Clubs

‘September is super techno month at the club!’ said The End’s head of PR, Alice Greaves. She was half-joking at the time, but she wasn’t exaggerating. It’s not that techno totally monopolises the music there this month, but they do have two of the true titans of techno, Jeff Mills and Richie Hawtin dropping in to play. Mills takes over The End’s main room on Saturday following a set by Anderson Noise (Brazil’s leading techno turntablist), while Richie Hawtin brings along his Minus labelmates Troy Pierce and Marc Houle for a special showcase date on Saturday 29.
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Legendary really is the only word for these two. Jeff Mills co-founded the guerrilla-styled Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance with ‘Mad’ Mike Banks and went on to found the Axis Records imprint with Robert Hood, pioneering a simpler, stripped-down techno. He’s the man who soundtracked Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 (which was followed by innumerable star-struck stage invasions) and for 25 years he’s been one of the most technically awesome DJs on the planet, capable of playing up to 70 records an hour.

Richie Hawtin’s ‘Decks, EFX and 909’ albums and prolific Plus 8 record label releases defined the tougher techno sound of the ’90s when he was also known as Plastikman (among a collection of aliases that makes Norman Cook look like a beginner), but his launch of the influential Minus label has led him to create a more minimal, warmer and spacious techno sound.

Who better then, to explain why techno, whether it’s called minimal, electro-tech or good ol’ machine funk, has never been so popular? The quietly spoken, intellectually intense Jeff Mills has probably done enough interviews to last him a lifetime, and he was touring too so proved unreachable, but it’s worth catching him whenever you get the chance because five years ago he was already contemplating DJ retirement, telling Time Out ‘I love to make music more than I love to play it, and as I get older, flying from country to country… I think those things will reduce gradually’.

It was flying from country to country, or more specifically, moving to Berlin five years ago, that re-invigorated Richie Hawtin’s passion for techno. Germany was already home to labels like Kompakt, Playhouse and Perlon which had been pushing a more minimal sound of which producers like Luciano, Steve Bug, Ricardo Villalobos and Hawtin have been at the forefront. ‘What’s been great about minimal and why it’s had so much success is that it’s brought influences from house and electro together,’ he says, ‘and at the same time it’s been progressive and forward-thinking once again. Minimal has been a term to get people back into a music that they were into already. In the mid-’90s techno got a bad name, partly because techno crowds only seemed to want it hard, fast and heavy. They didn’t appreciate the trippier sounds so much.’

As techno returned to the funkier sounds of its Detroit origins, alongside the clicky experimentalism beloved of the minimal producers, so the clubs which have played the music (Londoners could choose from the likes of Mulletover, Secretsundaze and DDD as well as countless events at Fabric, The End, The Key and the T Bar) welcomed more girls, gays and stylishly debauched crowds. Well, it made a change from dark rooms full of balding blokes and pilled-up ravers losing it to turbotechno.

‘The integrity has come back into electronic music,’ says Hawtin, who seems hugely positive about the scene at a time when many producers have already moved beyond minimal. ‘DJs at the forefront are mixing it up, and it’s house, techno, electro, vocals, instrumentals, all of it. Music for me has always been about escapism, about being taken somewhere I haven’t been before, by a certain sound, a certain feeling… and techno and electronic music have always embodied that search for something new and inspirational.’

So what’s the future for techno? It may seem ironic that Hawtin replies ‘People are looking back at what was great about techno and electronic music in the late ’80s and ’90s and seeing where that takes them now.’ Techno is back where it ought to be and long since stopped being a dirty word. As Alice Greaves says, ‘It’s really great to be able to say you like Jeff Mills without people saying “who?” or “euch!” ’

As One presents Jeff Mills is at The End on Saturday. As One presents Minus and Richie Hawtin is at The End on Saturday 29.