The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which aims to promote world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences, and culture, has added Berlin's techno scene to its cultural heritage list.
According to UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage refers to mainly cultural forms of expression, which are directly linked to human creativity and traditions, and which people pass those on through generations and are constantly evolving.
This includes practices, rituals, knowledge, skills and performing arts such as music, dance and theater, which are meant to be preserved and kept alive.
"Kraftwerk and African-American DJs and producers like Underground Resistance from Detroit, made a significant contribution to the creation and spread of techno culture," said Leichsenring.
- – Berlin techno on Germany's intangible cultural heritage list, Deutsche Welle
And
Techno is a fundamental part of the city, according to Peter Kirn, a Berlin-based DJ and music producer. In 2021 he told the Observer: "In other cities, people wouldn't accept music that's really hard or weird and full of synthesisers and really brutal, distorted drum machines. You can't play that at peak hour in a club, let alone over lunch. And here it's totally acceptable to play that over lunch.
And
Over the course of the 1980s, the Berlin club scene developed into one of the world's leading centres of the beloved techno subculture of the time.
The electronic music genre in particular became a kind of soundtrack to the years following German reunification, symbolised by legendary clubs such as Tresor, which opened in 1991, and the annual Love Parade.
- – Berlin's techno scene added to UNESCO World Heritage list, The Local DE.
Previously:
(2020) Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder, Dies Aged 73
(2016) German Federal Constitutional Court: Artistic Freedom Sometimes Takes Precedence Over Copyright
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Today, the German Federal Constitutional Court decided that under certain conditions, artistic freedom can take precedence over copyright.
As dw.com reports, the specific case the court was about sampling two seconds of a Kraftwerk song without permission:
The legal dispute originated when electro-pop legends Kraftwerk complained, angered at [musician Moses] Pelham "sampling" a two-second segment of the 1977 track "Metall auf Metall" and using it on an endless loop for rapper Sabrina Setlur's song. Initially, Kraftwerk won an injunction from Germany's top criminal court (the BGH) - prompting Pelham to use his only remaining recourse for appeal and to apply for the Constitutional Court to reconsider the verdict.
In particular,
The court ruled that composers can, under certain conditions, incorporate external audio clips into their own music without asking permission and do not have to pay royalties. If the copyright infringement is only "marginal," the court said, then artistic freedom takes precedence over the intellectual property rights of the original musician.
Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder, Dies Aged 73
As well as being forefathers of the synthpop that would dominate the 1980s and beyond, the title track of Trans-Europe Express was sampled in 1982 by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force for one of the earliest hip-hop hits, Planet Rock, while Computer World was hugely influential on the house and techno music that emerged from Chicago and Detroit that decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/06/florian-schneider-kraftwerk-co-founder-dies-aged-73
The German band he helped found toyed with ideas about technology and society, leaving a profound mark on rock, dance music and hip-hop.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/arts/music/florian-schneider-kraftwerk-dead.html
Kraftwerk won a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 2014 and the Grammy for best electronic/dance album (for live album "3-D The Catalogue") in 2018. Last fall, the band was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Gearnews has an article about use of Raspberry Pi microcomputers in digital signal processing (DSP) systems, observing that digital synthesizers are essentially computers in specialized housings. In addition to the complex software, there is a lot of work in making an enclosure with useful controls and displays. Increasingly manufacturers are building their synthesizers around the Raspberry Pi:
The biggest synthesizer manufacturer to make use of the Raspberry Pi is Korg. The Japanese synth company's Wavestate, Modwave and Opsix digital synths all make use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. (They're in the module versions too.)
In an article on the Raspberry Pi home page, Korg's Andy Leary sites price and manufacturing scale as the main reason Korg decided on these components. He also liked that it was ready to go as is, providing CPU, RAM and storage in a single package. "That part of the work is already done," he said in the article. "It's like any other component; we don't have to lay out the board, build it and test it."
The software for each instrument is, of course, custom. The Raspberry Pi, however, generates the sound. "Not everyone understands that Raspberry Pi is actually making the sound," said Korg's Dan Philips in the same piece. "We use the CM3 because it's very powerful, which makes it possible to create deep, compelling instruments."
These used to be designed with off-the-shelf parts from Motorola and Texas Instruments. However around 20 years ago, according to a Raspberry Pi link about Korg synthesizers, Linux entered synthesizer production scene.
Previously:
(2024) Berlin's Techno Scene Added to UNESCO Cultural Heritage List
(2021) The Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer's Clever Exponential Circuit, Reverse-Engineered
(2019) Moog Brings Back its Legendary Model 10 'Compact' Modular Synth
(2014) History of the Synthesizer - 50 Years
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 19, @05:34PM (11 children)
1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWSceMtAjPw [youtube.com]
1991: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/tresor-the-iconic-berlin-techno-club-of-the-1990s-groove/mQXRhhGnyyOKtw?hl=en [google.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday March 19, @06:12PM (10 children)
The term "Techno" first appeared, when in 1982 a certain Andreas Tomalla, who worked in a record shop on the underground level of Frankfurt's main railway station labeled a sub-category for sorting records like that, because he found it inconvenient to label it "Elektronische Technologiemusik". The guy later went on to achieve worldwide fame as DJ Talla2XLC.
