Detroit, Düsseldorf, Chicago, BerlinElectronic Music and Emotion, 1970-2000

Dr Ben Gook

University of Melbourne

Affect, Memory, Place seriesBook out in September (Rowman & Littlefield International)

Triple senses of ecstasy:

• an ecstatic response to the geographical and political reorganisation around 1989

• an ecstatic cultural enactment and reimagining of that reorganisation on dancefloors

• popular take up of the drug that takes its name from an emotional experience already accounted for by the ancients (e.g. Euripides’ Bacchae)

The Fall of the Berlin Wall was something no one had ever expected to happen so quick and with such intensity, leaving Germany in a state of euphoria, upheaval and confusion. . . . The years that followed were marked by new-found freedom, chaos, change and a rush of collective ecstasy.–Promotional blurb, SubBerlin: The Story of Tresor (2008)

Kraftwerk was always very culty, but it was very Detroit too because of the industry in Detroit, and because of the mentality. That music automatically appeals to the people like a tribal calling . . . It sounded like somebody making music with hammers and nails.—Derrick May, 1992

America is very shy when it comes to electronics. It’s still a highly schizophrenic situation. People have all the latest state-of-the-art technology, and yet they put wood panels on the front to make them feel comfortable. Or they develop new plastics and try to imitate the appearance of wood. They use modern technology to try to re-create the Middle Ages. This is stupid. —Ralf Hutter (Kraftwerk), 1982

Universal Techno

Detroit & GermanyDerrick May & Juan AtkinsKraftwerk & Manuel Göttsching

Juan Atkins was beside himself. Twenty-one years old in 1983 and already a recording artist, as half of an electro-funk duo called Cybotron, Atkins was still struggling to make it beyond his hometown of Detroit. He’d had a great idea—take what Kraftwerk, the German synth-pop group, was doing, but make it funky. Not just funky the way he knew them to be—a group whose 1977 album Trans-Europe Express could keep a dance floor going—but funky in a way that the rest of the world could hear.

Derrick May defined techno as sounding “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”

DJing one night, Derrick May sent everyone home to the softer strains of Manuel Göttsching’sE2:E4. “Just imagine,” says producer Neil Ollivierra, “Manuel Göttschingbeing played for a crowd of young black people in Detroit in 1988.”

–All quotes on this and previous page from Michelangelo Matos, The Underground is Massive (2015)

Robert Hood on growing up in (Fordist) Detroit

My parents were musicians. My mother sang in an R’n’B band; my father is a jazz musician. He played piano and trumpet. So music is in my DNA. . . . We’re a Motownfamily. The music was always playing at home. The Motown sound was the progressive sound for Detroit in the early ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was about progress and hope and dreams and aspirations for a better life. The auto industry was booming, and everyone could have a house. A two, maybe three bedroom home, one or two automobiles in the garage. In the early days of Motown, it wasn’t political. It was uplifting. It was about Diana Ross and the Supremes and ‘Dancing in the Street’ and that kind of thing. But later on in the 70s, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye started to record more politically charged music—during the Vietnam War and draft dodging and that whole era. That was influential in shaping me as a young black kid in Detroit. –Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 141.

Robert Hood on Berlin & Detroit

The enthusiasm we met in Berlin was surreal. But at the same time, it was sort of familiar. We had a common bond, and we knew that bond was there, that we were on the same page. What was surreal was that you came from such different backgrounds. It seemed to me that they wanted to escape their past. And we wanted to escape our past, too, the one so full of racism. Escape and move on. Remember the past, but look for a better world. That, I believe, was the common thread. We were all looking to these futuristic, experimental sounds as an escape vehicle, as a spaceship with which to get away, to transport ourselves into the future where we’re all one, where divisions of race and religion and culture are torn down just like the Berlin Wall.–Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 154-5.

Robert Hood on Berlin & Detroit

At the time [1990], there was no real stage for Underground Resistance [Hood, Jeff Mills & Mike Banks] in Detroit. . . . We were thus forced to go global. Jeff had already told Mike and me about Berlin, how exciting the music and club scenes were and what was going on there. That really inspired my imagination, of course. . . . The [Tresor] vault was an unusual location. It was dark and murky, a very underground, subterranean atmosphere. I remember it being very smoky—just perfect. An ideal setting for an Underground Resistance show. That was very indicative of the Detroit-Berlin connection. It was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there was this resurgence of a new electronic sound—more brutal, more assertive. Before, it was more of a fantasy-based electronic sound; now, it was more reality-based and in tune with what was happening in the world, with the fall of the Wall and the political situation. It was about survival and mankind coming together.–Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 147-8.

