Music producer Roman Flügel learned to play the piano at the age of six, but found it too boring for him. He discovered drum machines and that was it.
Photo: Photo: © HR
The navels of the world bear dazzling names. Some called Rome, Alexandria, Delphi, or Florence, Timbuktu, Constantinople; and they are all – whether rightly so or not – the heart of style-defining epochs and sound incomparably more impressive than Achtermai, Distillery or Muna. For those who have never heard of it: that’s the name of international institutions in a pop culture that’s more global than almost any before: techno.
Distilled from new wave, synthpop, electrofunk and industrial, this repetitive staccato marched from Detroit via Frankfurt to the last corners of every country. A triumph that the ARD documentary “Techno House Germany” retells. The country of origin of musical revolutionaries from Karl-Heinz Stockhausen to Can and Kraftwerk does play a key role in the four-quarter march of electronic sounds from the subculture into the mainstream. What the eight-part series emphasizes, however, are the suburbs of glittering metropolises like New York or Berlin.
Anyone who accompanies the filmmakers Wero Jägersberg and Mariska Lief through the history of techno for eight thirty-minute episodes will also end up in Chemnitz, Leipzig, Klosterlausnitz. Just a few years after pioneers like Sven Väth, Talla 2XLC or Athanassios Christos Macias alias Ata had imported the minimalist beat of pounding basses from the USA to Hesse, East German epigones founded clubs like the Achtermai (Chemnitz), the Distillery (Leipzig) or in the middle of the Thuringian Pampa: a cultural center called Muna.
Sounds like bohemian villages to outsiders. But if you take the trouble to ask people who love dancing in New York, Rio, Tokyo, you can definitely come across knowledge of these peripheral areas in the global music circus. The fact that Wero Jägersberg and Mariska Lief devote almost 50 percent of their four-hour milieu study to East German clubs and festivals, shaped by self-sacrificing techno freaks such as Mathias Kaden, Thomas Sperling or Ronny Seifert, is not romanticizing local patriotism, but the result of good research into landscapes full of orphaned areas that blossomed belatedly a bit of anarchy to turn off.
Nevertheless, the eight episodes also play elsewhere, of course. In the legendary Frankfurt underground club »Omen«, for example, which the native »shaman, father, master of ceremonies« Sven Väth opened in 1988 under the bank towers of Mainhattan, of all places. Or in the similarly famous Berlin techno temple »Tresor«, with which the capital began to replace Hesse as the national hotspot of fresh youth culture three years later. In both cases, however, it wasn’t about “locations,” as such halls are called in modern German; it wasn’t even about DJs or producers, among whom highly paid superstars soon emerged in the wake of the Love Parade.
Anyone who follows »Techno House Deutschland« closely will immediately believe the authors, as their protagonists constantly affirm: It’s about the music, a sweaty, unprejudiced, hedonistic, almost classless sound that, precisely through its monotony, sparks feelings of happiness and everyone involved with 90 beats per minute upwards and basses welded like a steam hammer to form a kind of dance floor family. Too much pathos? Maybe.
But gay clubs like the »Front« in Hamburg, where homosexuals discovered the disinhibiting sound for themselves in the mid-eighties, show in unison with tour buses full of party-goers who drove from city to city, i.e. rave to rave, in the early nineties how community-building techno was and is. In return, the documentary can even do without iconographic images of the Love Parade, where the conquest of free space not only became mainstream, but business. On the other hand, she does not refrain from some dark sides of the history of techno.
A misogynist male system, for example, that kept women off the turntables and dance floors for years. The occupation of the black subculture of American industrial wasteland by white affluent children, which the Turkish-German DJ Ipek calls »colonization«. Or the emergence of a new caste of celebrities with privileged access to new releases and 200,000 airline miles a year.
But none of this can hide the fact that even stars like Paul van Dyk or Sven Väth pursue their passion with dedication. If the ARD audience accompanies them for four hours at festivals and dance floors, they can be a part of it. Or simply visit the next club afterwards. It should be wild in there – no matter whether Detroit, Frankfurt or Klosterlausnitz.
Available in the ARD media library