Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 154–184 Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno Sean Nye University of Minnesota Introduction In the musical history of the Berlin Republic, it is unquestionably electronic dance music (EDM) that has been the soundtrack and export trademark of the new capital of Germany: unified Berlin. EDM is usually termed “techno” in Germany, and refers to EDM generally as well as to a specific tradition of EDM originating in Detroit. In fact, the coinage of techno seems to have had parallel origins. In Frankfurt, “techno” was first employed in 1982 by DJ-producer Andreas Tomalla as a music store categorization, and applied primarily to electronic body music (EBM), industrial, and synthpop. In 1984, Tomalla also founded a weekly dance event, the Technoclub.1 That same year, the Techno City 12′′ by the Detroit group Cybotron was released, the title representing the postindustrial conditions of “Motor City” Detroit. Techno, as a generic term connected to Detroit, gained popularity in Europe in 1988 with the release of the compilation, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, and later through numerous releases by Detroit artists on the Berlin label Tresor. Although its multiple uses can be confusing, techno warrants attention precisely because of its diverse meanings and transatlantic exchanges, which include phrases such as “techno culture” that open up a discursive field of social connotations beyond the musical. Yet along with techno, the term “minimal” has opened up a discussion of the aesthetics of EDM that moves beyond both club music and techno. To be sure, the notion of minimal allowed for a further emphasis on European EDM that specifically engaged the traditions of Detroit techno. By the mid1990s, techno was often dubbed “minimal techno,” especially following the 1994 release of the Minimal Nation EP by Detroit producer Robert Hood. However, minimal, decoupled from techno, also offered an aesthetic marker for a range of formal practices that ran across music and media in diverse locations in Germany.2 “Minimal culture” could thus be posited as intertwining with the larger history of techno, and, as shall be shown, the history of the term minimal is equally complex and conflicted.  C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Minimal Understandings 155 In this article, I offer a general overview of minimal in its variety of meanings as part of the history of German techno and electronic music more broadly, emphasizing its various functions as a musical, aesthetic, and cultural concept. I will explore minimal more specifically as a mix of postdigital aesthetics across media and as a reflection upon the refined, stripped-down, and functional steadiness of 2000s club culture. In the pop-dance context, glitch aesthetics, microsound, and the andante pace of minimal can be distinguished from the “harder-faster-louder” trajectory of early 1990s German rave music. As a counterpoint to hardcore, Eurodance, and trance, the notion of minimal had already become important by the late 1990s as a claim to cultural capital and as a balancing act between art and pop through a variety of EDM styles, whereby minimal was especially linked to Detroit techno and Chicago house—genres with greater cultural and aesthetic credibility according to many wings of the European club scene.3 This history leads me to make a social-aesthetic argument regarding minimal in the Berlin Republic and in the Berlin Decade of the 2000s. I will explore minimal’s central role as a social marker of sustainability for Berlin creative industries within times of economic uncertainty, the aging of techno culture, and the collapse of future utopias amidst iCulture.4 Breaking down the Berlin fixation in the context of German techno and the Berlin Republic, I trace the histories of Frankfurt, Cologne, and Chemnitz, though a host of cities worldwide (Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Munich, Detroit, Chicago, New York, London, Tokyo) are also crucial to minimal music history. In the second part, I seek to flesh out both the historical and socialaesthetic complexities of minimal in the Berlin Republic. Expanding on writings by Philip Sherburne, Simon Reynolds, and Tobias Rapp, I explore the prehistory of the ways in which minimal has taken on such an important role that, despite its many international flows and diverse origins, it has been constructed as a German tradition and identity. This tradition results in part from a retroactive coding (or belated realization) of older musical traditions as minimal, such as Krautrock and Neue Deutsche Welle. From these debates, I argue that a distinct tradition of electronic music and techno in the Berlin Republic, which I term the “minimal continuum,” has been implicitly posited and marketed. The “minimal continuum” borrows from Simon Reynolds’s use of the phrase “hardcore continuum”5 to describe the British tradition of dub-bass rave music, applying this notion to the German context. The final part of the article offers case studies of two producers, Wolfgang Voigt and Uwe Schmidt, who deal with the minimal continuum explicitly in its relation to German identity and the Berlin Republic. Voigt and Schmidt are distinguished by their engagement with minimal through 156 Sean Nye the use of concept albums, which set nineteenth-century German culture in tension with minimal music, as well as with electronic music more broadly. They thus offer macrohistorical interpretations of EDM and of German identity. Furthermore, by focusing on these artists, the histories of Frankfurt, Cologne, and Chemnitz can be highlighted, allowing for an exploration of the fissures and conflicts in the Berlin Republic with respect to the increasing centralization of music and cultural production in Berlin. To be sure, minimal is by no means the only genre of electronic music associated with Germany: trance, industrial, hardcore, Eurodance, and EBM are other examples. Minimal has, however, become a central trope of the German techno scene and press during the last two decades. Some of the important reasons for this centrality will be introduced in this article. Berlin Representations and Minimal Histories Due to a range of factors, the notion of Berlin as both a “techno city” and a “minimal city” has been firmly implanted in the international popular imagination since the 2000s. Many of the inspirations for this perception took root in the 1990s, including the extensive club life; the music producers and labels; the creative industries (including the audio technology firms Native Instruments and Ableton)6 ; the media institutions (Berlin EDM magazines now include De:Bug, Groove, and Resident Advisor); and finally, the postindustrial and dystopian character of Berlin, which was often compared in the early 1990s with the original “techno city” Detroit, and which was reinforced by the Tresor label’s connections to Detroit producers, such as Jeff Mills and Drexciya. Berlin also boasts a rich history of musical transformation through EDM, from the acid house movement in the late 1980s to EDM’s spread through the squats and open spaces of East Berlin during the early 1990s. This history is also visible via the Love Parade, an outdoor techno festival established in the summer of 1989 that grew into a massive popular event with more than 700,000 annual participants between 1996 and 2003, peaking at 1.5 million participants in 1999. This history resulted in the continued internationalization of Berlin techno during the 2000s, both through club tourist industries and a complex network of local and international music producers and promoters, many of whom relocated to Berlin during the last decade. A relative centralization of German and international EDM industries thus took place in what I am calling the “Berlin Decade.” The Tresor club manager Dimitri Hegemann recently observed in an interview that in the 1990s about a fifth of club-goers were from abroad, whereas now international tourists make up roughly 60 Minimal Understandings 157 to 70 percent of the clubbers in Berlin.7 This internationalization has taken on such dimensions that Berlin has been viewed as the techno capital of the world,8 a perception represented in documentaries such as Feiern (2006) or, from the American perspective, Speaking in Code (2009); as well as in film dramas such as Run Lola Run (1998) and Berlin Calling (2008). Print publications have also proliferated; Tobias Rapp’s Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno und der Easyjetset from 2009 has been the most prominent, to be followed in 2012 by Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno und die Wende [The Sound of the Family: Berlin, Techno, and