First use in print: "minimal techno"

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Here's a reference question, and if I had Dan Sicko's Techno Rebels I might find my answer, but maybe not. Anyone have any idea of the first (or anyway, an early) use in print of the term "minimal techno"?

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 15:54 (twenty-two years ago)

I would have no idea, but I wonder what level of print you are looking for? I would imagine that the phrase might have possibly turned up in some small 'zine in Detroit way back in the mid-90s, but if that is the case, specific details may be hard to come by.

I wonder if the phrase might have been used to describe something from before that era in a review, even if it was used more to describe the sound of a particular record, and not the scene that later emerged.

sorry to add more questions instead of answers :-(

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Sunday, 31 August 2003 16:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, I realized belatedly lthat my wording is probably too vague. I'd actually be happy to know when it passed into common parlance, either in Europe or the US. Mainly I'm trying to figure out when "minimalism," such a sloppy, unwieldy concept (ironic, innit?) glommed onto descriptions of techno. So much dance music could legitimately be described as minimalist, yet dance music fans tend to know exactly what they mean when they say "minimal techno."

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 17:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Hmm... Robert Hood released "Minimal Nation" in 1994, though I can recall people using the term to describe his and Dan Bell's material slightly before that.

― d.w., Sunday, 31 August 2003 18:05 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm not certain that the "minimal" in "minimal techno" is as closely related semantically to "minimalism" per se as it might be tempting to think...

― Clarke B., Sunday, 31 August 2003 18:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, that's one of the reasons I ask, Clarke -- I suspect that many links between "minimal techno" and classic minimalism (whether Reich/Glass et al, for repetitive/pulse minimalism, or Young/Conrad et al for drone minimalism) seem to have been made with extreme hindsight, eg via a semantic slippage after techno had already come to be seen as "minimal." I think the linkage between the multiple movements has become something presupposed, but I think it could stand to be shaken up a bit. Much pop, house, electro, hip hop is minimalistic, but only minimal techno gets tagged with the term. Why? (And when did this happen?)

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 18:37 (twenty-two years ago)

'NOTICE: persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons who listen to "minimal techno" will be shot.'

- mark twain, 1884

― trife (simon_tr), Sunday, 31 August 2003 18:44 (twenty-two years ago)

Funny, I'd always attributed the last part of that quote to Ann Coulter. A much earlier reference than I'd expected!

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 18:52 (twenty-two years ago)

It's not the most authoritative source, but Google Groups is a pretty good reference to use for questions like this. A search for "minimal techno" came up with several mentions in '93, but nothing before that. However, all those posts were made by one person (a certain Samu Mielonen), so that's a bit sketchy....

― Joshua Houk (chascarrillo), Sunday, 31 August 2003 19:55 (twenty-two years ago)

I agree with your point about semantic slippage, Philip. Making those sorts of tenuous connections between movements (especially hip ones like minimalism) seems kind of dated now, that mid-90s type of lazy historical revisionism that was DJ Spooky's stock-in-trade, stuff like "Reich Remixed" -- "Yeah Reich was a HUGE influence on me" ("even though I first heard him just a couple years ago, after someone told me about the historical/causal links between old electronic music and beats stuff"). Those connections that are presumed as fact by a lot of people have always struck me as almost having been willed into existence.

― Clarke B., Sunday, 31 August 2003 20:27 (twenty-two years ago)

ha ha

― dengo matherton (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 31 August 2003 20:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Wow. Point 5 just throws Reynolds' whole thesis of Generation Ecstasy right out the window! Breaks my heart to have to tell him.

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 20:48 (twenty-two years ago)

btw that's one of the first google results for "first use in print minimal techno".

a few results later is an old needledrops column by some schlub.

― dengo matherton (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 31 August 2003 20:51 (twenty-two years ago)

and i was lucky enough not to turn up in my own google. now you've crushed all my illusions, jess.

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 31 August 2003 21:14 (twenty-two years ago)

my first album as illusioncrusher will be out on slip'n'slide this fall.

― dengo matherton (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 31 August 2003 21:15 (twenty-two years ago)

is that techno rebels book any good?
i remember seeing it in waterstones when i first got into techno,but ihaven't seen it since, i always wondered was it worth tracking down

― robin (robin), Sunday, 31 August 2003 21:24 (twenty-two years ago)

depends on what you've read, and your perspective. I got it before GE, and it was a good source of information, and also inspirational in that i really liked his descriptions of the early party scene, the DIY spirit in Detroit before techno existed.

Its much more a short biography of Detroit techno than a critical opus.

The discograpy is valuable if you want to know more about "proper" techno.

Some would take issue with the fact that he assumes the validity of the Detroit project too much, but most writers have biases, and most readers are aware of this fact, and so when one figures out what the bias is, one can seperate it out as needed ;-)

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Sunday, 31 August 2003 21:36 (twenty-two years ago)

yeah that sounds good, (i presume GE is the reynolds book?its called energy flash over here,i must reread that as well actually,but anyway...)i was more checking that it wasn't some famously awful book (like that ambient century one)
i must have a look for it in the library,i'd actually forgotten about it until this thread...
cheers aaron...

