I grew up with Drumcode. It was quite common with forest raves here in Sweden, basically a huge sound system in some remote place and people dancing over night. And at one point there were also some organisers who rented a whole cruise liner, with people like Adam Beyer and Thomas Krome DJ’ing. My favourites include: surgeon, headroom, the advent, invexis, chris liebing, planetary assault systems, mark broom, pounding grooves and richie hawtin. Then I fell into the rabbit hole of more experimental music such as autechre and have been stuck there ever since

Drumcode is still going strong and Beyer does a weekly podcast, which is excellent (and supports RSS too). I still love that sound even though I'm now far too old to have the stamina to party like I did in the 90s/00s.

IDM has also been a huge love of my life. I'm not sure I could pick a favourite out of techno or IDM though. But Drumcode Radio is certainly good music to run to.

Slam did a rather nice podcast that sat somewhere between techno and experimental. I don't know if their podcast is still going but their RSS feed has certainly stopped :(

Drumcode has become the EDM festival gateway to many people and has earned the nickname "business techno". Gently bobbing along at 125-128 with predictable buildups/breakdowns and is very "FX friendly" on the mixer.

Aside from the beat rate, what you've described there could equally apply to all genres of dance music. Almost every track follows the same rules phrasing and has a 4/4 time signature (often with really accented four-to-the-floor kicks or percussion). The predictable buildups and breakdowns are a feature: most people can't dance to something they can't follow. Just look at how differently people dance to IDM (it's not uncommon to see a mosh pit at some gigs). That said, even IDM has a good few tracks with a predictable phrasings to them too.

Sure, some genres are more predictable than others (hardhouse, for example, is effectively the "painting by numbers" equivalent of EDM) but as a retired DJ who used to mix on 3+ decks and throw in the odd non 4/4 track too (typically 3/4 but I had some more esoteric records too), I can't think of many tracks from many genres that were particularly hard to DJ.

...well there was this one track that was difficult, not because of the phrasing nor time signature, but because the producer decided to fade in the start of the track. Very unhelpful that!

What I've written here also applies to a significant amount of rock and it's various sub-genres too.

As for the "FX friendly on the mixer", that's been technos style since the 90s. It's nothing new and certainly not anything specific to Drumcode. Richie Hawtin even released a compilation album called "Decks, EFX & 909" in 1999 and his style is very different to Adam Beyer's. In the early 00s Misstress Barbara wrote in a cover sleeve on one of her mixes about how her sets were about creating new compositions live using 3 decks, heavy EQing and effects. Her style also differed massively from Drumcode.

Source: retired DJ and producer. Not a household name but played a few gigs in and around London. Mostly techno but with house, electro, breaks, EBM, rock, metal, industrial and pretty much anything else thrown in that had the right vibe to it.

It's funny because I guess I'm old but that kind of stuff feels sort of like the "end of the road" for techno and not part of the history, more of the end of the history.

I liked some of it at the time -- I have some of the Code Red Adam Beyer stuff on coloured red vinyl somewhere -- but it's a bit soul-less and monolithic. A very white middle class European straightlaced "thump thump thump" interpretation of the genre.

The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.

> I liked some of it at the time -- I have some of the Code Red Adam Beyer stuff on coloured red vinyl somewhere -- but it's a bit soul-less and monolithic. A very white middle class European straightlaced "thump thump thump" interpretation of the genre.

I've got a couple of those records and I can tell you that Adam Beyer and Drumcode still sound like that today, they've really nailed that "far duller than it sounds" sub-genre of techno.

> The stuff from Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s that I loved the most that got left out of the "techno history" was the "No Future" / Scandinavian Records school -- Neil Landstrumm, Cristian Vogel, Dave Tarrida, etc. really wonky wonk stuff, very creative. That's what I was playing back then.

I managed to see Landstrumm play two days before the start of lockdown last March as part of the 20 Years of Don't evening at the Bangface Weekender, how's that for good timing? :)

https://bangface.com/weekender2020/lineup/

I was going out to a lot of squat parties that played it in the 00s when there was tons of it coming out of London from labels like Don't, Yolk, Chancer, Victim and 4x4 Recordings, and also went to Jerome Hill's Uglyfunk night regularly (it's still going in fact but I've not made it there recently). Mark Hawkins was probably my favourite producer followed by Jerome Hill and Michael Forshaw.

Nice man.

I've only managed to see Landstrumm twice, cuz of being on this side of the pond. Once in the early 2000s he DJ'd along with DJ Hell at a local club, and actually he was quite competent on the vinyl (more than Hell was) and he played a lot of Chicago and Detroit classics. It was a good night if I recall.

The other time was actually very recent (2019), someone I know locally knows him personally and brought him over into my local small Ontario city to play live. Small gig, maybe 50 people there. Even got to shake his hand and say hi.

Def. one of my favourite musicians in the genre.

