revision of the chart, Maultsby places Detroit Techno in the lineage of Disco music, below House, and the Techno Funk genre is changed into Electro Funk.

The Evolution of African American Music, 1992 and 2020 revisions

Maultsby indicates cross influence between sub-genres with arrows, that snake through the entire chart. Notwithstanding the absence of Caribbean, continental African, Latin American, and other non-American influences, Maultsby explains the audible similarities between Funk, Disco, House, and Techno by illustrating a cross influence arrow from Funk to Disco. Funk’s rhythmic innovations were built upon in the Disco era, and its songs were included into the Disco dj repertoire. Maultsby's arrows also note the cross influence between the instrumental and secular genres as far back as Ragtime. In the latest version of the chart, There are arrows branching from Hard Bop to Funk, and Funk to Disco and Jazz Fusion, and from the Jazz Fusion and Contemporary Gospel genres pointing towards Disco and House. Disco and its dance music descendants heavy instrumentality is evidence of a strong influence of Jazz and Funk. Sylvester's album Stars (1978) is an example of this triadic genre influence of the spiritual, secular, and instrumental. The song structure contains gospel refrains framing extended rhythm breaks. The album is 4 tracks, each about 10 minutes of orchestral arrangements. Made up of funky syncopated beats and the latest in music production technology, along with Disco's innovation of speed, that high and punctuated bpm.

The era of Disco was one of newfound freedom and liberated consciousness. It was also an era with heavy doses of escapism from the struggle for freedoms hard fought, and not yet won. Nile Rodgers, musical mastermind behind Chic and Sister Sledge, said, "…it was the worst financial time in America since the great depression...culturally in America, things were pretty bad.4" The happy music, with relentless positive messaging, was heard as radical on the dancefloors. There was an urge for cathartic release and unabashed collectivity. There was a social revolution, where people were turning away from the stage, the icon, and the leaders, and towards each other. Community was seen as the locus and generator for liberation. An approach in direct response to centralized leadership, the vulnerability of the previous decade’s counter-political movements. There was a genuine effort to democratize space and people were eager to find each other. In the Bronx, massive block parties and beat battles erupted in the summers after 1971, newly permissible after the celebrated gang peace treaty of Hoe Avenue5. Around the same time, in downtown Manhattan, David Mancuso opened his Loft apartment to an emerging community of racially diverse gay partiers.

The Disco sound emerged through a collusion of genres created by Black people, and became extremely popular globally. West African rhythmic innovations persisted throughout the diaspora, maintaining syncopation and polyrhythmic structure in Black American, Caribbean, and Latin American music. As communities blended, so did the sounds. The precision of Midwestern vocal performance groups, the soul-pounding swinging 2’s of Funk, and the upbeat Boogaloo and Salsa big band merged to form the sound. New York City is considered the paragon of the Disco genre because it contained the pinnacle conditions of social pollination, proliferation of nightclubs, and the elevation of the disc jockey to maestro of the dance floors. New York City was considered ground zero, and the nightlife industry and talent based there played a big role in disseminating it around the world. But the same conditions that cultivated Disco in NY were existent elsewhere, like Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. Philadelphia has a very legitimate claim to be considered the capital of the Disco sound. Because of Disco’s danceable tempo and diverse musical inspirations, it had mass appeal. Disco djs were known for cycling through different genres, layering different textures, from rock n roll to gospel to create a set. Tethering the Disco dj set was a danceable bpm, hovering around 120. The syncopated baselines from Funk, R&B and Disco music grounded the set, working the crowd into a frenzied groove.

As Disco traversed the world, it filtered through other music genres and technologies, most notably with European electronic music production. Disco returned to the States with music such as Donna Summer with Giorgio Moroder, and Sylvester with Patrick Crowley. Disco, like any genre, is nebulous at the point of origin, where in its early development, many styles form the genre, yet we remember it today as a more specific sound than it was. The term Disco is derived from discotheques, which basically means a nightclub where records are played, in lieu of live bands. (and/or it could be a reference to the disc jockey, who played music from record discs.) So, any record that was played and popular in these nightclubs can be considered “Disco.” It was an overarching term that mainly used to describe Black dance music of the time. There are some style distinctions and innovations that outline the genre, but the term most aptly describes dance music of the 1970s.

