Techno Tales

It’s 1994, and Takaaki Itoh, a young Japanese dj with a passion for various forms of electronic music, is beginning to organise his own techno parties in and around the city of Morioka, in northern Japan. Like many people in Japan in the early 1990s, Itoh’s interest in techno has been influenced by artists from the United States and Europe, who tour the country and increasingly release their records there. The growing popularity of...

It’s 1992, and Rolf Ellmar and Markus Löffel have been producing tracks together for about a year in Frankfurt, Germany. The pair work under the artist title, Jam & Spoon, which combines the adapted name that each member has taken on for the collaboration, those names being Jam El Mar and Mark Spoon respectively. Both artists are established in the electronic music industry, El Mar having been part of the formative trance act, ...

It’s February 1989, a few months before the Berlin wall falls. Matthias Roeingh, a dj otherwise known as Dr Motte, is standing on the street outside a Berlin nightclub at three in the morning. He, his girlfriend, and a friend, are discussing how underground parties in England are regularly being stopped by the police there, who in doing so also remove the sound system. Motte and his associates are amused that the response to this f...

It’s 1988 in Manchester, England, and a budding electronic music producer called Gerald Simpson is about to drop off a cassette recording to Piccadilly Radio station of one of his regular acid house jams. Simpson’s hope is that people will hear his work on Stu Allen’s Sunday show which features local demo recordings. When this recording is played on air, among the radio audience is local dj, rapper, and A & R staffer for Rham! ...

It’s the late 1980s, and Jeff Mills is a university architecture student in Detroit, as well as a renowned turntablist, dj, and radio host. In exploring producing his own music, Mills has also started to make tracks with another local electronic music artist, Mike Banks. During this period, Mills produces music at night, studies during the day, and sometimes flies overseas to dj at events on weekends. Then one day in class, his uni...

It’s the mid-1980s, and Kelli Hand works for a telephone company in Detroit, in their fraud control division. The company for which she works sells cards with phone credit, that customers use to make calls locally and internationally. Thieves steal the cards regularly though, and Hand’s job is to identify these stolen cards, and then to cut their access to the phone network. While this occupies her weekdays, on the weekends she is ...