― robin (robin), Sunday, 31 August 2003 21:54 (twenty-two years ago)

yes GE is Generation Ecstasy, the american version, which has less info on uk pirates, and, criminally, NO CD:-(

you can read excerpts of TR at www.techno-rebels.com... though my last attempt to go there did not work...

no prob.

is the predergrast ambient book bad? it is a cut-out at my bookstore, and could be had for less than 10USD...

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Sunday, 31 August 2003 22:13 (twenty-two years ago)

i haven't read it,but any reference to it i've seen has said its the worst thing ever
a lot of people on ilm hated it,i think,but i've also seen references elsewhere to it being awful

― robin (robin), Sunday, 31 August 2003 22:22 (twenty-two years ago)

ok thanks... probably better to use the $10 elsewhere then. it seemed like a good idea when i scanned the index...

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Sunday, 31 August 2003 22:26 (twenty-two years ago)

mark s (?) gave it a pretty damning review in the wire if i remember correctly

― dengo matherton (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 31 August 2003 22:36 (twenty-two years ago)

"if I had Dan Sicko's Techno Rebels I might find my answer"

Its not in there, I looked. His book doesn't really focus on anything outside of the Detroit techno/Acid house movements in great detail. Its a coffee table book, but still good reading.

Prendergast's book is horrible.

― Xii (Xii), Sunday, 31 August 2003 23:44 (twenty-two years ago)

baby ford to thread ... i first remember seeing "minimal" in reference to BFORD9 and the first i heard about a minimal techno scene wasn't in reference to dan bell / rob hood but to trelik and ifach.

i'm sure there's an earlier precedent.

― vahid (vahid), Sunday, 31 August 2003 23:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Prendergast's Ambient Century is really bad. I reviewed it for XLR8R at the time (can't find the text), and I recall that not only was his entire idea of "ambient" almost completely untheorized -- a sort of impressionistic trope about sound wrapping us all up, and that was it -- but the book was full of factual errors. The decisions of what to include and what to exclude were really curious as well. He also has this annoying habit of capitalizing made-up genres that have never been used in print anywhere else, as far as I can tell. But he's not neologizing -- he's dropping these awkward terms as if they were part of a lingua franca. A highly frustrating book and definitely not worth the 10 bucks/pounds/euros, unless you're a glutton for punishment.

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Monday, 1 September 2003 10:52 (twenty-two years ago)

bloody awful book. total waste of my money. i threw my copy away. minimal techno, i think is just a term that evolved fairly obviously and transparently because of the music being described. more than likely the person first using it wasn't thinking glass/reich etc but simply the structure of say dbx/hood/etc records being far more stripped-back and skeletal than, um, oh, fuck i dunno, say, strings of life for example... the drop in melody etc and the almost total concentration on repetitive groove as motor... i know this is probably absolutely no help, but i don't think this term can be credited to anyone and i don't see the coining of it as any kind of conceptual leap at all. i'm betting someone in a record shop said it first, wrote it on a record and then it passsed into common parlance. aside from not being all that useful, i think you'll have REAL hard time tracking this info down!

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 1 September 2003 11:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah... I got The Ambient Century for £5 thanks to the UK's pleasingly cheap Fopp chain, and would have felt massively ripped off had it been any more. It sits uncomfortably between the academic and fanboy approaches, exhibiting most of the worst aspects of both, and I imagine the author to have a mullet.

― DJ Mencap (DJ Mencap), Monday, 1 September 2003 11:09 (twenty-two years ago)

wouldn't 'minimal techno' be somebody hitting an acoustic snare drum or a cardboard box over and over trying to keep a beat with the 'squelches' provided by twanging a stretched elastic band?

― dave q, Monday, 1 September 2003 11:11 (twenty-two years ago)

i am going to ask tom magic feet...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Monday, 1 September 2003 11:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Say hello to him from me Dave, I haven't spoken to Tom in ages.

― Nathan W (Nathan Webb), Monday, 1 September 2003 11:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Tom Magic Feet, that is a name I have not heard in ages. Takes me back to the old 313 days.

Dan Sicko's book is pretty on the money as far as Detroit history is concerned. Explains the early Detroit party scene and pre-techno in Detroit. It gives you the basic jist without giving you the really nasty behind the scenes info that is better left to the people who live here. It definitely has a generational bias, as it pretty much stops after 1994, it never really gets into the Third Wave/True People era of Detroit Techno. Again, the book comes from more a of Jon Savage direction rather than a Kwodo Eshun angle.

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 1 September 2003 16:46 (twenty-two years ago)

philip, i would imagine shortly after the release of "little fluffy clouds" (~1990). the reich sample is about as technically "minimal" as they come. was it the first dance track to utilize a sample by a "minimalist" composer (note: not ambient)?

― gygax! (gygax!), Monday, 1 September 2003 17:00 (twenty-two years ago)

What about the Phillip Glass remix of Hey Music Lover by S'express in 1989? Also What about Sueno Latino in 1989?

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 1 September 2003 17:10 (twenty-two years ago)

where is there a reich sample in little fluffy clouds?