House music was born from the “ashes of Disco”6 before the induction of Techno. House's a priori existence marks an evasion, a slippage, a feint; the moment when the people renamed Disco and went to the protective underground. House was the moment when Disco went inside, not home, but to the afters; the address is only known to insiders, or if you stayed until the end. You simply cannot get to the house without going to the disco. If Disco became known for its lights, flamboyance, and commerciality, then House is the moment where pretension was shed to become something inconspicuous, a strategic pivot towards a protective and generative darkness, the creative unknown. House music is Disco that is preoccupied with extended rhythm breaks, looped from the classics, fed through technology, and warped into something wholly new. House centralizes, delays, repeats, and burrows into elements found in the breaks, and the heavy bass drops. It is proudly tethered to Disco because it extracts its sound from the archive, the people, and the memory.

In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove

And from this groove came the groove of all grooves
And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldy declared,

LET THERE BE HOUSE

and house music was born.

lyrics from Rhythm Controll, My House

Frankie Knuckles called House "Disco's revenge." With the impulse of Disco, House music continued the evolution of Disco’s record deck techniques and incorporated new technology, like reel-to-reels, tape decks, and drum machines. Early uptake with electronic instrumentation, as well as an obsession for unheard and original tracks, laid the soundscape for Techno to take shape. House began the work of inquiring a future, or at least by voyaging towards the new, it opened a portal through time. Records categorized now as Hip-hop, Pop, Punk, Electro Funk, and Industrial music were added to the Disco repertoire; blended and layered to create hours of rhythmic weaves. House music began as an experimental trespass of of Disco’s rhythm boundaries, the electronic instruments, the dj techniques, and, most central of all, a fast tempo.

House music and Techno are often discussed today as if they are rivals. Other times, the genres are discussed as if they are polarities of a janus face: two faces on a head that sees in all directions. House music looks toward the past, looping disco favs into melodic echoes and familiar breakbeats, whereas techno looks toward the future, a space sanctified by emotional human flamboyance and the erasure of race and gender. When Disco was first electrified in the 70s, its incessant bassline awoke the giant monster, its single big eye opened, and it called itself House. The head continued spinning around to view beyond the angles of its neck, faster and faster until its face split into two; this face called itself Techno. The beast continues spinning and spinning, spawning more faces to look in every direction. The fanning out of faces creates the multitude of dance music genres that we know and love today (Acid, Drum n Bass, Juke, Dubstep etc).7

The genre of Detroit Techno emerged around 1985, and was concentrated around a unique pulse in the network of the Black Diaspora, subsumed into the post-war era industrial economy of mechanical production. With all the mechanical and industrial influences of the specific site of Detroit, which have been noted and soliloquized many times, the resulting sound had a purely electro-mechanical logic. Techno fully automates House’s mixing techniques and effects with beat machines, eventually reducing the ‘swing’ for a stricter 4/4 timed beat, and furthered the tempo innovation of House and Disco. The consequential inquiries into Black dance music that lead to Detroit Techno were concentrated, but not limited to Detroit. Prior to and co-emergent with Juan Atkins christening of the genre, many Black music producers around the US, namely in Chicago and New York City, were foraying into the electro-mechanical frontier. The impetus of Techno is to liberate music production from the records, which anchored the sound to the archive, thereby clearing the memory of the most quintessential strains of its Disco music origin. Techno hyper-realizes rhythm technologies of previous generations of Black Dance music, and encodes them into advanced electric instruments, as an inquest for new perceptions of selfhood in the post-human era.

