Matt MacQueen wrote: yeah fair... massive connections between house and techno, and that is the way i like it too! But just for the record on a historical timeline, the earliest detroit techno things like A Number of Names and Cybotron and early Model 500 took more from european sounds than they did chicago house, and pre-dated a lot of chicago house actually. "Clear" (1982 !) was not a debt nor offshoot of chicago house. Chicago house (then and even now) still holds disco deep down in it's heart, where when Juan started out there was moreso a self-conscious rejection of that that kind of ethos in his early work. I know you know this Kent, but just in the interest of the public record :)
**** Well Matt, strictly speaking the above is one perspective only! (And *I* know that *you* know this *too* but I refer you to your own reason for piping up to Kent, earlier!) Being the varying degrees of music historians that we are, I think we will mostly tend to be familiar with the notion that a movement, genre, sound etc, call it what you will, needs a prevalence of releases and a public following in order to be validated as a trend. Plus there's also the idea that there needs to be a construct amongst the group of artists who are making a type of music, which shows that they consciously identify what's happening as a trend, contemporaneously, rather than such recognition happening retrospectively by the same artists or by others. Whether one agrees with those ideas or not (and I'm not even sure that I do), there they are. Now of course besides Cybotron, can anyone else name some artists who were producing music in such a vein in the US at the time? More crucially, when did Juan Atkins coin his 'techno music' phrase? Wasn't it quite a bit later than 'Clear'? I seem to remember it was during the late 80s, coinciding roughly with the release of the 10/Virgin compilation. Now of course the whole point of that compilation was that it was trying to find a new angle to cash-in on the Chicago house explosion of the time. As I say, I'm no history theory expert but I believe I'm on the right lines here. I'll also reiterate that I'm even ambivalent about such notions myself, and to illustrate that, throw in the other old chestnut about techno arguably having originated even earlier than Cybotron, in the shape of those blokes from Dusselforf who named themselves after the power station for some reason. (What can I say; I'm just a completist! :-)) K
