Techno was not invented in a single moment, and the people who assembled its parts were mostly not trying to invent it. What happened between roughly 1970 and 1981 was the arrival of a set of tools, and a set of ideas about those tools, that made the music possible.
The machine keeps time
The idea that mattered was that a machine could hold a rhythm indefinitely without tiring, drifting or improvising, and that this was a feature rather than a limitation. Drum machines had existed since the 1950s as accompaniment devices for organists. What changed at the end of the 1970s was that they became programmable. You could enter your own pattern rather than pick from a list of presets labelled bossa nova and waltz.
Roland's contribution to this is difficult to overstate, and was largely accidental. The company released three instruments in quick succession that sold poorly, were discontinued, and then became foundational:
- TR-808
- Released 1980. Its analogue drum voices sounded nothing like a real kit, which is precisely why it was commercially unsuccessful and creatively decisive.
- TB-303
- Released 1981 as a bass accompaniment for guitarists practising alone. It was bad at that job. Its resonant filter, pushed hard, produced the squelch that would later define acid house.
- TR-909
- Released 1983, partly digital, and the kick drum that most people picture when they picture techno.
All three were discontinued within a few years of release and turned up cheap on the second-hand market, which is where the musicians who mattered found them.
Düsseldorf
Kraftwerk formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 around Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Their early records were closer to the improvisational German rock of the period. The group that mattered to techno emerged with Autobahn in 1974 and hardened over the following seven years through Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981).
Kraftwerk offered a posture as much as a sound. The band presented itself as anonymous, uniformed and deliberately synthetic, inverting the rock performer as an authentic individual. They made repetition and precision into an aesthetic argument rather than a compromise. And critically, they were funky in a way that European electronic music of the period usually was not, which is why they landed so hard on Black American radio.
Munich and Tokyo
In Munich, Giorgio Moroder produced I Feel Love for Donna Summer in 1977, building the entire backing track from a sequenced Moog modular. The record's pulse does not swing or breathe. It simply continues. It was a global hit, and it demonstrated that a fully synthetic rhythm track could work on a dancefloor at the largest possible scale.
In Tokyo, Yellow Magic Orchestra (Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto) formed in 1978 and pursued a similar idea from a different direction, using microprocessor-sequenced arrangements and playing with Western ideas about Japanese modernity. Their records circulated widely in American clubs and were sampled heavily by early hip-hop producers.
Detroit radio
None of this would have reached the teenagers who built techno without an unusual piece of American radio programming. From the late 1970s, a Detroit DJ broadcasting as The Electrifying Mojo ran a show with no regard for the format boundaries that governed commercial radio. Kraftwerk sat next to Parliament, which sat next to the B-52s, which sat next to Prince.
For a generation of Black suburban teenagers outside Detroit, this was the delivery mechanism. It presented European electronic music not as an exotic import but as one more thing you might dance to, and it made no distinction between the machine music of Düsseldorf and the machine-assisted funk of George Clinton.
European synthesiser records, American funk, cheap discontinued Roland boxes, and a city whose industrial economy was visibly collapsing. That combination is the material from which techno was made.