Tomorrow is a brand new day
Clear
Clear
Clear all this place
Clear today
Clear your mind

An apologia is a latin term for a formal statement defending oneself or the actions of another. This is a Disco apologia. Disco has been defended many times in the decades since its condemnation and subsequent public execution at Cominskey Park. However, post-mortem to Disco, a deeply consequential rupture occurred at the birth of Techno that must be resolved to fully reclaim and thoroughly establish Techno as a Black music genre. Further than just naming parentage, an entire lineage, of the paternal and the maternal lines, has to be made clear. The original Greek word 'apologia' was a legal term for the defending statement made in court. A Disco apologia implies an initiating accusation, which the Greeks termed a kategoria. It may seem as if this piece is a Techno kategoria, or at least defends Disco from the kategoria Techno made against it. Inflammatory statements will be made, but the goal of this piece isn't to shift the blame.

The identification of Techno resolved a dialectic tension that emerged during the Disco and early House eras, the first facial fission of the beast, namely the future splitting from the past, what is ahead versus what is behind. The designation of Techno alleviated House's burden to carry the weight of all time. Techno's assignment towards the future, in turn, ordained House as a custodian of the archive. Both genres, however defined, are descendants of all secular music genres of the TransAtlantic African diaspora, indicating Disco as their predominant parent.

In a close analysis of the differences between House and Techno music today, there would be distinctions in terms of content and mode. House draws from the past, building loops from beats, breaks, and vocals from a history echoing Disco and beyond. Techno draws from the supposed future, a landscape nearly void of identity, assembling rhythms that are vaguely referential, but mostly intuitive from available technologies. The demarcation is clearer today, but it was a line that was drawn in a retroactive sense by a handful of insistent players. However, in the living, breathing moment at the emergence of genre, in the vernacular and the experiential, distinctions were barely tangible or consequential. It just wasn't that deep, yet. The persistent effort to create boundaries between the two and the consequences of that persistence is what will be interrogated here.

I AM THE CREATOR, AND THIS IS MY HOUSE
AND, IN MY HOUSE THERE IS ONLY HOUSE MUSIC
BUT, I AM NOT SO SELFISH BECAUSE ONCE YOU ENTER MY HOUSE IT THEN BECOMES OUR HOUSE AND OUR HOUSE MUSIC
AND, YOU SEE..

continued in PART II

1. I couldn’t find record sales or chart statistics for Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, but according to the Wikipedia article for the album citing Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (2010), the album sales did not do well, and failed to recoup costs. The Wiki article mentions that the single “Big Fun”, by Kevin Saunderson’s group Inner City did very well because it has ‘crossover’ appeal. The crossover genre the article is referring to is likely House music, which Inner City was considered at the time. Compare to The House Sound of Chicago, released by DJ International in 1986, which peaked at #52, and spent 12 weeks in the top 100. (officialcharts.com)

2. Salkind, Micah, Do You Remember House, Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds, Oxford University Press, 2019.

3. Those that created the category of 'Negro' did so to create an ‘other' human category in order to establish the degenerate referent against which the rational Man could be formed , and the dominance of the Human could be established over all in existence. Wynter, Sylvia. Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/ freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation– an argument. 2003.

4. Quote from 'How House Music Was Made', documentary made for Channel 4, dir. Jake Sumner. 2017.

5. On December 8, 1971, representatives from dozens of Black and Latino gangs of the Bronx gathered at the Boys Club on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx to create an alliance and establish a truce for peace and conflict resolution procedures following the murder of Cornell ‘Black Benjie” Benjamin, a peace keeper of The Ghetto Brothers gang. The truce maintained peace until the 80s with the crack epidemic. This period of relative peace in the Bronx has been cited as the genesis for the Hip-hop genre.

6. “A decade after the Demolition, journalists writing about the birth of house music began using it as a symbolic yoke between disco and the house sounds that had been “reborn” from “the ashes of disco.” In his memoir about his pioneering work as a house music producer, DJ Jesse Saunders connected house explicitly to the ritualized death of its parent culture, writing that the music was like a “phoenix” emerging from the ashes of Disco Demolition night.” Salkind, pg 27.

7. A version of this paragraph was published from my essay in Writing On Raving: An Anthology, originally appearing on Rave Forum blog