TechNet test pressing

[Matthew Fuller <matt@axia.demon.co.uk>]

Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult
Test Press May 1995 by TechNET, BM Jed, London, WC1N 3XX

nobody knows where you're at...We could begin anywhere.  A history of
techno would be too obvious and would imply that the creative phase was
over.  Any attempts at a genealogy, a hierarchical archaeology, or a
precise pinpointing of musicians prohibit an understanding of the
simultaneity of multiple codes, the overlappings between styles and forms.
Techno cannot be allotted a place as either a pop or an avant-garde music-
on the whole it doesn't take refuge in art and slips away from
categorisation as the net of naming is unfurled.  It avoids the discipline
of nostalgia which keeps people in the thrall of the past, unable to even
think of the future but always referring back.  Nostalgia is a language of
lack, a language that fills people with longings for a past that never
happened, a present that never comes, for the gift that never arrives.

it is difficult for words to say that which it is their purpose to
deny...Who knows what happens when we hear the sounds? Thoughts can race
without being apprehended as thoughts and it is an indication of the
tyranny of words that experience must pass through language to make it
'real'.  As we listen in the network of composition there is a challenge to
invent new vocabularies to communicate what it is that occurs, to express
explorations and to rewrite the multiple personalities of the music.  As a
challenge to language that is imbued with hierarchisations, techno conducts
the fleeting awareness that, just as what is possible is limited by
pre-conceptions, listening demands more ignorance than knowledge.  For then
we are mobile...stammer bass kick unfurling in blue analogue...tabula rasa.

techknowledgi...The music studio is re-defining the human as a continuously
mutating  collage of old and new technologies, as adaptions designed
through play and experimentation.  In this model, samplers are the hyper-
concentrated representation of the subjective experience of time, with
possibilites for time travel through stretching, combining, looping,
compressing and reversing sounds.  Sequencers form new desires for
composing, connected to the breaking up of an individual into a collection
of experiments.  Drum machines and synths are tools for survival against
mediocre audio programming and the restrictions of commerciality, fashion,
competition and self-promotion.  Routes constructed between music studios
and dance floors circulate into resistance against unacceptable states of
mind.  Only with machines can we recognise that most information is data
trash.  Only with machines can repetitious sound blocks crash to create
unexpected forms.

feeling like another self...As distance dissolves into space and space
dissolves into the haze of continual abeyance, the new celebrants loose
track of time.  The dance becomes a beyond unmarked by the archaic
calligraphy of computer text, irreducible to mystic yearnings but all the
same a kind of blank.  A  nothing.  A nothing so far imagined.  A nothing
that gives the lie to the word-net we throw over it.  Body  movements in
strobe/smoke.   We are here suspended in a slow motion that lets sparks fly
as it visually contradicts the call to speed-emotion of the music.  This is
our sovereign moment, spreading a virus of pleasure and awakening.  The
moment where future and past no longer meet  in consciousness, where the
music reverses the effect of gravity.  Lost hours.  Lost days.  Intertwined
in ever escalating cycles of repetition whose pulsations present
unimaginable sounds almost heard in the sudden space surrounding acres of
bass drum.  AnarchOz.

sensorimotors...  The listener as the operator.  These sounds are eminently
favourable to the birth and contagion of an intense excitement with its
inferred incitement given propulsion by a rolling flanged bassline that
chases melodies away with acentuated off-beat boosted cymbal rushes that
touch internal organs by impatient percussive patterns that encourage waste
pure and simple.  Dislocated dance.  Social magic.  We stumble across
limits to conceptualising.  Close your eyes and listen to blurred vision.
Eyes cease to order things.  Your senses overflow into one another,
emerging  as a senseless confusion of taste, smell and memory.  The very
air is tormented into an audio gel.  Body music surrounds the listener who
thinks as a pack intuitively knowing how to go all out...The secret is to
hear what you never heard before.