I'm really trying to educate myself here though, and I think part of my problem is that I'm still quite disassociated from the whole techno lineage - I've heard a lot and like a lot but it's all fragments, I don't have any sense of a continuum or anything like it as everything I hear is from different periods and probably different scenes in different places. I think what I really need is a comprehensive history lesson, but techno and house are so vast and have been global for so long that it seems a lot harder to do that than with something like jungle.
A very brief primer on trends in early-to-mid 90s techno then (and not definitive, so jump in and correct me!):
- lo-fi spacy disco-influenced art techno coming out of Detroit, building on what Derrick May was doing in the mid 80s. Carl Craig is maybe the best exponent of this - grab the 69 compilation called The Sound Of Music (a lot of the tracks on Food & Revlutionary Art are also from this period, such as At Les). His track Microlovr that he did as 69 is one of my two all-time favorite techno tracks. This stuff was in decline as dancefloor techno by the mid 90s, although it had a massive influence on intelligent techno, IDM and artcore jungle.
- also coming out of Detroit (though it soon spread elsewhere) - hard as nails, almost ascetic minimal techno. Namely Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. Check Hood's first two albums and the Waveform Transmissions stuff. Although some of this stuff is ace (especially Hood, who at his best was making music on a par with minimal art music composers like Steve Reich), by 1996 it had totally muscled out dreamy art music side of techno to become the dominant influence, at least as far as the dancefloor was concerned. Not good.
- Also massive at the time was the tuff, ravier euro-techno sound being created by benelux producers, of whom CJ Bolland was the most visible. Unashamedly big-rig dance music, these tunes had tight, chunky production and more crowd-orientated arrangements than the american/uk techno that preceded them. Although it was written out of 'proper' techno for being too populist, Bolland pretty much wrote the book on hard 4/4 electronic dance music and his influence is all over hard house, hardcore techno, schranz and other hardcore populist styles. I've been coming back to these tunes a lot lately and there is some wicked music in there. Labels to check are R&S and Touche.
- Closely allied to the low countries euro-techno sound was the big, open-sounding techno coming out of Germany in the immediate aftermath of reunification. In contrast to the fretful minor-key melodies of Detroit techno, or the clanging anti-melodies found in a lot of Uk and Belgian tracks, this German techno had cosmic, anthemic melodies influenced by Tangerine Dream and 80s euro-disco. By 1993 this was being called 'trance-techno' and by 95 it had split off into trance, a completely seperate genre, helped by the goa/hippy scene that had no use for hard, dystopian techno. Music: check the album Kitchen by Sun Electric and the first Alter Ego album (both wicked techno albums), the Trance Europe Express compilations, and the general 92-95 output of the Harthouse/Eye-Q labels.
- also worth mentioning is the back-to-the-303 movement, spearheaded by Richie Hawtin's early tracks as FUSE. Key areas for this were Holland (Unit Mobius, Shiver, early Djax) and the American midwest (Communique and all thier associated family of labels, plus the Drop Bass Network). No coincidence that both of these are also key regions in the development of gabber, and the new acid at it's most industrial and banging segued pretty neatly into the gabber soundworld.
The overriding point here is that prior to 1995, most DJs would play records from all of these factions within a single set, as well as tougher deep house tracks and even some breakbeat. The factionalism hadn't really started yet.
What happened next... 'Proper' techno got noisier and more monochrome as the 90s progressed, until most techno tracks were just rhythm loops, often with wilfully substandard production. 1998 was when the quality really dropped - that was the year that I pretty much stopped buying dancefloor techno. I used to rave to techno of this stripe all the time 10 years ago, now I can't hardly listen to it. Hairshirted dance music made by angry young men.
The abandonment of melody and sensuality in techno opened the door for people like Isolee to make complex, crisply produced digital psychedelia, and lay the foundations for what is now called minimal. Key factor here is the use of computer recording, which was becoming more widespread in the late 90s, with the first soft synths starting to appear. As an aside, a lot of the roughness of 90s techno came about purely because producers were using budget hardware - which makes the phatness of Bolland and the german producers all the more impressive. And so much of the problems in late 90s techno came from producers' luddite fetishization of this roughness as a mark of authenticity.
For various reason, all the back-to-the-303 producers had pretty much stopped making music of that sort by the late 90s. The scenes that had been hammering those records, such as the UK squat raves, had to start making thier own tracks instead, which is where the Liberators and the Stay Up Forever label came from. Although they only took the most banging, blaring-est punk techno elements from thier predecessors, which is why I still prefer the early 90s tracks.
By the millenium, a lot of techno producers had taken the 90s blueprint as far as they could. There was a concerted effort to find ways of getting melody, emotion and sexiness back into the music. The whole electro/italo/new wave influence that contemporary techno has came out of this - you won't find that in 90s techno at all (I remember getting the first Dopplereffekt 12" and playing it over and over, I just couldn't figure out why people would make music this way. It was totally out on it's own.)
I love a lot of the nouveaux disco stuff but when I listen back to those 90s tracks there's a kind of raw futurism that's been lost somewhere. Once you've opened the Pandora's box of 'retro', it's very hard to get that spirit of rushing into the future back again - you're always making music with a backward glance. Bassnation said up above that 1994 was a vintage year for techno and I'd agree with that - for me, great music happens when producers are riding a fine line between satisfing thier own progressive agenda, and feeding the short term needs of a genuinely popular subcultural movement. It never happens for more than a few years, but from 93-95 techno was in that sweet spot.