He may be a media-savvy new technology evangelist these days, but back in the mid 90’s Richie Hawtin was the kind of sketchily dark character you would think twice about leaving your kids with. The Canadian producer was known during that period for the gloriously haunting ambient techno of FUSE — which occasionally and unforgettably on “Substance Abuse” veered into the kind of deranged acid that this installment of BBH focuses on — and the complex poly-rhythms and LSD-referencing menace of his Plastikman project. Yet despite the rumors of acid tabs embossed onto copies of his debut Plastikman album, Sheet One, there was a far more belligerent side to his character: Circuit Breaker. This double pack, released in 1996, charts the laying to rest of the Probe Records sub-label, an outlet that had allowed Hawtin to explore this grungier, edgier identity.
big black headphones
BBH: Various Artists, Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave
There have been plenty of Detroit techno compilations over the years; True People would probably rate as my favorite for its sheer comprehensiveness and myriad pieces of vinyl, though its spot at number one has often been contested in my mind by this compilation on Astralwerks which came out the same year in 1996. Packed with ten tracks of exclusive material from the creme of Detroit’s third wave of techno producers, it showcases their many different sides, from deep and hypnotic through to raw, jacking soul and clinical, electro funk. Though many of the producers on the album were familiar to me already, there were others like Ectomorph, Will Web, and Mode Selector I was discovering for the first time. Throughout it all can be heard strains from their mentors mixed in with the new directions in which these younger guns were taking the music.
BBH: Silent Phase, The Theory of Silent Phase
Coming through at the end of the second wave of Detroit producers, Stacey Pullen fell under the direct tutelage of Derrick May, who not only mentored the young producer in capturing the essence of his sound but also gave him a taste of life as a traveling DJ. In the early 90’s, Pullen decamped with May to Amsterdam and ended up staying a year with the Detroit maverick, playing their native techno to hordes of appreciative Europeans. May had previously signed Pullen’s “Ritual Beating System” under the Bango alias to his Transmat offshoot, Fragile. Buoyed by the critical acclaim it met, he was offered a deal by R&S records while in Belgium to record a full length album which would become The Theory of Silent Phase under the Silent Phase sobriquet. With publishing duties falling between R&S and Transmat, Pullen claims that he never got the album to sound quite as he wanted it to due to analogue copies being shuttled back and forth across the globe for mastering, though there is no denying that contained within is the music of a truly inspired and gifted musician.
BBH: Major Problems, The Effects Can Last Forever
There’s been a lot of talk on LWE recently about people stealing or, uh, creatively sampling other artists’ work. Melodic themes (Rodriguez Jr.) and even whole tracks (Joe Louis) being appropriated without due credit to the originators seems to equal pissed off producers and fans alike. So how would you feel if one of your favorite records of all time (and a worldwide hit and bona fide classic to boot) had its bass line jacked wholesale without so much as a “by your leave”? This is the situation I was faced with a few weeks back. Having popped into one of London’s Music and Video Exchanges, done my usual trawl of the racks, and come out delighted with a Nu Groove record for a mere £2, I put the needle to the wax of Major Problem’s “The Effects Can Last Forever.” After thirty seconds of fuzzy beats and John Lennon intoning, “take this, brother, may it serve you well”, the familiar dungh-dungh-dungh-durr-dungh of “No Way Back” comes crashing through. Did I feel ripped off at Adonis being ripped off?
BBH: All, Alltag 1-4
Wolfgang Voigt has rushed back in the spotlight recently, in part thanks to the release of the beautiful Nah Und Fern box set collecting his four ambient/classical Gas albums, as well as a reissue of the minimal techno inventing/perfecting Studio 1 CD on Profan. Gas and Studio 1 have always been, with Mike Ink, Voigt’s most well known pseudonyms, but one must remember this is a man with 33 monikers other than his own listed on Discogs (counting only his solo projects). It’s with that in mind that I delve in the past to unearth one of Wolfgang’s hidden gems, All’s “Alltag 1-4” on his own Kompakt.