― robin (robin), Monday, 1 September 2003 17:13 (twenty-two years ago)

I first heard the term used to describe richie hawtin's concept series back in 96, but I can't remember the first time I saw it in ptint.

― Elliot (Elliot), Monday, 1 September 2003 17:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Mike, what sample does Sueno Latino use?
Gygax!, I'd turn your comment around. The Reich sample was as technically "Minimalist" as they come (in the context), but I'm more interested in determining if people were already talking about "minimal techno" when they made the linkage back to the Minimalists.
(I realize that in part, I'm just tying myself up in semantic knots, but I've always been a bit masochistic that way. I'm also sure I don't have much hope of definitively nailing this down, but even raising the question helps me think about minimalism in a different way, so it's at least useful as an exercise... I think.)

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Monday, 1 September 2003 18:04 (twenty-two years ago)

The repeating guitar motif (played by Pat Metheny!!) in 'Little Fluffy Clouds' is sampled - pretty blatantly - from Reich's 'Electric Counterpoint' piece.

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Monday, 1 September 2003 18:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Philip, E2E4 by Manual Gottsching

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 1 September 2003 18:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Hawtin's Concept series is way after the fact. You have to look back towards the Accelerate Records, Dan Bell put out Bleep in 1993. It doesn't get anymore starkly minimal than that. You call also look into the Quadrant EP that Basic Channel released on Planet E back in 93. You can Look back even further to M-02 in 1992 with the Maurizio mix of Lyot before it was reiussued as Basic Channel 03. You can also look back to 1994 when Rob Hood released Minimal Nation, but more importantly, he also released Internal Empire that same year. Minus being one of the top 5 greatest minimal Detroit tracks of all time. You also had Jeff Mills doing Waveform Transmission Vol.1 and X-103 in 92-93. Minimal Techno as we understand the concept began with the Detroit/Berlin clique in the early 90's, most likely in mid-1992.

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 1 September 2003 18:39 (twenty-two years ago)

as for it's first place in print, it is probably in some pre-web xerox fan zine thhat we will never ever be able to get our hands on because the only thing that is more disposable and difficult to capture than underground dance music is underground dance music journalism. The late 80's/early 90's zerox culture is almost completely non-existant these days. I came up in 94 and I was probably the very last generation of dance obsessives to get their info from zines, after 1996 everything went html.

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 1 September 2003 19:29 (twenty-two years ago)

i know that i saw records categorised as minimal techno as far back as 92/v early 93 in probe records in liverpool (was a great place to pick up sparse german electronic music and detroit business - damn, this is making me all nostalgic, not to mention old, now!). as i say, i think the term was used to describe techno with... er... minimal characteristics naturally by listeners, record shop folks and enthusiasts long before they began to think of glass/reich et al. however, that's not to say that the artists in question weren't aware of the work of minimalist composers, coz they in the case of hood/mills etc they absolutely were. accordingly, the idea of stripping techno back to its bare bones could very well have come from this influence. but when highlighting the parallel development of the berlin/detroit axes (mike is totally on the money when he cites maurizio and, of course, mills as an important examples) it is very well worth bearing another thing in mind: the incredibly heavy dub influence present in basic channel records not heard in their detroit conterparts in the main. interestingly enough, someone (i dunno who to be perfectly honest - could actually have been coldcut, but it's apt nonetheless) once described dub as "the art of making space" which sums it up pretty well in the context of an alternative form of minimalism, existing outside the US/european avant-garde, that's well worth looking into, too. in other words (i guess i could have put this a lot more succinctly!) - dub is probably as as important to the overall minimal techno aesthetic as classic minimalism ... and i still don't know when the term first arose or where!

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Tuesday, 2 September 2003 08:50 (twenty-two years ago)

I've been doing a lot of reading through the Google groups archives. No smoking guns, but it's interesting reading (plus funny as hell to read the original alt.rave FAQ v.0.0, and all the arguments on things like alt.music.industrial where people are arguing about what is and isn't techno... times never change!). People are throwing around the term "minimal" in 92 but the phrase "minimal techno" doesn't seem to have stuck quite yet. Interestingly, though, there is one guy in Finland whose sig line reads "funk... soul... minimal..." etc., not using the adjective as a modifier, just as itself. (Interestingly, in Spain, lots of people call various techno/microhouse styles simply "minimal," no noun). Anyway, this brings up another good point of reference -- Sähkö, although that didn't get going until 1993...

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Tuesday, 2 September 2003 12:00 (twenty-two years ago)

appearing on r&s records in 1992 an artist called "minimal vision" from italy. if i recall correctly it's not exactly like rob hood in his "minimal nation" phase but more like bobby konders, sort of trance-state deep house.

― vahid (vahid), Friday, 5 September 2003 00:46 (twenty-two years ago)

joey beltram's energy flash was 1990 (according to r&s). i'd be hard pressed to believe that someone reviewing that record at the time wouldn't call it minimal. time to get out the microfiche. :)

― disco stu (disco stu), Friday, 5 September 2003 01:20 (twenty-two years ago)

let us know if you find any reviews from 1990, and whether or not they call it "acidic", too.

― vahid (vahid), Friday, 5 September 2003 02:11 (twenty-two years ago)

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