Techno Radio

Techno is mechanical and human at the same time. The genre emerged from Detroit in the 1980s when Derrick May and others took electronic synthesizers designed for corporate music and turned them into tools for underground dance floors. Juan Atkins built Model 500 and created a sound that felt like the future, and that future-oriented aesthetic has never left techno. The drum machine becomes a percussion instrument, the synthesizer becomes a voice, and the four-on-the-floor beat becomes hypnotic rather than groovy. What makes techno radical is its refusal to center melody or song structure. A t…