Electronic Dance Music was not the first music I fell in love with. My first aural affair began at an early age with the music I was playing on the piano and cello–classical (my favorite composer was Bach). As I grew older my taste diversified, though I still maintained a love of art music. However, I just wasn’t as into punk as all my friends were. In fact, I just wasn’t into the whole live band experience.

A bunch of factors led me to EDM, mainly the fact that it could still be heard on WHFS at the time. My taste matured from the near-rock of Prodigy, to drum and bass, and finally to that purity of sound of techno (mainly the Detroit, acid, and minimal kind). I began frequenting parties, club nights, “raves,” anything with beats coming out of a sound system. I began DJing with kids at school, then organizing our own nights in high school and college (though they where never heavily attended).

Techno was one of the passions of my life. I read, and re-read Techno Rebels: Renegades of Electric Funk. I spent way to much money on vinyl, and mixed instead of doing work. But slowly, I lost interest in that music.

My tastes became more inline with that of the indie trends. This is most likely due to the death of the EDM scene around these parts, and the astounding emergence and quality of Baltimore’s indie scene. The new indie electronic acts, though technically electronic, didn’t fit into the old paradigm. Dan Deacon is electronic, and he does make dance music, but not in the same way that Jeff Mills does.

The end of an era came for me when I packed away my second turntable, because I wasn’t using it, and it was taking up space. I sold much of my vinyl on ebay.

However, the electronic music I have experienced live over the past few weeks has re-invigorated my interest in the music that was once the sole pursuit of my life. Read the rest…

Richie Hawtin- a name that looms large in the world of techno, but one that many outside of the scene may find unfamiliar. To be clear, we are talking about techno here, not house, not trance, not generic electronic dance music. And more specifically we are talking about pummeling Detroit techno, and then, as Hawtin’s style progresses, heady minimal techno.

To make this a little more familiar to the uninitiated, techno grew out of the failing economy and racially divided Detroit in the mid Eighties. People like Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May played a huge role in the transition from electro to techno. Hawtin, then known by the seriously unfortunate moniker “Richie Rich,” was one of the first white kids on the scene. Not even a native of Detroit, but English by birth, and an immigrant to Windsor, Canada, Hawtin was met with some resistance from the Detroit establishment. This reluctant passing of the torch from the old Detroit guard to the new kids became known as the “Second Wave of Detroit.” All this is chronicled in much greater detail in the book Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk, by Dan Sicko. If you have even the slightest interest on the development, and evolution of a scene from local sound to international movement, than read this book Read the rest…