I also saw him as Crystal Distortion back in the mid-00s at Uglyfunk and as himself in the early 10s, so that's only one more time than you :)

I'm a big fan of Detroit ghetto-tech like DJ Godfather, and have a similar problem of it only existing on the other side of the Atlantic... The weekender I mentioned has had at least one of the top DJs over every other year or so over the last decade which is amazing, because otherwise I've been out to see it played three times in the past two decades, so I feel your pain :)

I believe I saw Godfather and some others in that vein at the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival back in 2000. Maybe in 2001.

Sweet little Canadian me was ... shocked ... by the way people uh, danced to that stuff.

Hah, I bet, watching people dancing to it in Boiler Room videos is different enough from what I'm used to, and that's got to be a lot tamer than you'd see somewhere without cameras filming the entire thing!

The first time I saw this clip it was amazing how distant it was from everything I've experienced since going to my first club in 1995 - and the video is from closer to 1995 than 1995 is to today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EarSRa19sZc

I've seen Model 500 and wasn't impressed to be honest, but then again electro isn't my thing at all so that's more about me lol, my friends enjoyed it a lot :)

Electro was my thing back then. But I think I'd tire of a whole gig of just Model 500.

The DEMF dancefloor vibe while the booty stuff was playing was... raunchy. Like full on grinding, ass rubbing, etc. Didn't see that stuff at clubs here. The rave/club/techno scene back then here was pretty androgynous and public displays of affection would have been very gauche. Not so in Detroit at certain gigs

First time I saw DJ Godfather they had DJ Stingray play before him and I enjoyed that style of modern harder electro a lot more, if only because the production was so much better :)

The scene here was neither androgynous nor restrained in the public displaying of affection - but overtly sexual displays were very much in the minority and stood out, probably because British people loved being able to shed our passively-aggressive polite and emotionally stunted personas for an evening by consuming large amounts of pills and just wanting to dance and hug people ;)

I've seen some full-on stuff at squat parties though. Ecstasy and alcohol can make people completely lose their inhibitions lol.

I totally agree for 90, even 99% of the tracks from that era, but there are some serious gems in there. I really enjoy the Youtube account "TECHNO" for finding some of it. A few producers that stood out to me: Kobaya, Rino Cerrone, Samuel L. Session, Leandro Gamez, G-Force, Tomie Nevada, Headroom, Gaetano Parisio, Damon Wild & Echoplex (slightly difference scene), Ade Fenton ... and many others less famous and with fewer releases.

Adam Beyer's tracks himself and most of the stuff on Drumcode from any era though is totally boring, I agree. And we can also agree the Neil Landstrumm and Cristian Vogel (I'd argue early Villalobos too) are the height of the end of techno history.

Quite possibly I just like this stuff because it reminds me of video game soundtracks from the era.

Damon Wild, that's good stuff.

Here, crack a cool one and breathe this in, for a little while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RFY8GK5PAA

Did exactly as you said. Fantastic.

That whole movement was kinda self contained. Early 2000s Central Europe.

There's a party drug contribution that's really instrumental to these movements. I have been thinking of how to do a musical taxonomy by narcotic, but it's hard to do without making everyone sound like a junkie.

New Beat and MDMA, Disco and cocaine, freeform Jazz and heroine, etc. (I'm a big fan of all of these btw, and could likely make you want to "delete my number" talking about them. But pretending like Gino Soccio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhAPoip5YeQ) or Tantra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyqkePY6FKY) or the partiers listening were sober is personally, not very plausible. Sure, I'm sober, but I'm an outlier)

The big theory here is the genres that seem to compactly come and go in a few years, seem to have a high degree of self similarity in releases (take reggae or psytrance for example), and seem to be popular with the party kids might be heavily linked to a particular single or set of narcotics.

Take happy hardcore for example. Thousands of tracks, labels, artists, a huge culture and scene behind it, of well, to be honest, a bunch of teenagers on drugs. Take psychedelic rock and LSD.

Again, this is a really touchy subject but I kinda think drumcore is in that camp. It follows the same chronological and social patterns and seems to fall in the same circles.

I'm not a drug user but I've been to enough parties to know there's certainly a different prevalence in different circles. It's even more difficult because you know, it's all technically illegal so people aren't entirely forthcoming and people don't tend to leave great documentation of illegal substance use around for future historian study.

Maybe a cross comparison with police arrest reports would be as authoritative as we can get? Even that is tough though because in all the hundreds of underground raves I went to in my teens and twenties in california, police arresting people happened at I believe zero. So that sample size is extremely small.

And even then, everything usually gets consumed rather immediately and if they bust a dealer what they're finding are the unsold inventory so even that's not a good metric, the "empty shelves" are the important ones.

To be fair a lot of the stuff I mentioned was from Spain and Belgium, more so than Sweden, but I loved your post! Completely agree.

Yea, that Swedish techno and its offshoots ... it was/is amphetamine music. That's my jerky opinion anyways.

Boom-tss, boom-ts, fist pump

oh that makes sense. I forgot about meth.

Mostly it's me not understanding why so many people are captivated, excited and enthralled by something that sounds so caustic and abrasive.

It's admittedly extremely arrogant for me to say "well they must be on drugs because ahem, I am perfect." but you see parties starting at around midnight and going until 4pm the next day, there's something up with that.