Minimal Techno
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Minimal techno, a minimalist sub-genre of Techno music, is characterized by a stripped-down, glitchy sound, simple 4/4 beats (usually around 120-135 BPM), repetition of short loops, and subtle changes.
Related styles include Detroit techno, ambient techno, microhouse and tech house.
Minimal techno features consonant harmony, but most tracks lack functional chord progression, sometimes to the point of seeming atonal. Melodies, when present, are usually short loops of one or two bars, and emphasis is put on creating layers of unique sounds. Musical development is achieved mostly by adding or removing instruments (sounds) on eight-bar phrase boundaries and adjusting sound effects. Music created under this genre can range from melodic beautiful harmonies with a prominent bass line, to glitchy, unstructured, disjointed sounds which are unified to create an organised new track.
In recent years, the genre has taken great influence from, to the point of merging with the microhouse genre. It has also fragmented into a great number of difficult to categorize subgenres, equally claimed by the minimal techno and microhouse tags.
Minimal techno has found mainstream club popularity since 2004 in such places as Germany, South Africa, The Netherlands, Spain, North Italy and the UK with DJs from a wide variety of genres incorporating differing elements of its tones.
By the second half of 2006, the term 'minimal' had in many ways become contradictory, as it serves as a denominator for the tech house sounds of the moment, many of which should rather be coined as 'maximal' in terms of their sonic content, in contrast to the original stripped down, i.e. minimalist electronic genre.
Notable artists include Daniel Bell, Richie Hawtin (a.k.a. Plastikman), Ricardo Villalobos, Mika Vainio, Maurizio (Basic Channel), Jeff Milligan, Steve Bug, Luciano (Lucien Nicolet), Troy Pierce (a.k.a. Louderbach), Sleeparchive (Roger Semsroth), Sutekh (Seth Horvitz). Some record labels specializing in minimal techno are M_nus, Foundsound, Sähkö Recordings, Force Inc, Kompakt, Trapez, Cadenza, Poker Flat Recordings and Revolver Canada.