Underground Resistance / World Power Alliance

The [World Power] Alliance is dedicated to the Advancement of the Human Race by Way of Sonic Experimentation . . . The W. P. A. was designed to bring the world’s minds together to combat the mediocre audio and visual programming being fed to the inhabitants of Earth, this programming is stagnating the minds of the people building a wall between races and world peace. The Wall must be destroyed, and it will Fall . . . By using the untapped energy potential of sound, the W. P. A. will smash the wall much the same as certain frequencies shatter glass. Brothers of the underground, transmit your tones and frequencies from all locations of this world and wreak havoc on the programmers. THIS IS WAR! Long Live The Underground.–Text etched on the B-side of three vinyl singles issued in 1992; cited in Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (2012), 271.

Jeff Mills

As barriers fall around the world, the need to understand others and the way they live, think and dream is a task that is nearly impossible to imagine without theory and explanation. And as we approach the next century with hope and prosperity, this need soon becomes a necessity rather than a recreational urge.–Text from Mills’ Waveform Transmission vol. 3; cited in Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (2012), 287.

We Call It Techno

Ek-stasis

A moment of standing outside oneself or the putting of something out of place

–To turn inside out–To be beside one’s (sense of ) self

Makes clear link to stasis: liberation from stasis (Nietzsche)

Music and ecstasy

Music possesses us and we give ourselves up to it, hurled into another state of consciousness, jolted out of our usual way of feeling connected to our bodies, our perceptions and others. We can emerge feeling as if we had been reborn.–Sharon Farber, “The Hunger for Ecstasy”

Wolfgang Tillmans

The inversion and upending of scales and values made it feel as though techno would lead to a new openness and impartiality. Hard is soft. That whole hard look with camo gear and the hard sound, which wasn’t actually meant aggressively or militaristically. This total upending forced you to see everything in a new way. It had a lot to do with the times and the end of the East-West paradigm. Of course, you didn’t always have the feeling there were no more conflicts—the war in Yugoslavia was very present—but the absence of that longstanding rigid framework really triggered something very deep. The structures that had previously existed were suddenly gone.—Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 214. Emphasis mine.

DJ Clé on Berlin

We played in clubs that belonged to no one, in parts of town for which no one was responsible, in buildings that, according to the land register, didn’t even exist. We lived predominantly during hours of the day when all normal people were sleeping. —Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 247.

Feiern (Don’t Forget to Go Home)

Common responses to the Fall of the Wall

“This is insane!”

“I can’t understand it!”

“I can’t grasp it!”

“Nonsense, nonsense”

“This is sheer madness.”

Wende

Many responses to questions such as ‘What was the Wende like?’ began with ‘How can I describe it to you?’ and then trailed off through minutes of searching for apt metaphors and similes, false starts, agitated silences, and sighs. One man simply laughed at me and said, ‘HerrBoyer, I would be very happy to explain it to you, but the problem is, we’re not even certain ourselves what it is that happened to us.’-Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System (2005), 220-1. Emphasis mine.

Stefan Schvanke: I lived for it. It was cult-like. Everything was right: the music, the people, the parties, my work. It was almost too perfect. I was totally revved up all the time. The whole thing gave me an incredible energy. I was fully charged, even during the week, always looking deliriously forward to the weekend.Clé: Everything revolved around techno. All my friends had some important position somewhere—at EFA or in a club, printing t-shirts or DJing themselves. Life was concentrated around the weekend. On buying records, listening to new stuff, painting tapes, hanging around with people. It was incredibly exciting. I had the feeling of being part of it, part of the whole. Of not just being a consumer, but doing and shaping something.—Interview in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie (2014, English edition), 139.

SubBerlin

Ecstasy (MDMA)

Empathogen-entactogenFeeling enhancerDisinhibitionEmpathy production“Touching within”

Ecstasy and crowds

A strange and wondrous atmosphere of collective intimacy, an electric sense of connection between complete strangers.—Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (2012), 19.

We Call It Techno

We Call It Techno

In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this aspect: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event is itself a splitting off from, or a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a deviation with respect to laws, an unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible. . . . In this sense, an event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed; but there still is something there that cannot be outdated. . . . (cont…)—Deleuze and Guattari, “Mai ’68 n’a pas eu lieu’” (May 68 Did Not Take Place)

May ’68 is more of the order of a pure event, free from all normal or normative causality. . . . There were a lot of agitations, gesticulations, slogans, idiocies, illusions in ’68, but this is not what counts. What counts is what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if a society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else. . . . The possible does not pre-exist, it is created by the event . . . The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work . . .) When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects, according to lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that shows that it desires the mutation. That’s what it is, a veritable redeployment.—Deleuze and Guattari, “Mai ’68 n’a pas eu lieu’” (May 68 Did Not Take Place)

The present is never caught up to itself, we encounter history virtually, vicariously, voyeuristically — forever latecomers and precursors to our experiences, outsiders to our most intimate affairs. We are burdened with the unfinished projects of others, which impinge with the brutal opacity of ‘enigmatic signifiers’ — untimely relics of a forgotten era and intrusive reminders of a future foreclosed.—Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution