171–180 of 305 posts
"Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall" [0] is a good book on the origins of the Berlin Techno scene. It's based on interviews and discussions by the people originally setting up the whole thing, making it a pretty breezy read that you don't necessarily have to go through chronologically. No city can really replicate the absurd situation Berlin was in after the second world war. The absolute…
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EDM isn't Techno. It's a bit like saying that hard rock is like metal (somewhat bad analogy, but I hope you get the point). I know you listed a range of genres but it's important to note that the Berlin techno scene would never consider itself part of EDM. In Europe, most EDM is happening in Amsterdam.
Can you distinguish these two? In my head EDM & techno occupy the same space.
Almost immediately after the term started being used, though, it became strongly associated with a particular type of dance music -- namely the mainstream house music that got played at big "EDM" festivals -- think David Guetta and Afrojack and Avicii and Tiesto... They used a blanket term when putting the festival together because the festival booked all kinds of dance music, but the main stages were dominated by a particular kind of dance music, so for most people that went to those festivals, that was the kind of music they associated with EDM.
"Techno" went through a similar evolution. It was originally a term for a particular subgenre of disco and kraftwerk influenced dance music coming out of detroit in the 1980s, around the same time that house music was starting up in Chicago and garage music started up in New York. It pushed further into pure electronic sounds than house and garage did (at first) and early techno compilations solidified in people's minds that electronic music was "techno", especially in america, so "techno" for a while became a catch-all term for all kinds of electronic music. That faded away when "electronica" and then "edm" sort of took on that role, and techno continued as a subgenre of music by itself.
So, I think, properly, techno is a _sub genre_ of "electronic dance music" in the general sense, but is a different genre than what a lot of people think of as EDM (the kind of house music played at large festivals).
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A room in a flat now for €500? Maybe way outside the ringbahn...
I was trying to make a comparison to the €100 rooms from 20 years ago. That would be a single room in a 4-6 person shared flat. Those are still €500-ish. (In places just outside the ring like Treptow, Britz, Wedding, Lichtenberg.) In my shared two person flat back then I paid €300 (bills included). That room now would be way over €500.
"Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall" [0] is a good book on the origins of the Berlin Techno scene. It's based on interviews and discussions by the people originally setting up the whole thing, making it a pretty breezy read that you don't necessarily have to go through chronologically. No city can really replicate the absurd situation Berlin was in after the second world war. The absolute…
> after the second world war. I think you mean the cold war.
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Can you distinguish these two? In my head EDM & techno occupy the same space.
> In my head EDM & techno occupy the same space. That's the case for a lot of "normies", but it really feels insulting to the electronic music fans in general. Unlike say rock nobody's gonna ask you to know every band in existence and every album they put out decades ago, but you should be able to distinguish between major electronic music genres like house, techno, drum and bass, trance, hardstyle and what not. Some…
And don't assume that people in other cities don't get it. There's lots of underground clubs where people that go out are 100% into it for the music and "get it" and aren't just going for bottle service and VIP or whatever.
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I live in Berlin. This isn't true at all. Berlin's underground scene is still quite strong, perhaps just not as strong as it used to be. There's more "in the open" stuff due to the popularity, yes, but there's still plenty of (sometimes literal) underground raves happening. I'd also argue that the most recent accelerator for the shift in culture in Berlin isn't so much the tourism, but the pandemic. People haven't re…
Tourism definitely wasn't a major drag on the techno scene. There's always been the tourist clubs and the clubs that were more underground. Berliners usually don't go to Berlin's best known clubs. (Who the hell goes to Watergate or Tresor? Old joke was that Tresor was the biggest club in Dresden.) I think the biggest drag is actually rent prices. When I got to Berlin 20 years ago you could get a room in a shared flat…
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Can't remember climbing a ladder down to get into Tresor. The ladder was into the cellar of the Fischbüro location somewhere in Kreuzberg 36. (these guys started Tresor later) (Eimer (Bucket) was a really bad location several years later, you wouldn't have been able to get out of the basement if ...)
What exactly is Kreuzberg 36? I always assumed that was a street number after hearing an old Smut Peddlers song. https://genius.com/Smut-peddlers-kreuzberg-36-lyrics
36 is the cooler, poorer, more political, younger half of the borough, it really was a center for non-conformists after reunification, but it's being gentrified these days.
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City limits are important because each city in a metro area could have different zoning and noise ordinance laws. Or even just law enforcement that's more or less strict in one city than another. This can help to shape the culture in each city in a metropolitan area.
> City limits are important because each city in a metro area could have different zoning and noise ordinance laws. You can have these differences within one city as well, on the district level or even individual streets.
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On the other hand, normies do ruin everything.
In my experience, 100% of all people who use the word "normie" unironically are shitty, shallow, superficial people.