Transcendental Time Technologies: The Philosophy of Detroit Techno

On Robert Hood, Jeff Mills and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

1.

"... the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of time." (Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, Or Ardor. A Family Chronicle)

Techno and electronic dance music as a whole are now approaching their 40th anniversary. Yet, to date there has been very little research that attempts to build a theory of how and why this music works the way it does. Academic approaches tend to center sociological and ethnological approaches that - while of course generating valuable insights in their own right - are ill-fitting to explain the object at hand on its own, immanent musical terms. Neither does it make much sense to employ musicological schemata designed for western classical music, or established Pop music theory. Techno, as abstract timbral music, speaks neither of words, nor of traditional tonality.

This has led to the popular cliché that electronic dance music is purely a music of the body, the mind need not apply. But it is intelligible - not from the point of view of traditional approaches, but according to its own immanent structural principles. In the drive-circuit between DJs, producers, record labels, magazines, clubs, record stores and so on, there has long emerged an entire landscape of informal musical languages and theories. What I am interested in is seeing if these can be conceptualized in more generalized, philosophical terms. Perhaps they will become more malleable in the process. I'm here taking Detroit Techno artists Robert Hood's and Jeff Mills' solo work from the mid-1990s (after they had departed from the Underground Resistance collective) as exemplary for Techno, and perhaps electronic dance music as a whole, because their conceptual and musical radicality remains a pinnacle to this day. These are records that weren't merely following established musical principles but were themselves continually inventing, shaping, and iterating them.

Today, it is often critically remarked that electronic dance music's forms have become overly ossified. But in the 1990s, at a time of rapid breakthroughs, its foremost practitioners were sensing limitless potential. Mills' comments about Techno music being a "new form of communication" may appear naive in hindsight, but it highlights the stakes that were at hand. This wasn't about dancing. It was about the future of the future. Juan Atkins, widely considered to be the inventor of Techno, famously took up much of his philosophy from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave , a 70s styled, utopian-technocrat fever dream. Released in 1980, with Reaganomics already on the horizon, it hardly hit the zeitgeist.

But Techno was still committed to the future and would continue to be so throughout the 1990s. In interviews, Mills has often talked about the significance the upcoming "year 2000" held for him at that time. Y2K wasn’t just a significant calendar date, but the promise of a radically open, indeterminate future. Accordingly, his music's declared task was to provide a total a re- imagining of what music, sound and artistic communication could be. The night club, rather than an end for musical consumption, was just a means; an “affective laboratory” that provided a place to iterate and test out new sonic technologies and thoughts every weekend.

2.

One key aspect of Mills' and Hood's mid-1990s music is that it is considerably more abstract than that of Techno's first generation from the 1980s (the so-called "Belleville Three": Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson). Very early Techno fits right into a sonic lineage from Kraftwerk to “Planet Rock”: block party rockin' electro drums, robot-voiced vocals, lyrics about partying and the future, sound effects straight out of classic sci-fi movies. This is no longer the case with the second generation of Techno. Gone is all the Techno-Pop, the 80s clichés and the associated cultural semiotics. What's left standing is more like the infamous monolith from 2001: a pure, cryptic figure.

I think it is important to take this inherent level of abstraction seriously. In an interview of Kodwo Eshun with Christoph Cox, Eshun talks about how abstract black visual artists are usually less widely received than figurative ones, since the inherent abstractness of their work makes it harder to read and to insert familiar narratives. There is a music-historical context to this move towards abstraction. In 1980s Detroit, Techno had emerged out of a black upper-middle class background. Many people don't know this, but adjusted for inflation, entry for a night at the legendary Detroit-Techno club The Music Institute was over 50 dollars - it wasn't meant to just be accessible to anyone. But when Techno hit Europe, it became a mass youth culture, something more proletarianized. The kids wanted it harder, faster, louder, more extreme. To the very people that had invented it, Techno got out of control. There's an anecdote of Juan Atkins being at a club in the Netherlands in the early 1990s and being utterly horrified at the “hooligan” hardcore- Techno they were playing.