Reunification], edited by Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, and Berlin Sampler: From Cabaret to Techno 1904–2012, A Century of Berlin Music, by Théo Lessour. Along with the focus on music and the club scene in these publications, Rapp’s coinage of the “easyjetset” marks the new club tourism industries, which have been made possible through such budget airlines as EasyJet, which occupies all of Terminal B at Schönefeld Airport. Speaking in Code reflects this focus to the extent that it is largely a documentary on club travel between the United States and Germany. An especially intriguing musical aspect of Rapp’s book is his track selection. His “20 Records: A Little History of the Berlin Sound of the 2000s” (252–65) offers a sonic tour of techno. Most of the selections, which begin with Ricardo Villalobos’s Alcachofa (2003) and end with Portable’s “Knowone Can Take Away” (2008), bear the sleek digital production and moderately paced 4/4 beats that were gradually grouped under the minimal rubric. Although Rapp innovatively describes 2000s Berlin musical developments, the history of how minimal came to represent Berlin requires further analysis. Philip Sherburne, the chief English language chronicler and theorist of minimal in its various manifestations, was the first to write (in the British magazine The Wire in 2001) on the history of minimal aesthetics and what he termed “microhouse,” with special attention to German productions over the span of the 1990s.9 Expanding on this research, Sherburne produced a detailed and extraordinary “The Month in Techno” article series, which was written for Pitchfork between 2005 and 2009.10 In the series, Sherburne recognized that by 2006 “minimal” had come to indicate diverse styles ranging from techno to house.11 The Wire had itself long held a keen interest in German electronic music, having already explored minimal techno in a cover article in 1998, “The Future Sound of Berlin” (Eshun). The Wire has continued its research on minimal aesthetics up to the present—especially with respect to Germany and Detroit—with recent articles on Detroit producers Carl Craig and Robert Hood, and on German producers such 158 Sean Nye as Mark Ernestus and Manuel Göttsching, as well as with cover articles on Voigt and Schmidt.12 With respect to Rapp’s construction of minimal techno in the international Berlin of the 2000s, a look back on various minimal manifestations before this time, as well as a reassessment of the minimal 2000s, is warranted. What is striking, initially, is that while Berlin has been represented as the center of electronic music innovation and organization during the last ten years, the moniker of the “Berlin sound” that Rapp posits came about largely through the importation of musical styles that were developed in other cities as well as through an influx of international artists; indeed, Rapp traces many of these migrations. “Berlin minimal” thus interestingly parallels the diverse origins and rather pained construction of the so-called “Berlin School” of cinema—even more so given the central presence of international artists on the Berlin scene. In fact, of the twenty tracks from Rapp’s selection, only ten are from Berlin-based labels and only nine are from producers actually residing in Berlin—many of whom are recent transplants. Moreover, a puzzling aspect of Germany’s focus on minimalism since the 1990s, and especially in the 2000s, is that it comes late. The theorizations of “minimal art” and musical “minimalism” are American imports that had already arisen from aesthetic debates in the 1960s. The term “minimal art” was coined in 1965 by the British philosopher and aesthetic theorist Richard Wollheim. His coinage was followed that same year by Barbara Rose’s essay “ABC Art,” which linked minimalism to New York artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Both minimalism’s definition and application, however, were immediately contested. James Meyer, in his analysis of how “minimal art” first emerged as a discourse between 1963 and 1968, argues: “We come closer to the truth in viewing minimalism not as a movement with a coherent platform, but as a field of contiguity and conflict, of proximity and difference” (4). My discussion of German minimal as both a discursive field and an aesthetic debate reflects this theorization: a rapid increase of minimal rhetoric, but set in the starkly different cultural context of the 2000s. In fact, in the 1960s, a discursive field also took shape in the context of musical minimalism. Like minimal art, musical minimalism was primarily associated with American composers based in New York (including La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass13 ), although this iteration of minimalism followed a distinct aesthetic logic. “Musical minimalism” was first coined apparently in 1968 by Michael Nyman, who subsequently Minimal Understandings 159 developed his theory of minimalism in the 1974 publication Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, which focused on art music. Musical minimalism involved formal features that were later connected to a range of media. In this respect, Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice offers a comparably “antinomian” (19) definition to that of James Meyer, taking minimalism beyond conventional boundaries. Fink’s investigations include, among others, the Munich disco history of Donna Summer’s and Giorgio Moroder’s “Love To Love You Baby” (25–61), as well as the theorization of minimal as analogous to, among others, advertisement repetition and the media sublime of television (62–166). Reflecting Fink, I will argue that the minimal moniker deals with a similarly broad range of cultural-aesthetic and economic issues related to electronic music in the Berlin Republic. To be sure, German musical minimalism has a long history. Cultural links between American minimalism and Germany were already established by the 1970s. American minimal art exhibits took place in Europe throughout 1968, and a Dutch exhibit traveled specifically to Düsseldorf and Berlin in 1969 (Meyer 262). Tours of minimal music by Steve Reich also began in the early 1970s,14 though the key influence of New York minimalism in the popular music context was The Velvet Underground. The band’s first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), which featured German expat Nico, had significant cross-cultural influences on West German rock and early electronic music of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This music, dubbed Krautrock by the Anglophone press, is often associated with maximalism to the extent that it was perceived as a German form of English progressive rock. However, Krautrock musicians, many of whom resisted this label, also developed minimalist connections. The band Faust offers one example; tracks such as “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” displayed rhythmic repetition and a stripped-down style closely associated with The Velvet Underground. Tony Conrad, a former member of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music (along with Velvet Underground member John Cale), even collaborated with Faust on their 1973 album, Outside the Dream Syndicate. The period’s primary influence on the traditions of German techno proved, however, to be the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk. Furthermore, techno’s reception later reflected back on Kraftwerk’s minimal aspects. The band’s trajectory from experimental composition to stripped-down pop productions and club music began with Autobahn (1974) and culminated in Electric Café (1986), which featured the track “Techno Pop.” Kraftwerk acknowledged their inspiration by The Velvet Underground, though the rhythmic funk of James Brown and soul music were of equal if not greater influence 160 Sean Nye (Duffett 199). These inspirations make clear the central role played by African diasporic musical practices of rhythm and repetition in EDM, which gradually gained the reputation of being, as Luis-Manuel Garcia points out, “the most unapologetically repetitive of popular music meta-genres.” A further development toward “techno pop” in Germany was the so-called Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), which was especially present as a subculture and later as a popular phenomenon between 1977 and 1983. Focusing on basic guitar riffs and simple synthesizer production and repetition made possible, for example, by the Korg MS-20 synthesizer, NDW music resulted in a popular explosion of primarily German language pop along with English synthpop. The convergence of punk and synth-based music was most evident in the work of the Düsseldorf-based band Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), which would pioneer the