The underground music of the 80s, influences of techno – Electro, New Wave, Industrial, Synth Pop and Italo Disco
Simultaneously, in the still divided city of Berlin, the Industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten was one of the most stalwart artists of the wild West Berlin anarchy art scene. Under enormous exertion of their physical powers, they performed an experimental metallic sound clash. They raged with hammer blows on tin sheets and anvils and expressed their anger at the establishment through meta howling under the angle grinder.
The album Construction Time Again by British Synth-pop pioneers Depeche Mode was recorded in 1983 in the Hansa studios of West Berlin. It was heavily influenced by the Post Punk Industrial sound of Berlin. The group DAF Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft which was founded in the late 70s in Wuppertal, gained consider-able international recognition in the early 80s with their typical martial and homoerotic speech-song style and their dominance of playing the sequencers. The musical stylistic traits of Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado-Lopez later formed one of the corner-stones for the development of the genre EBM – Electronic Body Music.
This hard primary stage of European Techno was formed by bands like Front 242 from Belgium, Nitzer Ebb from the UK or Laibach from Slovenia – to name just a few representatives of this genre that developed from the roots of Post Punk, Post Industrial and New Wave.
In the year 1983, Talla 2XLC (picture) was a DJ and staff member at the record shop City Music in Frankfurt on the Main – and he was already working on a name for his electronic favorites. It was his idea to arrange all records which represented techno-logical progress in the creation of electronic music in just one shelf under the generic term of TECHNO.
In the mid80s, Talla 2XLC founded the Techno-club Frankfurt . At the Sunday Afterhour in the Dorian Gray, a discotheque in the airport of Frankfurt, the Inde-pendent scene and revellers from the city as well as from the urban hinterland came together and celebrated, dancing to New Beat, New Wave, House, EBM or Electro music.
Parallel to the developments that were bestowed upon electronic music in Europe, techno music, as defined in its purist way, emerged to a fundamental part from the visionary creations of Detroit musicians. Juan Atkins and Rik Davis aka 3070 experimented already since the early 80s with modular synthetic sound sources and sequencers. Under the alias Cybotron, they produced the track Alleys Of Your Mind – due to the nature of its beat composition style, the track is still recognized as Electro.
In 1981, the Formation A Number Of Names placed a milestone in the cradle of Techno with their track Sharevari .
Literature: Wikipedia of the listed artists; Rave on! by Matthew CollinElectronic Germany by Christian Arndt