There is more to this Detroit-Benelux connection. What's often left out of Techno history is that in the late 80s, black clubs in Detroit were also playing EBM and New Beat, bands like Front 242 - this super-white, super-masculinist, aggressive “military-march” music. You can hear that Belgian sound all over Mills's early records, but then he gradually gets more and more abstract: he gets rid of those big basslines, the big bravado, and almost folds the violence back into itself until it is concentrated into a single point. What’s interesting here historically, is that Hood's and Mills' response doesn't really follow the trope that's well known in Rock and Jazz - that over time, white musicians are watering down black music through conspicuous abstraction and academicization. Hood and Mills didn't go searching for some lost musical soul, they were outgunning the vulgar European rave sound by being more machinic and abstract.

Mills’ and Hood’s encounter with a freshly re-unified Berlin and the sheer intensity of affective spaces such as the infamous Tresor club also mandated a music that could keep up with these environments. This wasn't a return to smooth Jazz. It was about channeling sonic violence through a different kind of intensity, a more spiritual, abstract one. In an interview, Hood talks about wanting to induce the "holy ghost" on a "guy in the back". In footage of him DJing from this period, Mills himself almost comes across as possessed. His style of Djing became infamous for being so intense that (according to the legend) Mills started throwing his already-played vinyl records back into his crate. He was under the force of the future- machine. Mills' music (for example, ”Confidentials”) from this period is pure visceral violence, hitting at every limit, always only one step away from complete disintegration, conjuring the violence of the pure future, no matter the cost.

(Jeff Mills - Confidentials A1)

It is interesting how out of step this “popular modernist” future-obsession of Techno is with the "postmodernist" referentialism that was so popular in the 1990’s visual art and academia. Techno is thoroughly high modernist, but from the outside: Is this image of a man hysterically possessed by violent, repeating beats not the horror of modernism? The rhythm of the march, of the factory, always threatening to swallow up the precious jewels of “difference”, “non-identity”, “différance”, or whatever you want to call it. But, today, in the 21st century, all this seems like settled debate: Techno's machinic modernism has already won. Much to the dismay of those passionately defending "real human music", today, virtually all recorded music is auto-tuned, quantized, beat-gridded, pitch-corrected, and so on and so on, until it is sufficiently machinic.

3.

Of course, Hood's and Mills' music hardly resembles the majority of popular music today. But nonetheless, I believe that looking at these records doesn't just tell us about how Techno functions but also problematizes more general notions of time, repetition, timbre, the machinic and materiality. What is crucial in that respect is the interplay between the material and ideal, time and timbre, and the ways in which they are reciprocally synthetic of the conditioning structures with which musical affects are produced. This is what I am calling "transcendental time technologies”. Timbre gets, to use a term from Gilles Deleuze, "dramatized" - that is to say, temporally developed and determined with increasing precision, and in turn, time becomes embodied in timbre.

As a philosopher, Deleuze had a rare affinity for electronic music. One of this friends and students, Richard Pinhas, was one of the first Rock musicians to make use of the synthesizer in France and Deleuze's go-to advisor in all things musical. During the last year of his life (while suffering from terminal ailments) Deleuze was contacted by Achim Szepanski, the founder of the seminal experimental electronic music label Mille Plateaux. While Deleuze was in too ill health to write the text on "Techno theory" that Szepanski had asked for, he gave his blessings to the label and replied that he enjoyed listening to the CDs that Szepanski had sent him. I find this fascinating, since philosophers will typically turn to poetry in their final years - certainly not cutting edge electronic music. Deleuze’s unwritten text on Techno exists virtually, as a latent possibility within his work, but remains unwritten. I will use his philosophy pragmatically in order to sketch out such a not yet existing “Techno-theory” as it fits, while sidestepping some of the exegetic issues and attempting to work around, and sometimes with, his modernist shunning of the metric - Deleuze frequently states that true rhythm can never be metric, but only irregular.