Also, Techno as such has nothing to do with Black Music. Kraftwerk were musically quoting e.g. Schubert with distinctly European heritage. Aside from the stab at a swinging rhythm in "Kometenmelodie 2", there's nothing of this kind in their pre-digital work, despite what "journalists" try to report about it, without having the slightest clue about their back catalogue. If at all, they purged the (Kraut)Rock elements from the "Autobahn" album on. Africa Bambaata and others only picked up on that and added the Funk/Soul influence when Kraftwerk's influencing already was complete (and Hütter lost his focus toying with the Synclavier). Lore has it that the merge with electronics happened, because the Roland 303 and 808 devices had such a crappy UI that original owners cheaply dumped them on ghetto kids, but I made up the conspiracy theory that the CIA paid for that to happen, much like they paid for the Boston Symphonics tour in 1952 (and for modern art promotion later on).
Slightly tongue in cheek, Techno by itself is fast March Music, which is why it was able to capture the hearts of the march-loving Prussians in Berlin. Organist comedian Mambo Kurt illustrates this with the march patterns of the rhythm section of his home organ in this revealing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y59K6-91G1Y [youtube.com] (in German)
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday March 19, @07:48PM (4 children)
very interesting comment. some of us like the march, and some of us like the gallop baseline I guess. I'm more of a Charge of The Light Brigade (The Trooper) galloping baseline person myself. It's kind of funny that it was the British v. the Prussians in that battle. and it was miscommunication and disorganization on the British part that got them destroyed. Oh those Brits. they love that gallop.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday March 20, @12:25AM (3 children)
You've got to look into Trance, where the gallop is a popular pattern (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do5vwsvvUr0 [youtube.com]). There's also the development with Düsseldorf (Kraftwerk, minimalist) vs. Munich (Tangerine Dream, spherical) and Jean-Michel Jarre as well, whose first two albums can be considered the origin of modern trance. Nothing of all this has significant black influence, and Africa Bambaata's "Planet Rock" appeared only in 1982 when these developments had ended (as did the entire analog age, in 1984, with "Jump" and the DX-7, and samplers took over).
I left that stuff out from the above comment, because I didn't want to write a whole essay on Electronic Music History. We've got a museum for that in Frankfurt now. Curiously enough, even though I lived there, at the proper age, through the entire development, and with friends going there, I've never been to any of the "inner circle" clubs, because even if I had the Kraftwerk and Hawkwind back catalogues and tinkered with Synthesizers and other music electronics, I was scene-wise mostly into (trve, no posers!) Metal and Punk back then, rejected the idea of mingling with "poppers" and only ever went to the "Music Hall" a few times. In retrospect, I would probably have liked the small club at the "Dorian Gray" where they had the harder EBM stuff on late at night. (Even today, I like Nitzer Ebb, but can't be bothered with Depeche Mode...)
To close the circle, I'll better leave gallops to the Brits after I spent a few months trying to do "Run To The Hills" in proper two finger style on bass at 174 bpm and still barely can keep up. ;)
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday March 20, @03:51AM (1 child)
Are you saying that Jean-Michel Jarre can be considered to have created of Trance music??? Funnily enough Oxygene was one of the albums I most listed to in my misbegotten yoof - along with Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind LOL!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Wednesday March 20, @12:04PM
Picking a small example from the Frankfurt scene again, listen into that: https://youtu.be/jn2VMEfh1kA?t=92 [youtu.be]. I'd say from sound selection and atmospheric arrangement, there isn't much that Jarre hasn't done 20 years earlier. The Techno and and Trance productions of certain substyles have a very narrow limit of what is "allowed" (which may or may not have evolved from dancefloor response), so you will get beat patterns that Jarre hasn't done in exactly that way, over the also there's been some cross-pollination going on, also with other world music (like DJ Dag was strongly influenced by American Natives), but overall, this combination of "sequenced plus harmonic/atmospheric" goes back to Jarre.
Well, with those masterpieces, the yoof could hardly have been misbegotten!
Alright, here's one more, from Frankfurt, too, which has it all: 4/4 (house-ish) Bass line (Kraftwerk descendant), Trance backing line (Jarre descendant) with a gallop that'd do Steve Harris justice, Space Rock chord progressions (Hawkwind descendant) AND finally, a black lady with a soul-ful voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe_0zKVVGQw [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday March 21, @07:01AM
thanks for the response and the excellent youtube link. I wasn't aware of the Trance music scene much at all and find it quite interesting. also not familiar with any of the artists really except for Kraftwerk who I had at least heard of in passing. I'd probably be interested in your essay on electronic music history and others would be as well. write it up on substack or something and link it here.