aesthetic of repetition as provocation that became the genre of EBM. The transformation of minimal aesthetics as EDM in Germany continued in the mid- and late 1980s with the further popularization of EBM and acid house. However, it is the musical developments following unification in 1989 that are particularly pertinent to understanding the development of minimal techno and its accompanying discourses in the Berlin Republic. The popular explosion and artistic innovations of EDM post-1989 were exceptionally rapid and extensive. In Berlin, for example, the sudden availability of new club spaces in the East was combined with the extensive reception of Detroit techno, collaborations between East and West German organizers and DJs, and the increased access by East German producers to new instruments, DJ equipment, and computers.15 In considering the practices of minimalist aesthetics and rhetoric in the Berlin Republic, I will focus, as previously mentioned, on four key cities: Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Chemnitz. In early 1990s Berlin, austere and industrial-inflected Detroit techno was received so intensely that a so-called “Berlin-Detroit alliance” was propagated by Berlin’s most influential techno label of the early 1990s, Tresor. An album was even released in 1993 by the English label Novamute called Tresor II: Berlin & Detroit: A Techno Alliance. The Detroit presence was exemplified by the release of Robert Hood’s first album, Internal Empire, on Tresor in 1994, the same year that Hood released the Minimal Nation EP on Detroit-based Axis, inaugurating the explicit discourse on minimal techno. At the same time, minimal styles were propagated by the legendary record store Hard Wax. Although first acting as the main source of records for diverse DJs in the early 1990s, Hard Wax developed into an arbiter of Minimal Understandings 161 taste that would later resist the distribution of what was deemed commercial rave music in its trance or hardcore styles.16 Minimalism’s urge toward a “higher” status as well as its reaction to hardcore rave, which also occurred internationally, is remarked upon by Sherburne: “Minimalism’s tasteful restraint offered an alternate, and even polemical, position for aesthetes in search of a more refined brand of ‘intelligent dance music’” (“Digital Discipline” 322). Hard Wax’s drive toward minimal aesthetics was represented by its owner, Mark Ernestus, who also developed the label Basic Channel/Chain Reaction and collaborated with Moritz von Oswald as the band Basic Channel, the classic duo of “dub techno.”17 Parallel to these developments, the Frankfurt label Mille Plateaux, founded in 1993, released works of glitch music. These included Systemisch in 1994, the seminal glitch album by the Darmstadt-based group Oval. Glitch offered an engagement with digital aesthetics as failure, or with what Kim Cascone has theorized as “postdigital” music (392–3).18 These innovations resulted in Mille Plateaux’s influential Clicks & Cuts series of compilations of postdigital minimal music during the late 1990s, which also featured artists from Cologne and Chemnitz. The label further drew attention through its reference to A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Label founder Achim Szepanski engaged aesthetics and theory in numerous interviews and his own writings; furthermore, beyond Mille Plateaux, Szepanski’s label Force Inc. was an important source for releases of minimal EDM during the 1990s.19 At this time, the Frankfurt label Playhouse (also founded in 1993) played a significant role in the development of minimal techno and house in Berlin. Just as Mark Ernestus operated both Chain Reaction and Hard Wax, Playhouse founders Ata and Heiko M/S/O were DJ-producers as well as owners of Delirium, a record store as significant to the Frankfurt scene as Hard Wax was to Berlin. It was the label’s producers Isolée and Ricardo Villalobos who proved key for the development and popularization of minimal techno and microhouse, releasing the landmark albums Rest (2000) and Alcachofa (2003) respectively. As mentioned, Alcachofa inaugurates the track listing of Rapp’s “Berlin Sound” selections. In Cologne, the Kompakt label was formed in 1998, which would globally influence the development of more pop-inflected minimal as well as spread the label’s own genre coinages of “Schaffel”20 and “pop ambient.” The “Cologne Sound” was primarily connected to Kompakt, though the label was formed from a range of Cologne techno labels from the early 1990s (chiefly Profan, founded in 1993, and Studio 1, founded in 1995) 162 Sean Nye and the resulting partnership of five producers: Wolfgang Voigt, Reinhard Voigt, Jörg Burger, Michael Mayer, and Jürgen Paape. The pop-oriented dance tracks of Kompakt immediately had important influences in Berlin, and, parallel to Hard Wax and Delirium, Kompakt developed as both a label and a record store for the Cologne Scene; indeed, its distribution strategies and focus on design were, in many respects, the most successful, achieving unprecedented international attention during the 2000s. Finally, the perhaps unlikely city of Chemnitz (formerly Karl-MarxStadt) developed the most innovative electronic music in East Germany. This music arose from artist and musical collectives already existing in KarlMarx-Stadt during the 1980s. The label Raster-Noton, founded in 1999, became the primary label for the Chemnitz-based musical circle of Frank Bretschneider, Olaf Bender (Byetone) and Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto); like Kompakt, the label was in fact a combination of two Chemnitz labels: Rastermusic, founded in 1996, and Noton, founded in 1995. Bretschneider, the oldest member of the circle, had been musically active since the 1980s, promoting electronic music through instrumental experimentation and the acquisition of a Korg MS-20 on the black market. He distributed his music via illegal cassette tapes and became a founding member and producer of the band AG Geige before developing a career as a solo artist. Raster-Noton was distinctly multimedial in its use of video art in musical performances and in its careful attention to design, and Carsten Nicolai went on to become a successful visual and media artist, exhibiting constantly following German unification. Raster-Noton, both for its music and its design aesthetics, rose in stature throughout the 2000s, receiving a 2003 cover article in The Wire (Borthwick). As such, the projects of Kompakt, Mille Plateaux, Playhouse, and Raster-Noton run parallel in the degree to which these institutions not only influenced musical practices, but a range of social, media, and artistic scenes as well.21 Minimal Meetings: Berlin and Beyond Diverse techno styles dubbed “minimal”—from pop and dance to experimental—thus developed in various contexts in Germany. However, as the 1990s ended and the Love Parade reached its pinnacle of success, the focus on Berlin as the center of Germany’s musical life became increasingly difficult to circumvent. Although during the 1990s cities such as Cologne, Frankfurt, and Chemnitz were as innovative and dynamic as Berlin—if not more so—these artistic scenes slowly declined or became increasingly intertwined with those in Berlin. This was brought on by the gradual move, Minimal Understandings 163 during the 2000s, of music organizations and producers to Berlin. VIVA and Popcomm transferred operations from Cologne to Berlin; Bretschneider and Nicolai moved from Chemnitz to Berlin; and from Frankfurt, key music producers and organizers moved to Berlin, including Ricardo Villalobos, Thomas Koch (DJ T, manager of Get Physical records, and founder/editor of Groove magazine), and DJ Good Groove (manager of Good Groove Music, Multicolor Recordings, and Frisbee Tracks). These losses were compounded by the flocking of producers from other cities to Berlin, many of whom were stars connected to minimal aesthetics: DJ Hell and his electro label International Deejay Gigolos from Munich, and internationally, a whole range of DJ-producers, such as Richie Hawtin and Radio Slave. Judging from this history, the years 2003–2004 can be seen as Berlin’s symbolic pivot into an international minimal mecca. Year 2003 turned out to be the final year of the Love Parade’s organizational connection to Berlin’s pop-rave Low Spirit label. By the end of the Love Parade era and in the face of Low Spirit’s decline, Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos, two of the world’s chief minimal stars, had moved to Berlin. Hawtin and Villalobos would be central to the respective development of the Berlinbased labels m nus and Perlon. Further labels were founded in or moved headquarters to Berlin after the settling of these artists and institutions. The