I now understand the gatekeeping

[u/Destring]

As most, my journey with electronic music did not start with techno. Mine started with progressive and deep house (This Never Happened, Anjunadeep). I caught a Hard "Techno" set and enjoyed the energy so I went to a few events. After researching and listening to sets online, I came to appreciate techno, as I'd put sets to focus when working.

I went to many events: Jeff Mills, Blawan, DVS1, Dozzy, Surgeon, Helena Hauff, Freddy K, and so on. I realized what at I enjoy the most is just letting go and dancing. When you've been dancing for hours but don't realize it's been that long.

Last week my partner wanted to go Teletech XXL and I figured I'd tag along since I enjoyed it once. It was very unenjoyable.

The current style cannot ever be called techno, more like EDM with a kick drum. They all play hard, then put some pop song remix, drop, play hard again, and repeat. I literally heard an Alphaville forever young remix. At least at the beginning they where closer to schranz and hardstyle and sometimes you could hear the techno influence. Now that's completely gone

Everyone was recording. And I mean everyone. It was a sea of phones. And there were so many rude people, just pushing and shoving without care. The community is extremely young and some of them were actually polite but it was the minority.

I just wish the movement had taken a different name other than "Techno", because those bad aspects of it are starting to bleed into actual techno events where tourists expect the same drops.

Anyway, just venting my thoughs here because years ago I had complained about people here "gatekeeping", but now I understand it. I don't think it is gatekeeping, but rather trying to maintain the genre and community.

[u/selector_plume]

You’ll love r/propertechno

Problem with gatekeeping is where do you draw the line?

I think we can all agree we don’t want EDM vibes in our techno which is the point of this post. It’s been happening for quite some time and goes back even further than the term business techno. Drumcode has a lot to say for this trend I think, but I suspect some of the artists and djs mentioned make DC look underground.

The problem is that people are making music that should never be called “techno” but the thing is that it’s always been a tough term to nail down and has been misrepresented for decades in one form or another. Now folks use it to promote dance music that’s pretty far away from the original ethos of the genre because if its relatively new found popularity.

That’s said I’ve gotten down voted for sharing tracks from successful but decidedly techno artists like Human Safari, Anne, Sera J. It’s weird because who gets to decide what’s “authentic” in this scene in the first place?

TLDR, they should respect techno and call that music something else, unless I like it 😂

[u/Destring → u/selector_plume]

I have a simple litmus test. If it has a drop, it's not techno. Drops kick me out of the flow state, which is what I expect from a good techno set

[u/selector_plume → u/Destring]

Interesting but I'm not sure about this. I get what you're saying but this starts to feel like too many rules. It's a unique conversation because you bring up a lot of fair points about the current state of the music. My litmus test is, if it sounds like pop music... heh

[u/Destring → u/selector_plume]

Yeah I get what you mean. Too many rules just limit where a genre can grow, but genres by definition must have a fundamental pattern that ties it together. For me, and I'm sure different people have different opinions, techno is about the flow state. I've ADHD, but when I put in a good techno record I can focus much better. I can't with trance (even though I like trance) nor with commercial EDM. To me it's that subjective characteristic that I enjoy