One of Deleuze’s key philosophical insights is that objects are always doubled, they have two sides. But this isn't a dualism. It’s about how being ("actual", material) and the process of becoming ("virtual", ideal) reciprocally interact. What a thing is shapes what it can become, and what it is becoming shapes what it can be. This is also true for time - time is both actual and virtual. Virtual time gives us a form in which we can determine a given structure. What separates a pile of notes from a chord? It is that the chord is determined, in unity, as a chord. But the determination precedes the object. When we say, "this is a chord", we have to already have made the determination, or we couldn't even call it a chord, since it would just be a pile of notes. The determination is part of the coming-into-being of the chord as a chord. This is what, starting with Immanuel Kant, it means to be transcendental - to set the ideal, formal conditions of the determination of a structural unity.

But in a given piece of music, how is this ideal time produced? In one of his lectures on Immanuel Kant, Deleuze, in passing, mentions the concept of a "transcendental rhythm" - a rhythm that emerges out of differential "chaos" and establishes a measure in the first place. There is no measure pre-ceding the rhythm, it is the rhythm that establishes the measure with which we can start to determine a structure. Something that Deleuze points out in Difference & Repetition is that the determination of any pattern always necessarily requires and produces an asymmetry. The determinate starting point (let's say, the "one") becomes asymmetrical in relation to the others ("two", "three", "four") by virtue of being accented. Symmetry and asymmetry become interwoven: they form a rhythm.

4.

Rhythms are relational, they are a temporal structure between differing elements. A rhythm isn't in itself a being, it is just a virtual relation. But as a relation, it also encompasses existent elements, such as individual sounds. Deleuze also calls this kind of being-as-interrelation an assemblage. An assemblage is a relational construct that performs a certain function, and in the performance of this function it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts. In Techno, there is a relational, reciprocal rhythm between music- making machines that interact and form a studio, which in turn interacts with its producer. As Kodwo Eshun puts it: "The producer is caught up in machinemutation, played by the machinery he plays." Mark J. Butler has employed the phrase "playing with something that runs" to describe the parameter-tweaking of a running, repeated sequence so endemic to electronic dance music. The running sequence forms an assemblage that swallows up both producer and machine.

Particularly characteristic of Hood's and Mills' running sequences is the use of synthesizer features that were originally invented to allow for more "naturalistic" performances (portamento, chord memory). But in their music, they become machinic. For example, on Hood's track “The Figure” from the Moveable Parts series, the portamento pitch-gliding between notes leads to a detuned, unstable pitch that continually de-forms the sequence, obscuring its beginning and end, gesturing towards the bending and stretching in between the notes. This is further accentuated by the straight offbeat Roland TR-909 hi-hat, who's leading transient forms an energetic burst, followed by an enveloping trail of reverb that is cutting a path forward in time, already projecting towards the next beat: the future.

(Robert Hood - The Figure)

In such a Techno track, the rhythmic structure eschews clear accents on the beat or backbeat in favor of a pure flow - the flow of the off-beat, the in-between, the in-becoming of time. What becomes highlighted is the inner morphology of the sequence, its syntax, its perpetual folding and unfolding into and out of itself, the virtual yarn that is spun between its individual steps but can never be caught up with. A friend of mine (that runs a well-known Detroit-Techno reissue label) once tried to re-program some of Hood’s classic sequences on the same original machines that Hood had used. Despite his best attempts, he could not replicate them, ultimately concluding that Hood had either sliced together a bunch of different takes with tape (unlikely) or had simply performed some kind of "magic”.

This "magic" is the virtual between-the-beats, the gaps in the rhythmic skeleton, where the "texture of time" appears. On the cover art of the Moveable Parts series, Hood has drawn sketches of abstract, skeletal figures. They are stuck in stasis, but arrows and lines outline their capacity of movement, their virtual side. What is formed is a "zone of indiscernibility" (Deleuze) between stasis and motion, where nothing is ever changing, but everything is always changing. Despite having listened to Hood's music for many years, sometimes, I still cannot tell if a sequence is modulating its parameters in actuality or if I’m being tricked and my brain is conjuring virtual changes that don’t actually exist.

