Take Three by Takashi Shallow

A few tracks into Function’s set at a secret-location warehouse party, a stranger headbanging next to me proclaimed: “What the fuck is that bass drum?” A thousand beads of sweat dripping from my face, I answered them in my head: “I know, right?” The next day, I anxiously began sound designing multitrack bass drums that became the parts of my first EP: Inflator. The EP explored sound engineering for large systems, acknowledging what I learned: that the heaviest bass drums activate the woofer, subwoofer, and tweeter.

All the while, the more our leaders neglected us, the more punishing our techno got. By way of producers like Paula Temple, I felt techno returning to its dystopian roots, not as science fiction, but as reality. Jeff Mills describes techno’s inseparability from Detroit’s Fordist industrialization and Rust Belt economics. Understanding contemporary techno as an impression of Earth as it burns before our eyes provoked my 2nd EP: Superacid.

But the most beautiful thing to me about techno is that it’s brutal and it makes you dance at the same time. While most techno is in 4/4, it’s this rigid time signature’s pairing with triplets that I believe gives techno its bounce. I dedicate my third EP to the number 3. Three songs each motivated by a specific city’s soundscape—Berlin’s unforgiving tonality, Detroit’s pioneering tech-house synths programmed best by Kevin Saunderson, and my teenage nostalgia for low-res footage of Trance Energy just outside of Amsterdam pirated on P2P file-sharing networks.

-Takashi

テクノテクノテクノ

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