gathering of EDM labels and musicians would thus combine with the trends of dub techno and affinities with Detroit already established in Berlin, promulgated by the aforementioned Tresor, Chain Reaction, and Hard Wax. Also contributing to the trend toward minimal discourses in the 2000s was the founding of the Berlin labels BPitch Control by Ellen Allien in 1999 and Shitkatapult by Marco Haas (alias T. Raumschmiere) in 1997. These labels promoted what alternatively became known as electro or electroclash, which differed from the pop-rave styles associated with Low Spirit and the Love Parade. Ellen Allien’s label established the careers of a number of major Berlin stars in the 2000s: Modeselektor and Paul Kalkbrenner, among others. Allien herself promoted a pop-oriented yet refined Berlin electro with her albums Stadtkind (2001) and Berlinette (2003). Although arguably pop-maximal in comparison with Tresor and Basic Channel, these music trends paved the way for the Berlin’s rapid trajectory toward slower techno, electro, and house styles after 2004. Finally, starting in the mid-1990s, crucial shifts in media design took place. The aesthetics of the German techno-zines—in particular De:Bug and Groove—shifted drastically away from those of both the undergroundindustrial fanzines of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the colorful fantasies of rave hyper-reality in the early to mid-1990s.22 Reflective of international 164 Sean Nye trends, a new aesthetic evoking Apple design, iCulture, and chic urbanity gradually developed in Berlin. If the early and mid-1990s were dominated by the rave magazine Frontpage, 2000s Berlin was dominated by De:Bug, a magazine whose subtitle is “Elektronische Lebensaspekte,” or, “Electronic Aspects of Life,” a.k.a. a minimal lifestyle, though the magazine did not just explore minimal electronic music. This subtitle later included the statement: “Magazine for Music, Media, Culture, Self Control.” De:Bug was later joined by Groove, which transferred headquarters from Frankfurt to Berlin in 2006. De:Bug’s rhetoric reflected the gradual fusion of experience, place, design, and music in Berlin into a total minimal lifestyle to be accessed in clubs, lounges, bars, offices, cafés, and the like. These new designs also shifted dominant representations of DJs from either rave stars or underground renegades to chic urban professionals and “poor but sexy” nerds. This focus on independent, yet professional workers, such as those featured in Speaking in Code, resulted in a rhetoric that I would argue forms the most distinctive aspect of minimal discourse: sustainability of the scene rather than pop excess or underground resistance, as had been witnessed in the antipodes of Berlin musical life in 1996—the Love Parade on the one side, with its move to Straße des 17. Juni in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and the Bunker Club at the other extreme, with its closing and resulting counter-development of the Fuck Parade as an expression of anticommercialism and hardcore music. Another aspect of sustainability since 2003 is arguably reflected by dance styles. The tension between the minimal and the sustainable in dance practice is implicit in my earlier reference to the tempos of minimal. By keeping the BPM at a moderate rate, usually between 120 and 130 BPM, DJs ensure that the dance experience is moderate, yet maximally extended. On the basis of my experience in Berlin between 2003 and 2011, I would, in fact, argue that dance styles have themselves become minimal. In other words, compared to some of the extreme dance styles I witnessed in Berlin during the late 1990s, Berliners in the 2000s gradually engaged in what I would call “minimal dance,” a nonchalant dance over the course of many hours featured, for example, in the Resident Advisor documentary Real Scenes and in Feiern. In 2005, De:Bug writer Felix Denk summed up the attitude toward the mid-1990s trend against rave music: “At the time, rave was one of the worst insults in the dictionary of techno. Reduction—the other strand—would save techno from retardation . . . the end of euphoria on the dancefloor was the price of this rescue mission” (8).23 In a fascinating shift from earlier, excessive rave dances, reserve and restraint were put on Minimal Understandings 165 display, reflecting the relative banality of digital technology in everyday life in contrast to the virtual reality fantasies of the early 1990s. Indeed, such postdigital dances result from the intertwinement of lounge, club, bar, office, and café environments discussed previously. These multiple sources influenced the reception of minimal in Germany, even though, as Sherburne makes evident, minimalism has experienced extraordinarily diverse international manifestations. Yet, given the perpetual discourse around and production of minimal within Germany, to the point that it has become an export commodity, I would argue that a “minimal continuum” has been implicit in the Berlin Republic, paralleling Simon Reynolds’s post-1989 notion of the hardcore continuum in the United Kingdom (mentioned earlier). This minimal continuum applies to various scenes that reflect Germany’s diffuse urban geographies,24 unlike, for example, the relative centralization of hardcore in London, though, as Reynolds emphasizes, hardcore also had “outposts” in various regions of the United Kingdom.25 The transformations of Germany’s minimal continuum and its various subgenres post-1989, as compared with Reynolds’s hardcore continuum, can be viewed as follows, though a strict chronology cannot be given: HARDCORE CONTINUUM—UNITED KINGDOM r hardcore → jungle → UK garage → drum ’n’ bass → grime → bassline → dubstep MINIMAL CONTINUUM—GERMANY r techno → dub techno → glitch → clicks ’n’ cuts → pop ambient → Schaffel → electro → microhouse The term continuum26 is debatably appropriate because many of the protagonists of this continuum have been active for over two decades in transforming this music: artists like Villalobos, Bretschneider, and Oval, as well as Voigt and Schmidt. Minimal allows for innovation precisely through its focus on atomistic sounds, visual design, refined forms, and the maximal use of limited elements. Although aiming for abstraction, reduction, and pure sound, minimal also lent itself to cultural associations. Links between minimal and stereotypes of German reserve, rationality, and exactitude have repeatedly been made, even though minimal music reflects diverse moods (passion, humor, fun, etc.), artistic practices, and origins. Kraftwerk is the central example of these kinds of associations. As early as 1975, music journalist Lester Bangs discussed the so-called 166 Sean Nye “intricate balm of Kraftwerk” (155) as compared to the maximal freakouts of American rock at the time. Kraftwerk’s continued engagement with German identity and Rhine industrial culture resulted in German minimal music’s association with such stereotypes, even as artists self-consciously played with these associations. Digital production has permitted this perception of exactitude to be even more accentuated through new sampling technologies and granular synthesis. The formal principles and assumptions made regarding minimal; its wealth of technological possibilities; and the cultural associations between regional, national, and international minimal scenes, thus remain in complex tension. Minimal discourse also reflects the apparent contradiction between “forward-looking” music and an aging techno scene. My analysis thus turns to the self-reflection—the desire for conservation or even the melancholic resignation—of the German techno tradition, which is nevertheless more searching than the naı̈ve claims of the “raving society” made during the establishment of the new pop industry in the 1990s. These debates on the minimal continuum become visible, and audible, in the diverse works of Wolfgang Voigt and Uwe Schmidt. Minimal Legacies: GAS and AtomTM Wolfgang Voigt and Uwe Schmidt were starkly present in 2008 and 2009, the years leading up to the twentieth anniversary of German unification and the Love Parade, techno’s symbolic link to the history of the Berlin Republic. At the time of this anniversary, minimal and German identity were linked by Voigt and Schmidt to the extent that the future/pasts of EDM were explored through a distinctly German trope: Romanticism. This tendency not only acknowledged the aging of electronic music as a rooted tradition, or, in other words, the aging of future music; it also provided new ways in which to explore minimal, which had become the definitive marker of German electronic music in the Berlin Republic during the last decade. As it turned out, Voigt and Schmidt were divided in a number of respects over the