No more wordS

Unlike previous forms in poplar music techno has concentrated on being an instrumental music and as such almost defies writing that attempts to discuss it. Words are useless, unable to define the effects that sound frequencies and speeds of beats have on the mind and body. The content and form of the music combine into meanings that lie beyond words.

No more wordS

A rejection of words in the form of vocals to a song allows te listener a far more open field of exploration, a space where it is possible to discover those immanent thoughts that are beyond syntax..you enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. For words guide us to order, they instill in us the need to have others speak for us; they make us receptive to the fixity of imposed meaning. If being without words is meaningless then techno hints at the possibility of any and all meaning…a living and illicid speech where listening is not judged as passive but part of a process of communication. Techno evades the exhausted vocabulary mouthed by lyricists and legislators, anarchists and authoritarians.

When words do appear in techno they are sampled from elsewhere. They become another noise element in the layers of sounds, to add to the energy of the music, for humour or a defiant pose. Sampling offers the possibility that the world is audible, available for everyone to continually re-arrange, re-mix and fuck up…you do not feel yourself lately. Or you feel like another self. Techno also points to an outcome of digital technology that originals of things no longer exist. In this fibre space of endless copying, control over ownership of ideas becomes completely unenforceable.

Techno is dynamic, ever changing, always on the move and never finished. Records are re-mixed together by DJs to create new compositions. There is never a final product. Everyone has their own top ten or can disperse with the notion of a rating systems altogether. A techno party is something more than entertainment, the relationship between consumer and product is pushed to a limit where they merge…you change all the time, nobody knows where you’re at, not even you…and nostalgia for an alphabet fades in the rapid path of strobelights.

Speed increases, space expands, a new culture emerges…a culture of aphasia in which ideas and identities slip and slide constantly…if you close your eyes you lose the power of abstraction. We stumle across limits to conceptualising, it is time to learn how to judge society by its sounds and not by its words.

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