It is a well-known psycho-acoustic phenomenon that the cognitive apparatus of human beings does not cope well with machinic metric repetition - something that does not exist in nature. Sooner or later, the brain starts inventing virtual modulations of its own to fend off the “violence of repetition”. As an affective space, the nightclub of course greatly accelerates this. In the middle of night, in dark rooms flooded with seas of blinding lights, it isn't uncommon to hear faint phantom melodies, queer harmonic doubles, rhythms that might have never existed, transitions into nowhere.

I am tempted to call such affective states being in the "machine zone", a term that Natasha Dow Schull developed in her study of the entrancing differential repetitions of Las Vegas slot machines. A far-out metaphor for music, perhaps - but in the repetitions of the machine zone, the “Eros” and “Thanatos” of the loop become intertwined. "One more spin" is not only the modus operandi of the gambler, but the ontological principle of electronic dance music. A loop is never complete in itself, but always relying on yet another go-around to achieve a stable determination. In the "four" there lies already implicit the next "one". Without the “one”, the “four” finds itself in disarray, cut off from its virtual conclusion, and falls into nothingness. The slice points of a loop, its beginning and end, are always virtually folding and unfolding, tending towards the infinity of their own presence. For Deleuze, this is precisely what "speed" is:

Speed is to be caught in a becoming that is not a development or an evolution. One would have to be like a taxi, a waiting line, a line of flight, a bottleneck, a traffic jam, green and red lights, slight paranoia, difficult relations with the police. Being an abstract and broken line, a zigzag that slips "between." [Dialogues, p. 40-41]

Accordingly, highly loop-based music such as Techno is "fast" in a sense that is not referring to its actual beats per minute, but the virtual infinitive of the loop: its "to repeat", the perpetual presence of the always-just-gone and always-just-about-to-arrive, that retroactively constitutes the virtual condition of possibility of its repetition, going for yet another and yet another round. Just like a melody is only intelligible as a melody (and not a scattering of notes) when a line is drawn from the first note towards its end, a loop is only intelligible as a loop when a line is drawn towards its virtual end.

What is repeated is always a surplus that cannot be resolved, can only be repeated once more - its virtual infinity, the infinitive present of "to repeat" that can never be actualized and flows towards both the past (of what already has repeated) and the future (what will keep repeating). Everything in the loop is temporally simultaneous, all that is needed is already present in the loop. But it is also staggered, delayed within itself, temporally differentiated (“one-two-three-four”), which is what makes this coexistence possible in the first place. It is always the delayed, yet simultaneous "infinitive" rhythmic speed of virtual time that dramatizes a loops' material and produces affective hysteria: the "slight paranoia" of the "traffic jam" and even "difficult relations with the police". Rave might not have been an organized political movement, but its affects were perceived to be dangerous enough to the public order that virtually every industrialized country on earth fast tracked anti-rave laws in the mid-1990s. Thus, the UK's 1994 criminal justice act famously criminalized gatherings that played "...music wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."

5.

To both the high modernist and the state bureaucrat, quantized, machinic, looped repetition appears as troubling, since it appears to eliminate "the human" in music. But quantization is best understood as a process of abstraction; and, as already Hegel knew, in the abstract, we find the concrete. Such a notion of temporal quantized abstraction is developed in Anna Greenspan's book Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine. There, she develops (building on Deleuze's philosophy of time) the concepts of "calendar time" and "clock time". Calendar time is the time of nature, the spheres, the stars; cyclical movements that go in and out of sync with each other. Clock time crucially is both the time of emergent capitalism, of the factory, of money and "time as a pure form" in Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. The two are interrelated. Mechanization is abstraction: the clock frees time from movement and makes possible time- in-itself. Techno puts these two forms of time in a queer, entangled relation.