reception of this term. Although their careers intersect with the trajectories of Frankfurt, Cologne, and Chemnitz, their division demonstrates how minimal came to signify a contested German tradition in electronic music. Voigt’s 2008–2009 tour was symbolic of the triumph of minimal as the definitive techno style in the Berlin Republic, whereas Schmidt’s tour was a critique of this historical arc at a time in which many had already been criticizing the stagnation of minimal techno since the mid-2000s.27 In this respect, Voigt and Schmidt had equally reserved Minimal Understandings 167 and reflective perspectives regarding this tradition and its connections to Germany and Berlin. In analyzing this history, I will first turn to their biographies; as producers active for over twenty years, both offer important perspectives on musical history across the minimal continuum. The Wire 291 (May 2008). Cover: “Wolfgang Voigt: A walk in the forest with Kompakt’s minimal Techno ranger.” Courtesy of The Wire. Voigt (b. 1961) has resided in Cologne his entire life. Growing up during the 1970s, he had a wide range of musical interests that especially 168 Sean Nye included glam rock. He was later deeply inspired by the acid house movement of the late 1980s, before in the early 1990s beginning a career as an innovative house and techno producer under many aliases (Mike Ink, Love Inc, etc.). In 1998, he became cofounder and manager of Kompakt, a label that achieved world fame and came to symbolize minimal’s triumph in the 2000s. Like Mark Ernestus with Hard Wax in Berlin, and Ata and Heiko M/S/O with Delirium in Frankfurt, Voigt was a music producer at the same time as he was a label manager and record store owner; the Kompakt store even began as a branch of Delirium in 1993 (Young 41). Voigt admits that his dream has always been to have “a kind of Factory à la Andy Warhol” (Young 40). Kompakt developed into an institution for the promotion of the “Cologne Sound” both in the Berlin Republic and internationally, emphasizing terms such as “minimal,” “Schaffel,” and “pop ambient” to describe its releases. Leading up to and following Kompakt’s founding, Voigt also gained notoriety for four albums of his neo-Romantic project called GAS: GAS (1996), Zauberberg [Magic Mountain] (1997), Königsforst [King’s Forest] (1998), and Pop (2000). These albums were released on the Frankfurt label Mille Plateaux, mentioned earlier as part of the glitch wing of minimal. Voigt was in the musical background for almost ten years thereafter, focusing primarily on management, until, in the summer of 2008, his four GAS albums were rereleased as a box set called Nah und Fern on Kompakt. A photography catalogue of forest images was also published by Chemnitzbased Raster-Noton, along with an album of previously unreleased tracks. Indeed, the forest figured prominently as a central motif of the GAS project. Voigt recounted both family outings and youthful acid-tripping experiences in Cologne’s Königsforst (Young 40), and he drew upon such experiences for the GAS project and Königsforst album. The 2008 box set was followed by a successful tour in Germany, which included a headline performance at the Club Transmediale Festival in Berlin. On this tour, Voigt wore a nineteenthcentury Romantic suit with a puff tie, and the music was accompanied by hyperreal forest visuals by Petra Hollenbach. As stated, this tour served as a symbol of Voigt’s past success on a number of levels: in the arena of German minimal-pop, as a founder of Kompakt, and as the author of the GAS project.28 In contrast to Voigt’s Cologne roots, Uwe Schmidt (b. 1968) is a world traveler without a home and, arguably, without a scene. He grew up in Frankfurt, which, as he once explained, never even feels like home to Frankfurters.29 He studied philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt and committed himself to electronic music thereafter, though he remained influenced by postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, whom he Minimal Understandings 169 specifically references as an inspiration for his 1992 album Cloned. Amidst the exceptionally vibrant Frankfurt scene, Schmidt released a plethora of electronic music under various aliases in the 1990s, from EBM to ambient to hardcore.30 Dissatisfaction with Frankfurt and an interest in musical isolation led to a move to Santiago de Chile in 1997, where Schmidt has lived ever since, though he returns to Europe often. If the Chilean-German Ricardo Villalobos’s move from Frankfurt to Berlin in 1999 played a central role in international innovation in the Berlin minimal scene, Schmidt’s move from Frankfurt to Chile in 1997 would later result in an exploration of minimal trajectories from afar.31 Although Schmidt considers himself neither Chilean nor particularly German, this move eventually resulted in a reflection on German identity as a kind of techno exile. Under the project name Señor Coconut, Schmidt released Latin remixes of Kraftwerk on the album El Baile Alemán [The German Dance] (2000). This interest in Kraftwerk as a figure of electronic music’s legacy was revisited with a focus on the band’s Romantic (and specifically Biedermeier) connections under the project AtomTM , which had two albums released by Raster-Noton: Liedgut [Song Goods] (2009) and Winterreise (2012). Liedgut was one of Schmidt’s most publicized albums, and like Voigt, he was on tour throughout 2009, sporting sleek Kraftwerk-like suits. He also became especially interested in the German language. After a decade abroad, he stated, “Suddenly German became like an alien language in a way, and I started to see words in a different light” (quoted in Barrow 43). Although both the GAS and AtomTM projects deal with minimal and Romanticism, they diverge in important respects. As stated, though the GAS tour was a symbol of success in 2009, the project in fact derived from a different period. The four albums made between 1996 and 2000 were released during the early history of minimal. GAS was a key player in this trend, yet it was unlike anything Voigt had previously released. In it, Voigt links the acid experience of his youth to the legacy of the Romantic forest, the myth of the Zauberberg, and the 1970s traditions of glam rock, pop, and cosmic Krautrock set against 1990s minimal techno. However, though GAS sampled a range of classic compositions, the samples remained isolated sounds and chords, virtually impossible to identify: a kind of media stasis as studio art. The neo-Romantic techno music that emerged caused a stir in the techno press and popular media outlets. Voigt had explicitly stated that the project was in search of properly “German pop.” As he explains, “Even long before Acid and a few other far-reaching incidents turned my cultural selfimage upside down, my artistic zeal was mainly determined by one motive, 170 Sean Nye namely to create something like a ‘genuinely German pop music’ away from current clichés.”32 GAS expressed German pop through a distinct mix of ambient and minimal techno, which was also inspired by Voigt’s longtime musical interests in sampling classical, Schlager, polka, and glam rock, among other genres. Kompakt’s official press release declares, “GAS is Wagner goes glam rock, and Hansel and Gretel on acid. GAS is there to take you on a seemingly endless march through the under woods—and into the discotheque—of an imaginary, nebulous forest.”33 The project became reflective of a new pop-patriotism in the Berlin Republic during the age of globalization and of Kompakt’s project of promoting German techno internationally. By the time of the rerelease of the albums in 2008, GAS stood not only for the fulfillment of the Rhine tradition begun with Kraftwerk’s promise of techno-pop, but for the crystallization of a number of currents: the Romantic tradition of absolute music combined with minimal techno as the new tradition of German pop—in short, minimal-pop symphonies. The individual tracks were uncompromisingly minimal in terms of andante 4/4 beats, which were filtered so as to sound like marching footsteps or heartbeats rather than maximal bass on the dance floor. Moreover, the tracks lacked harmonic/melodic development or memorable hooks. In part, the albums were received as minimal simply because of Voigt’s reputation. However, their true innovation was the linking of ambient Krautrock and classical music with pop minimal. GAS as a name represents this mix: the ether acid bath of Romantic symphonies, ambient history, and an homage to Voigt’s glam rock roots via T. Rex’s hit, “Life’s a Gas.” In this respect, GAS is arguably the pinnacle of Kompakt’s trademark genre “pop ambient.” However, the sublimity of GAS contrasts starkly with Kompakt’s reputation for pop humor and light ambience. The