techno.fyi is a short, plain history of techno music. Six articles covering the period from about 1970 to the present, plus a timeline.
What this is for
Most writing about techno is either specialist, assuming you already know who Mad Mike is, or promotional. This site tries to be neither. It is a straightforward account of where the music came from, who made it, and what the arguments about it have been.
It is deliberately short. Each era article runs to roughly a thousand words. Where something is contested, the text says so rather than picking a side and presenting it as settled.
What it gets wrong
Some of it, certainly. A few things worth knowing about how this was written:
- Dates for label foundings and club openings vary between sources. Where accounts differ, the text gives the most commonly cited year and avoids hanging an argument on it.
- "Firsts" are mostly unprovable. Claims that a particular record was the first techno track, or that one person invented the genre, are avoided throughout. The people involved generally reject that framing too.
- The Belleville Three is a retrospective label, applied by writers rather than chosen by Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. It is used here because it is the term readers will encounter elsewhere.
- This is a history written from published sources, not from interviews. Every era article lists what it drew on.
If something here is wrong, it should be corrected. The site is a set of Markdown files, so a correction is a small change.
Sources
The two books this history leans on most are Dan Sicko's Techno Rebels for Detroit, and Simon Reynolds's Energy Flash for the British rave period. For Berlin, Der Klang der Familie by Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen collects first-hand accounts from the years around reunification. For the argument about the music's ownership, DeForrest Brown Jr.'s Assembling a Black Counter Culture is the most useful recent text.
Per-article sources are listed at the foot of each era page.