Robert Hood's frequent use of polymetric sequences on top of an even 4/4 grid (for example on “Minus”) forces an asymmetry into the symmetrical. Sequences start to cycle in and out of the transcendental clock. Even the clock of the drum machine is subjected to random jitter in its timing output, re-introducing microscopic timing variances that are not "human error" but machinic error. The ideal of time faces its chaotic ground. Eshun: "When sequences bounce and clock cycles nudge, when the rims of texturerhythm meet the edge of rhythmelodies, time touches time in a machinekiss." Clock and calendar touch each other in their reciprocal modulation, producing a time that is material and ideal, machinic and differential.

(Robert Hood - Minus)

Richard Pinhas, in one of Deleuze’s seminars, protests against Deleuze’s shunning of the metric and proposes (citing the American minimalist composers) a concept of "metallic time" that generates qualitative differences in metric repetition. The word "metallic" here is reminiscent of Deleuze's concept of metallurgy, which he explicitly associates with music (and nomads):

If metallurgy has an essential relation to music, it is […] the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy... [Thousand Plateaus, p. 479]

In other words, form is not some pre-existent thing enforced on inert matter, but in a reciprocal relationship with matter, shaped through the ongoing variation of matter. In music, this matter is its timbre. Timbre itself only exists as a differential relation between a myriad of overtone partials. What we hear as the color and texture of a sound is not any individual partial, but their relational sounding together, the peaks and troughs in the frequency spectrum that is produced in their continuous variance in intensity and amplitude. Timbral micro-relations become audible only in their repeating modulation over time. Thus, material microscopic differential relations become generative of form.

Form is no longer a matter of ideal macro-developments (such as in a traditional score), but becomes a matter of timbral nuance, as Stefan Goldmann says about Techno: "Repetition as a magnifying glass. I tend to think that in techno, wider form is pretty much a matter of nuance...” Under this "magnifying glass", we can imagine timbre as a kind of “sonic body”, one that is continually molded in relation to the forces acting on it: the temporal modulations of its spectral content. Time assumes a "texture", becomes embodied and audible in its modulations and deformations. In Techno, timbre is the "flesh” of time, how it can be affectively heard and felt. This “timbral flesh” emerges temporalized in - for example - the modulative moment of a sweeping filter's resonance (example: Jeff Mills’ “Man-Like”) perpetually constructing, erasing, and re-constructing complex peaks and valleys of harmonics on the fly.

(Jeff Mills - Man-Like)

In its ongoing repetition, the modulative pattern declines its own immanent syntax. Timbre and time are dramatized - increasingly reciprocally determined – in, and only in, their ongoing repetition. This is not only true for the micro-level of an individual sound’s timbre, but also the macro-level of different sounds interacting within a track. Stefan Goldmann speaks of digital frequency modulation (FM) synthesis - employed by both Mills and Hood - as a "metaphor", meaning that the inter-modulative relation of tones for the purpose of sound-synthesis mirrors the interrelation of elements within a given track:

...all parameters are effectively bundled and thus exist in a state of permanent dynamic cross-modulation. Each layer is modulated by all others, mirroring the others, imprinting contours onto each other. Everything is melting into a convoluted perceptual entity where the products of cross-modulation form their own emergent aesthetic layer [...] there is no such thing as an independent variable.

Transcendental time technologies form an inter-relational system in which the material and the ideal are mutually productive. The machinic reduces, abstracizes, quantizes and repeats but also sets free new rhythms, new times, new timbres, new affects. This opening-up of new possibilities in the spanning interrelation of all parameters is what Deleuze refers to as “widened chromaticism” (which he likens to a modular synthesizer). Techno’s space-ship interior is all chrome. Gesturing towards the tradition of science fiction, Kodwo Eshun says that as “sonic fiction”, Techno constructs an "escape route". What are we escaping towards? Perhaps time as bliss; the sonic machinic as a flash of messianic salvation. In the aphoristic words of rave-novelist Rainald Goetz:

From the margins came the limbs and lights, on foot, in flashes, the steps and basses, the pads and hisses, the equations and functions of a higher mathematics. [Rave, p. 19]