second album, Zauberberg, offers a macrotrope of minimal history. In this album, absolute instrumental music meets the program of Thomas Mann’s 1,000-page Zauberberg [Magic Mountain],34 a novel that mined the magic mountain myths of Mann’s Romantic forebears: from Eichendorff’s coinage of Zauberberg in “The Marble Statue” to Wagner’s Venusberg in Tannhäuser. Echoing the loss of the sense of time in Mann’s Magic Mountain, Voigt plays with minimal as developmental stasis—the thin air of the magic mountain meets atmospheric urban electronic music. Susan McClary, in her writings on minimal musical aesthetics, even singles out Mann’s novel as representative of minimalist repetition in literature (297). Mann as reference is further appropriate with respect to pop-DJ practices; the novel’s engineer protagonist Hans Castorp reflects Voigt as a minimal sound engineer, and Castorp’s selection of “schöne Stellen,” or “beautiful moments,” in the famous encounter Minimal Understandings 171 with the phonograph in the chapter “Fullness of Harmony,” is updated by Voigt’s meditation on club culture. Indeed, surface noise and crackling associated with records from shellac to vinyl accompany many of the GAS samples, evoking age and media history amidst digital culture. Pop minimal works in tension with sublime Romanticism, from which emerges Voigt’s proclamation of a new German identity in an age of globalization, provoking critical responses. Wolfgang Voigt. GAS (R-N102). Forest catalogue and CD. Courtesy of Raster-Noton. archiv für ton und nichtton. 172 Sean Nye An especially contested trope in the search for German pop and GAS was the forest. To bring the forest into techno culture, usually considered a safely urban movement free from German roots, was a provocation. What interests Voigt, however, is the forest as psychedelic headspace and cultivated pop myth. The forest could be easily exported, as the text of The Wire’s feature article on Voigt states: “Germany’s ancient forests conceal the nation’s profoundest myths and darkest secrets . . . . Lying just east of Cologne, Königsforst is one of Germany’s oldest wild woods, a tangle of oak, beech, and firs” (Young 38–40). The article considers the Königsforst literally ancient and sublime, partly misunderstanding Voigt’s pop play with Königsforst. Voigt could have chosen any number of famous forests, yet he chose Königsforst, the place where forest myths and walks were part of his bourgeois hippie youth, but which also bears the brunt of history, as most Cologne citizens know. This forest is not a Wald but a Forst, which means a managed forest rather than wild woods. The “King’s Forest” has been used by royalty for a thousand years, and it was completely deforested by Napoleon and then replanted with nonnative conifers by the Prussians.35 Moreover, it was a military outpost in World War II, and is littered with bunkers and other structures, though it has now, finally, been placed under natural protection. In short, like most German forests that have long been cultivated, the Königsforst is anything but rooted. It has literally been uprooted and abused. Voigt’s album, Königsforst thus conveyed a local Rhine patriotism as cultured, bourgeois, and artificial as Kraftwerk’s homage to Düsseldorf fashion in “Showroom Dummies.” No actual “nature” sounds can be heard, and the album’s distorted samples and brass recall deforestation amidst industrialization. A similar nod is present in Kompakt’s Speicher logo, which features Cologne’s coat of arms under the Prussians, recalling old rivalries with the newly-founded capital of the Berlin Republic. Indeed, the logo is an ominous prophecy of the Rhine region’s struggles with Berlin in the 2000s, and while GAS represented minimal success, its rerelease shone as a critique of current trajectories from the past. At the close of the Wire interview, Voigt argues, “The once liberating movement of international minimal Techno has degenerated into an uninspired, unglamorous DJ kit, a boring pap” (Young 44). Minimal Understandings 173 The Wire 339 (May 2012). Cover: “Follow the Lieder: AtomTM in a Romantic mood.” Courtesy of The Wire. The mix of developmental stasis and critique of minimal by Voigt is a suitable point from which to explore where Schmidt’s own minimal critique in Liedgut takes off. Liedgut comes at the end of the minimal continuum, whereas GAS is situated toward its beginning. Set against GAS, the AtomTM project evokes contrasting forms of tradition and media history: as opposed to the symphony, the Lieder of Schubert and Schumann, as well as the bourgeois and formal history of Biedermeier, are explored here. 174 Sean Nye Biedermeier, as opposed to the long nineteenth century of Austro-German Romantic music, emphasizes the postrevolutionary period of Austria and Germany between 1815 and 1848. This period is reflected in Schmidt’s posing before the Clara Schumann piano at the Robert Schumann House in Zwickau,36 a new center for neo-Romantic tourism within the Berlin Republic. Part of a humorous photo shoot only possible in united Germany, the image takes on a special bourgeois-Biedermeier significance to the extent that the piano, along with a Clara Schumann portrait, was featured on the 100 Deutsche Mark banknotes issued upon unification in the Berlin Republic. AtomTM at the Clara Schumann Piano. Robert Schumann House, Zwickau. 2009. Courtesy of Uwe Schmidt. Minimal Understandings 175 Clara Schumann 100 Deutsche Mark Banknote. 1990–2001. Courtesy of Banknotes.com and Audrius Tomonis. The compositional elements of Liedgut differ quite significantly from GAS’s minimal ambient: the waltz and glitch instead of 4/4 minimal; mechanical organs and the Hammond organ rather than brass and strings; and instead of the surface noise and crackling of records, modern media are explored through the juxtaposition of digital sound production with the central motif of white noise. This white noise is produced by an old piece of analog equipment: the aforementioned Korg MS-20, released in 1978 with great success as an affordable synthesizer, reflecting Kraftwerk’s proclamation of an age of “techno pop.” The album also evokes the literary; however, rather than the grand novels of Thomas Mann, its design recalls the bookbinding formats of the Insel-Bücherei classics, which were cheap but elegant editions of German literary classics. Yet text is scarce, and there is no actual art song. Instead, the Lied takes the form of Kraftwerk’s minimal speech-song in only two texts: “Wellen und Felder” [Waves and Fields] and “Weißes Rauschen” [White Noise]. The list of tracks, structured like a table of contents, consists of sound media chapters rather than literary chapters. “Wellen und Felder” and “Weißes Rauschen” are also Romantic texts as sound-media, evoking the multiple meanings of natural geographies, intoxication [Rausch], and electronic-digital production. Finally, the booklet includes a “Danksagung” 176 Sean Nye [Note of Thanks], which is an altered version of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Danksagung to his landmark 1863 study of sound and acoustics, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. In sum, what Schmidt offers in 2009 is a return to multiple beginnings: Biedermeier, carnival, media theory, Kraftwerk, and minimal. AtomTM . Liedgut (R-N099). Courtesy of Raster-Noton. archiv für ton und nichtton. And it is the first and oldest term on the list, Biedermeier, which proves key. It is Schmidt’s grasp of this concept that allows for his diagnosis of the minimal continuum at the end of this history. His realization occurred upon visiting an exhibit in Vienna entitled Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity,37 a landmark in Biedermeier research. From this encounter, he concludes, “We are today still stuck in post-Biedermeier.” He continues: The Biedermeier idea of simplicity, as previously mentioned, [is] a German theme that I probably would not have become aware of were I living in Germany. Simplification, minimalism, reduction in art, especially music, is quite an inflationary idea. There is an artificial, cultural superstructure of minimalism here that is not questioned at all and [that] has become a lifestyle.38 Minimal Understandings 177 Through Schmidt’s juxtapositions, the ghosts of the Biedermeierbourgeois salon confront the minimal-lounge domesticity of the Berlin Republic. A Chilean exile who had been watching the history of the Berlin Republic from afar, Schmidt later made reference to Nietzsche’s view of the first Berlin Empire from the Alps. A quite “minimal” aphorism (n. 334) on novelty, repetition, music, and love from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science is quoted in the Winterreise album, reflecting Schmidt’s exploration