BBH: Pelon, No Stunts
When Basic Channel ceased its transmissions and gave way to Chain Reaction, the label’s fans were introduced to further faceless techno by a new wave of producers. While Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald used the former label as a breeding ground for their own Basic Channel tracks, Chain Reaction was set up for other artists as the pair digressed towards their own new projects. Chain Reaction threw up a fresh wave of unknown dub techno producers, and while some of those went on to become rather prolific, one of the best releases on the label marked the only release for its author. Henner Dondorf, better known as Pelon has since gone on to master a number of releases for Stephan Mathieu, but “No Stunts” on Chain Reaction is his only contribution to the canon of dub techno we have so far.
BBH: Joe Louis, Back To The Beginning
When I bought this 12″ back in 1996, I had no reason to believe it was anything other than a release by early Chicago house producer Joe Lewis. He had already released under that surname variation on his own Target label a decade earlier and had accumulated three releases on Relief. What I didn’t know was that Lewis had come into possession of these four tracks by way of a trip to the UK, during which Jaime Read gave him two DATs of music with the understanding they would be handed to Relief on his behalf. The truth of which was never widely recognized, allowing further releases of more of that music on Basement 282 and a retrospective album on Peace Frog years later. I had heard rumors of this fact for several years but never got full confirmation until researching for this review. In addition to a thorough telling of its history on Discogs, Read has made his regrets and frustration known publicly: “I gave Joe Lewis my DATs when I was young and naïve, so there is an expensive lesson learnt. Shame there’s no music journos with any bollocks.” But if you can put this release’s ignominious underbelly aside, there is music contained within that deserves celebrating.
BBH: Steve Bicknell, Lost Recordings Number 1: Why? & For Whom?
It was 1996. The UK’s techno scene was reaching the tail end of its “golden” period. By 1998, the landscape would have changed irrevocably, with the one-note loop dullards dominating, flooding the scene with cheap knock-offs of Purposemaker’s dynamism. However, just as the lights started to fade, Steve Bicknell, the resident DJ and promoter at London techno mecca Lost stepped up with the Lost Recordings series (confusingly, on the Cosmic label).
BBH: D’Pac, Everybody/Wouldn’t Lie
It’s the deepness that first gets you when listening to this early Detroit house classic on the short lived Vicious Music label. The pads float on and on like endless clouds filling the sky, the bass burrowing beneath your feet, urging them to raise up and move. This 1992 record was one of only a handful of releases for the British born D’Pac who together with his brother had emigrated to Detroit via Toronto in the mid 80’s, before they moved back to Canada to focus on their Immigrant Soul project. Backed with the upfront house of “Wouldn’t Lie” featuring Terence FM on vocals, the cuts also had a helping hand from Chez Damier on production duties, which goes some way to explaining the unmistakable Detroit house sound.
BBH: Martha Wash, Runaround
From a completely different era of clubbing when tracks had not quite taken over from the power of a song came one of the great dance floor anthems of the early nineties. Todd “The God” Terry was at the height of his powers; legendary for playing sets on four turntables entirely comprised of his own productions, almost as well known for his unmistakable syncopated snare heavy beats and having a bottomless bag of production monikers. He was already hugely popular for having redefined New York house music, essentially making it what it became, by fusing together elements of disco, Chicago house and Latin. He had already won over Europe and scored large by producing the crossover classic “I’ll House You” by The Jungle Brothers. He hadn’t quite reached the celebrity remixer status he enjoyed from the middle part of the 90’s when he inexorably helped along the career of Everything But The Girl with his anthemic remix of “Missing,” but he was well on his way with a litany of remixing credits to his name of the club stars du jour.
BBH: Teste, The Wipe
Looking back at Teste’s limited output, it would easy to write the Canadian duo off as a minor footnote in the history of techno’s early years. Their discography never extended past two official releases, but with their debut 12″ known as “The Wipe” they left an indelible mark on the techno landscape.
BBH: Various Artists, The Airbag Craftworks Compilation
With Workshop’s thin run of singular tech-house releases really blossoming into something special over the last couple years, I suspect I wasn’t the only person who hit up the Discogs and MySpace info pools to figure out just how long Lowtec had been so weird sounding, precisely who Da Halz was and how much more Move D the hard drive could hold. Fortunately, Leipzig’s now-dormant Out To Lunch offers insight on all those inquiries and more. Effectively a “pre-Workshop,” there’s a sizable overlap in roster, which might be because they happen to be operated by the same dudes. In this discography, you’ll find records by the likes of Lowtec, Even Tuell, Alex Cortex, and Seidensticker, as well as a handful star-studded compilations. The most invaluable of these is 1999’s Airbag Craftworks Compilation, so named for Paul-David Rollmann’s line of bags and shirts.
BBH: Monoton, Blau, Monotonprodukt 02 26y++ & Eight Lost Tracks
In 2003 and 2006, two early-80s minimal electronic records resurfaced on the Montréal-based label Oral Records. The long out-of-print, limited-release Monotonprodukt albums are the work of Konrad Becker, a multidisciplinary artist who now writes and conducts research about media. While Becker is currently busy doing work for the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0, Public Netbase, World-Information.Org, and the Global-Security-Alliance.Com project, he was once, as if in another life, the inspired mind behind Monoton, an art project he started in 1979.
BBH: Dark Comedy, Plankton/Clavia’s North
One of the spearheads of Detroit’s second wave of techno producers, Kenny Larkin has been responsible for some of the most spine tingling moments in the history of techno. It’s a fact that’s often overlooked, but his stunning discography leaves no doubt this is the case. With time spent repairing computers for the Air Force and an intended career in stand up comedy, Larkin’s entry into the Detroit scene was slightly delayed, though perhaps time spent examining the inner mechanics of machines helped with his productions. Before the release of this stone cold classic in 1997 he had already unleashed the brilliant Azimuth album, a string of singles, and under the Dark Comedy moniker the techno epic “War Of The Worlds.” With the issue of “Plankton,” backed with the equally mesmerizing “Clavia’s North” (on limited clear vinyl no less) Larkin’s reputation as a master craftsman of electronic communication reached a new high.
BBH: DJ Jasper, Automation EP
The end of the nineties was a very interesting time in techno for America. While the focus had squarely been on Detroit for some years, people like Damon Wild, Freddy Fresh, Joey Beltram, Steve Stoll, Woody McBride and Frankie Bones were already highlighting other pockets of forward thinking synthetic electronics. Few though factored in San Francisco as a hotbed of techno activity; its name synonymous with tripped out house and the warehouse parties that made use of the cheap space in the Soma area. Two labels went a long way to dispel this generalization of the city though — Organised Noise and Cytrax. The latter was set up by Kit Clayton, Steve Tang and John Mendez. The label was host to a small like-minded group of friends — among them Sutekh, Markus Miller, Twerk and DJ Jasper. Their releases were undeniably influenced by the tracky style of Chicago’s Relief Records but with a nod to electro; they were also infused with a more experimental flavor, which Kit Clayton especially would go on to explore further via his output on Pole’s ~scape imprint among others.
BBH: 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins, Jazz Is The Teacher
By 1992, the spiritual kinship between the cities of Detroit and Berlin had existed for years. But despite the invisible conduit of ideas and inspiration flowing back and forth between the world’s electronic dance music capitols, there was precious little actual collaboration to show for it — just a handful of tracks, really, though a symbiosis of ideas and a definitive kinship was in full flower. 3MB was the German half of the equation, featuring Moritz von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann who would go on to produce pioneering music of their own. The pair had worked a year previous with Detroit techno pioneer Eddie “Flashin” Fowlkes, though the group only truly collaborated on two tracks on the double LP released under their names. By all accounts, however, the work between Atkins, von Oswald and Fehlmann was a true melting pot, the music showcased on the group’s self-titled double LP released by Tresor in 1993.
Introducing Big Black Headphones
We here at Little White Earbuds are known for bringing you reviews of the hottest new techno/house singles; but until now our purview has been limited to the present. With Big Black Headphones, a new column we’re starting, LWE’s reviewing staff has the chance to look back at oft-overlooked releases that had our hands in the air in years past. We want to see how once vital singles stack up in today’s crowded, fast paced world and trace the threads connecting the past and the present. Please join us in taking time to remember the past which laid the foundation for where we are today.