An extract from Der Klang der Familie: a book on the origins and development of Berlin’s techno scene… 

It was basically pure coincidence. This new, raw, stark machine music appeared—and then the Wall came down. In East Berlin, the administration collapsed; the former GDR capital became a “temporary autonomous zone.” Suddenly, there were all these spaces to discover: a panzer chamber in the dusty no man’s land of the former death strip, a World War Two bunker, a decommissioned soap factory on the Spree, a transformer station opposite the erstwhile Reich Ministry of Aviation. And suddenly, people were dancing at all these sites rejected by recent history, to a music virtually reinvented from week to week.

Put simply, techno originated in Detroit in the mid-eighties. But the new electronic sounds didn’t find a home in the crisis-ridden Motor City. No club scene developed around the music, which became an export by necessity. Detroit musicians found their largest following in Berlin, of all places, and a symbiotic relationship developed between the two desolate cities. Aside from the efforts and enthusiasm of a few music freaks, this, too, was for the most part a matter of chance.

At the time, Berlin couldn’t look back on a long history of electronic music—unlike, say, Frankfurt, where a professional network of clubs, producers and labels had been operating since the eighties. Even the word “techno” was already being used there. West Berlin, by contrast, was a rock city, albeit an experimental one. Bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and movements like the Geniale Dilletanten meant there was a fairly broad understanding of what the word music could mean. And in clubs like Metropol, a small DJ culture was already emerging, born from the days of disco.

In East Berlin, of course, everything was different. Youth culture was something clandestine, even dangerous. The first generation of punks was vigorously persecuted. Young people were accustomed to seeking out niches. One of them was breakdancing, which began to shape GDR subculture far earlier than in West Germany, a fact which explains the East’s special enthusiasm for electronic sounds.

Techno became the soundtrack of reunification-era Berlin for three main reasons: the pure kinetic energy of the new sounds, the magic of the places it was played and the promise of freedom it contained. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone could program his own world: DJ, produce, start magazines, print tee-shirts. Techno was a music that called for participation, a sound of flat hierarchies. Not for nothing was it referred to in the early days as a music with no need for stars. There didn’t seem to be any room for them.

The human disappeared in the tracks; the artist-subject dissolved in the circuitry of the drum machine, the binary codes of the sampler and the ever-changing project names of the producers. At the beginning, even the DJ was part of the party, not its focus or star. The star was the party itself and with it, all the abandoned, decaying venues transformed into dance floors, sometimes for a night, sometimes long enough that people from around the world could come dance on them.

Few music genres have brought …