of musical form, passion, geography, and science. Indeed, Winterreise also references Carl Friedrich Gauß as another scientific forebear, as compared with Hermann von Helmholtz.39 The irony for Schmidt is that while technology offers more possibilities than ever, the dogma of minimal techno prevents innovation. The “Weißes Rauschen” [White Noise] results in Schmidt’s criticism of digital media as an overoffering of possibilities from which little that is musically interesting is developing; it leaves us “Im Rausch der Gegenwart” [In the Intoxication of the Present]. To borrow another Romantic metaphor inspired by ubiquitous DJ-producer laptops in Berlin and beyond: the laptop’s promise of universal sound design, equivalent to Friedrich Schlegel’s vision of progressive Universalpoesie, proves false. The minimal laptop is, rather, reduktive Universalpoesie.40 In Schmidt’s return to Kraftwerk as the source of this reduction, he investigates the mix of Romanticism, concept albums, pop, and minimalism that packed so much potential during the dawn of techno, but with which Schmidt had already become disillusioned in Frankfurt by the mid-1990s (Barrow 43). In his diagnosis of minimal as post-Kraftwerk German simplicity, Schmidt acknowledges its successes, and indeed delights in Kraftwerk’s Biedermeier tracks such as “Franz Schubert,” all the while critiquing the stagnation. And yet, amidst this critique, what is perhaps the greatest strength of the minimal continuum is Schmidt’s own elective affinity: the legacy of Kraftwerk. In Liedgut, new possibilities emerge from and within the white noise. From the perspective of the minimal continuum in 2009, it is hard to say how German minimal discourse will develop. The contrast of the art music traditions of the Romantic “long nineteenth century” with the minimal history of German electronic music from Krautrock to techno demonstrates the degree to which so-called “German” musical associations have transformed. The links explored here between the Frankfurt-CologneChemnitz—and Santiago de Chile—engagements with Romanticism and Biedermeier help to set the musical history of the Berlin Republic in context. Meanwhile, Voigt and Schmidt have already pursued a range of new projects 178 Sean Nye and samplings of minimal history. Whether our future will remain minimal is left for the international techno scene and, perhaps, the future Berlin Republic to decide. Acknowledgments Thanks to Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider, Jan Kummer, and Uwe Schmidt for the interviews; thanks to Erhard and Barbara Schüttpelz for the conversations on Rhine history. Thanks to friends and colleagues for advice and/or reviews: Elliott de Aratanha, Ben Lukas Boysen, Nicolas Chevreux, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Sumanth Gopinath, Rembert Hüser, Jordan Kraemer, Jesse Lawson, Joshua Lemm, Daniel Reisser, Simon Reynolds, Daniel Schneider, Michail Stangl, Aaron Thompson, and Ryan Wurst. Thanks to the Archiv der Jugendkulturen for use of its magazine archive. Thanks also to the external reviewers of this article for the helpful comments. Research for this article was made possible by a DAAD Fellowship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a doctoral fellowship from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. The conclusions, opinions, and other statements in this publication are my own, and not necessarily those of my colleagues or sponsoring institutions. Notes 1. See Andreas Tomalla’s discussion in We Call It Techno. See also Schneider 5–7. 2. By 2001, the Berlin magazine De:Bug had concluded: “In recent years in the context of electronic (dance) music, one concept has overshadowed all others in the number of its uses and the variety of its subjects. As a prefix and as an adjective—especially in Germany—and with a special fervor in this newspaper— it has colonized the discourse on electronic music like no other: minimalism” (Saager and Eickhoff 21, my translation). 3. For debates on aesthetic hierarchies in Europe with specific regard to Detroit techno, see Schneider 80–85. 4. I use iCulture here to indicate the everydayness of the internet, digital technologies, social media, and portable devices, through which minimal aesthetics have entered popular culture especially through Apple design. In turn, the focus on the new in technological development has lost a degree of novelty. 5. The hardcore continuum will be discussed more thoroughly later in the essay. See endnote 23. 6. The influences of Berlin’s creative industries, in part, resulted in the election of the Pirate Party to the Berlin State Parliament in 2011. A party with diverse platforms, it has primarily been associated with issues of freedom and open access to the internet. In 2012, the Pirate Party supported the club scene in debates Minimal Understandings 179 regarding musical tariffs with Germany’s authorized music collection organization, the GEMA. 7. See the video Real Scenes: Berlin in the filmography section. 8. See the webpage of the aforementioned Real Scenes: Berlin documentary, which describes Berlin as “techno’s current capital city.” 9. Sherburne writes, for example, “Despite the prevalence of German producers enmeshed in this sound, it’s not a national phenomenon . . . . Nonetheless, it’s tempting to suggest that none of this would exist without Cologne’s musical cottage industry” (“MicroHouse” 24). See also Reynolds 500–04 for a discussion of minimal and microhouse histories. 10. For a full listing of Sherburne’s entries to the series, see http://pitchfork. com/features/techno/. 11. See Philip Sherburne’s 24 May 2006 entry of “The Month in Techno,” which begins, “Whither minimal? Once a niche proposition, now an increasingly bulky subset of house and techno—at least in name—the genre is suddenly ubiquitous.” (See http://pitchfork.com/features/techno/6343-the-month-in-techno/). 12. For examples, see Barrow, Moliné, Shallcross, Walmsley, Young. 13. See Potter. 14. For an account of the reception of American minimalism in Germany, see Beal (especially 197–203). 15. For examples of collaboration, see discussions in Denk and von Thülen and We Call It Techno. Regarding equipment, Frank Bretschneider recalled in a personal communication, for example, the difficulties of acquiring the Korg MS20 synthesizer in East Germany. 16. In 1994, after the pop-rave hit “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” Westbam recounts, “After that, there were no more gabber-records and the like to be found in Hard Wax” (Denk and von Thülen 379, my translation). This reaction against rave later caused counter-reactions against minimal. For example, by the mid-2000s, a popular saying, which I also witnessed at the trucks of the annual Fuck Parade in Berlin in 2008 and 2009, was: “Minimal is not enough for us” [Minimal ist uns zu wenig]. 17. See Walmsley. See also Eshun, “The Future Sound of Berlin,” which primarily focuses on the dub techno scene around Hard Wax, as well as on the work of Robert Henke, also known as Monolake. 18. See the thorough analysis of Oval in Kelly 252–74. For an aesthetic and historical account of the relationship between minimal, glitch, and microsound, see Demers 69–89. 180 Sean Nye 19. Szepanski’s minimal discourse even found its way into literature; namely, in Thomas Meinecke’s 2001 novel Pale Blue. The last paragraph of the novel begins as follows: “The Feast of the Epiphany. In the ICE train, at a table, on which I have spread out a city map of Hamburg. On top the De:Bug from December in which Achim Szepanski proclaims new tendencies in minimal house and techno. Not just an ardent advocate of a kind of musical immanence, he claims that music is no longer representation—it copies nothing—is nothing but a free-floating form, something real that presents itself. And although music as a language is significant, it has no signified. End of story.” (Meinecke 307) 20. For extensive discussion of Kompakt in the context of Schaffel, see Turenne. 21. For a multimedial consideration of the relationship between 1960s minimal art, objecthood, and microsound, as well as their proximity to theories of absolute music, see Demers 69–89; see also 97–101 for analysis of Wolfgang Voigt and Basic Channel. 22. Such rave artwork has been collected in the book Localizer 1.0; see Die Gestalten. 23. My translation. The original by Denk reads: “Damals war Rave eines der fiesesten Schimpfwörter, das der Techno-Wortschatz hergab. Reduktion— der andere Strang—musste Techno vor der Verblödung bewahren . . . . Die Enteuphorisierung der Tanzfläche war ein Kollateralschaden der Rettungsaktion.” 24. If space allowed, Hamburg and Munich (at least) would also require extensive discussion. 