I've messed around with Pronoise but mostly because I've come from an Amiga tracker background rather than a real musical background. I did find the youtube video interesting and informative though.
Run to The Hills is a good track and very popular, but kind of strange and weird to play on guitar in my opinion. The Trooper is more basic, more primal and distilled essence of the gallop baseline with a skilled harmonization of melodic guitars and vocals overlayed.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 19, @07:50PM (1 child)
It's all a matter of perspective, and I'm sure from Berlin the Detroit scene didn't matter much at all.
Through the late 80s / early 90s the club scene in Miami would advertise "Industrial" bands more than Techno, and of course all those genres have more similarities than differences when listened to from a distance of a couple of decades.
In the very early 90s a friend moved up to Boston where Nine Inch Nails was "club music" - whereas in Miami NIN was more something you'd hear on the college radio station, and I don't believe anyone was applying the "Industrial" label to Trent Reznor back then, but they certainly are today.
If we want to get realistic about the Industrial / Techno division in the US - or at least Florida, Techno was often spoken in the same breath as Hip Hop a.k.a. that Black scene music out of the South Bronx / Detroit, the Industrial designation held more appeal for lighter skinned audiences in the US.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday March 21, @07:04AM
In the 90s Mcdonalds slut employees were quoting pretty hate machine lyrics between blowjobs. I don't think they were concerned with industrial v. techno but I take your point if you take mine
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday March 20, @11:09AM (2 children)
March goes back to Africa through the Ottoman influence (percussion and instrumentation): https://brolgamusic.com/catalog/janissary-band [brolgamusic.com] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214453 [jstor.org] https://www.17thregiment.com/archive/bands-of-music-in-the-british-army-1762-1790-part-3 [17thregiment.com]
On the other side of the pond, March music was often performed by black musicians due to being conscripted but not being allowed to bear arms:
( https://www.folkstreams.net/contexts/a-brief-history-of-african-american-marching-bands [folkstreams.net] )
After being discharged from service, many of them traveled to Europe to find employment following Joseph Bologne success in the classical concert halls and played for a living. e.g. https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristol.ac.uk/dist/7/228/files/2014/12/Black-Music-in-18-and-19-C-Bristol-4page.pdf [wpmucdn.com]
The pattern becomes better documented in the 19th and 20th century where individual Black musicians are credited to what becomes Swing, Jazz and Rock. But there's a mountain of indirect evidence of the black and Turk heritage in the March genre.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday March 20, @01:28PM (1 child)
Interesting to look at the paths of black music through something else than the curriculum content of "cotton fields to bebop", which my perspective admittedly is for the largest part. (And agreeing with a popular opinion, I see Robert Johnson's 1939 "Crossroads" as the point where modern Rock music forked off.)
However, I don't see where there's any indirect black influence to be made out in march music at all. No polyrhythmic patterns, no off notes, and the repetition comes with the task of marching. Even if certain musicians of African descent may have performed, they didn't do "their" tunes at all.
The osmanic influence looks pretty strong, as the turks certainly had their music with them as they laid the siege on Vienna in 1683. Medieval germanic march music often refers to the "piper", whereas Prussian march music is onomatopoetically referred to as "Tschingderassabumm!", clearly illustrating the use of cymbals. So we can assume they were introduced in between. Even today it's said that the finest cymbals are hand-made in Turkey.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 20, @11:25PM
It's earlier influences that trace through basic African rhythm patterns -> Middle Eastern / Arab music (Islamic conquest) -> European import (1st crusade). e.g. by the time we're looking at the transition between sacred Ars Antiqua to profane Ars Nova loosening up rhythm patterns in response to additional percussive instruments, it's already 200 years following "first contact": https://www.examenapium.it/cs/biblio/Blades1973.pdf [examenapium.it] https://www.wfmt.com/2017/07/12/history-european-music-may-owe-arabic-culture-realize/ [wfmt.com]
Maybe a more illustrative (and wildly anachronistic) example is how Mozart had special pedal in his piano to do Janissary stop in the Marcia alla Turca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuhSAbQPk7E [youtube.com]
But really, we've seen multiple genres come and go along with instruments as electrification, recording, synthesizing and sampling did away with Swing, Jazz and Rock under a century. So, maybe trying to narrow down some specific musical properties instead other than the acoustic improvements of newer instruments is begging the question.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday March 19, @06:38PM
Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!
https://youtu.be/QHZR9SA5pOg [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Wednesday March 20, @01:51PM
Not gonna happen. Anyway, here is some Classic Techno by Jeff Mills of Detroit, and I do mean classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpOak4iAJY [youtube.com]