25. See Reynolds’s series posted on The Wire website, begun with his retrospective introduction, “The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum: Introduction” (http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/ the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_introduction). For subsequent debates and contextualization, see Reynolds’s essay in Dancecult at http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/47/79. 26. I realize that positing a minimal continuum will likely cause many objections. However, I propose it in part as a gesture of maximal blasphemy: an attempt to gain a historical perspective on the microdistinctions of minimal at the same time as simply reflecting the maximal and repetitive use of minimal discourse in Germany since the 1990s. 27. In 2008, Philip Sherburne noticed the prominence of general criticism of, and frustration with, minimal. See his entries in Pitchfork at http://pitchfork.com/features/techno/7518-techno/ and http://pitchfork.com/ features/techno/7552-techno/. Minimal Understandings 181 28. Images from the tour can be found on the Kompakt website. For example, see http://media.kompakt.fm/01/assets/photos/lynWfQprM0h3-original.jpg. 29. Personal communication. 30. For extensive information on Schmidt’s biography, musical projects, and press since 1990, see www.atom-tm.com/portada.php. 31. The political history of Chile plays an important role in German techno. Producers Ricardo Villalobos and Dandy Jack both grew up in Germany because their families were political exiles from the Pinochet regime. Dandy Jack was also an influence on Schmidt’s choice of Chile, since they moved to Santiago at the same time. 32. Translation by Multipara. See http://www.angbase.com/interviews/ wolfgang_voigt.html. For the original German, see Bunz. 33. See the Voigt description on the Kompakt website: http://www.kompakt. fm/artists/gas 34. Voigt confirms this reference in an interview at http://musictalk. blogbus.com/logs/33297410.html. 35. The history of the Königsforst can be found in nature guides dealing with the region and in descriptions on websites; for example, see http://www.wahnerheide-koenigsforst.de 36. The piano, which Clara Schumann received in 1828, is described on the Robert Schumann House website: http://www.schumannzwickau. de/en/historic_keyboard_instruments.asp 37. The introductory essays in the catalogue emphasize that the main idea of the exhibit is to explore Biedermeier as form across media and culture, as reflected in the exhibition title, The Invention of Simplicity. Form contrasts, for the authors, with the emphasis on bourgeois taste, which is how Biedermeier has primarily been received. Although I also emphasize form, issues of bourgeois status in Biedermeier and its reception cannot be discounted in the analysis of AtomTM , as exemplified by the D-Mark bank note reference. See Ottomeyer et al. 38. My translation. The original reads: “Wir [stecken] heute immer noch im Post-Biedermeier . . . [die] Idee der Einfachheit, wie vorhin erwähnt, aus dem Biedermeier, ein deutsches Thema, das mir vielleicht nicht bewusst geworden wäre, wenn ich in Deutschland leben würde. Vereinfachung, Minimalismus, Reduktion in der Kunst, besonders der Musik, ist eine ganz inflationäre Idee, es gibt hier so einen künstlichen Kulturüberbau des Minimalismus, der gar nicht hinterfragt wird und zu einem Lifestyle geworden ist” (Multipara 43–45). See also http://de-bug.de/mag/6287.html 182 Sean Nye 39. Schmidt’s conclusion in an interview conducted on 22 September 2010 with Quartz TV was the following: “The main evolution is stagnation and decadence. I think the last ten years have been very reactionary. We have been thrown back ten or fifteen years by minimal techno, which I consider in a strict sense conservative.” This interview is no longer accessible on the internet. Further considerations on minimal and EDM can be found in an interview on 6 April 2011: http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/little-white-earbuds-interviews-uweschmidt-atom%E2%84%A2/#.UVXZ-Bnu2HA 40. The comment on Schlegel is my addition, though Schmidt also references the computer’s limitations: “Precisely my musical work on the computer last year made me aware of how one loses perspective in the flood of options—by subordinating yourself to the economic logic of the producers: the update-mania” (Multipara 45, my translation). Works Cited Bangs, Lester. “Kraftwerkfeature.” 1975. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. 1987. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Anchor, 2003. 154–60. Print. Barrow, Dan. “AtomTM : The Ecstasy of Simulation.” The Wire 339 (2012): 40–45. Print. Beal, Amy C. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2006. Print. Borthwick, Ben. “Raster-Noton: The Perfect Storm.” The Wire 238 (2003): 40–47. Print. Bunz, Mercedes. “Der Deutsche Wald auf Acid. Ein Interview mit Wolfgang Voigt.” De:Bug 22 (1999). 12 February 2013. Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. 392–98. Print. Demers, Joanna. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Denk, Felix. “Platzhirsch: Breitbeinig in der Waldlichtung.” De:Bug 92 (2005): 8. Print. Denk, Felix, and Sven von Thülen. Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno und die Wende. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012. Print. Minimal Understandings 183 Die Gestalten Berlin, ed. Localizer 1.0. The Techno-House Book. Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 1995. Print. Duffett, Mark. “Average White Band: Kraftwerk and the Politics of Race.” Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop. Eds. Sean Albiez and David Pattie. New York: Continuum, 2011. 194–213. Print. Eshun, Kodwo. “The Future Sound of Berlin.” The Wire 169 (1998): 26–32. Print. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music.” Music Theory Online 11.4 (2005). Web. 12 February 2013. Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2005. Print. Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. Print. Lessour, Théo. Berlin Sampler: From Cabaret To Techno. 1904–2012, A Century of Berlin Music. Berlin: Ollendorff, 2012. Print. McClary, Susan. “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late TwentiethCentury Culture.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. 289–98. Print. Meinecke, Thomas. Pale Blue. Trans. Daniel Bowles. Las Vegas: Amazon Crossing, 2012. Print. Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Moliné, Keith. “Manuel Göttsching: Playing the Long Game.” The Wire 334 (2011): 30–35. Print. Multipara. “AtomTM : Einfach. Ohne Stress.” De:Bug 129 (2009): 42–45. Print. Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. 1974. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Ottomeyer, Hans, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, and Laurie Winters. Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2006. Print. Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Rapp, Tobias. Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno und der Easyjetset. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. Print. 184 Sean Nye Reynolds, Simon. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. New, Updated 20th Anniversary Edition. London: Picador, 2008. Print. Rose, Barbara. “ABC Art.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. 1968. Ed. Gregory Battcock. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. 274–97. Print. Saager, Michael, and Ulrich Eickhoff. “Umsonst und Draußen: Ekmoah & Submania.” De:Bug 49 (2001): 21. Print. Schneider, Daniel. “Detroit Techno und die Frage nach der Hautfarbe.” Magister Thesis. John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free U of Berlin, 2009. Print. Shallcross, Mike. “Robert Hood: The Master Builder.” The Wire 343 (2012): 46–53. Print. Sherburne, Philip. “MicroHouse: The Rules of Reduction.” The Wire 209 (2001): 18–25. Print. ———. “Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. 319–26. Print. Turenne, Martin. “Schaffel Beat Resuscitates Techno.” Exclaim! April (2004). Web. 12 February 2013. Walmsley, Derek. “Mark Ernestus: The Gene Genie.” The Wire 312 (2010): 34–38. Print. Wollheim, Richard. “Minimal Art.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. 1968. Ed. Gregory Battcock. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. 387–99. Print. Young, Rob. “Wolfgang Voigt: Deep in the Woods.” The Wire 291 (2008): 38–45. Print. Filmography Feiern: Geschichten von Zartheit, Exzess und Zerstörung. Dir. Maja Classen. Intergroove, 2006. DVD. Real Scenes: Berlin. Resident Advisor. 6 Sep. 2011. Web. 12 Feb. 2013. Speaking in Code. Dir. Amy Grill. sQuare productions, 2009. DVD. We Call It Techno! A Documentary about Germany’s Early Techno Scene and Culture. Dir. Maren Sextro and Holger Wick. Sense Music & Media, 2008. DVD.