Techno began as a vision of the future in a young black boy’s mind, gleaming in the rubble of a failed city. When the sprawling Ford car plants deserted downtown Detroit, it was hollowed out from the insides. Yet this post-industrial wasteland proved fertile ground for Juan Atkins and his gang of teenage dreamers who created their own, new – totally alien – music fuelled by fantasies of svelte European urbanites dancing in suits to Kraftwerk and the utopian promise lurking just out of reach over at Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage in New York.
Atkins – along with Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, the three original pioneers who became known as The Belleville Three – called this music techno, and though it was unlike anything that had ever come before, it carried with it poignant ghosts of Detroit’s past.
The eviscerated Motor City will always tote a musical legacy that not even the greatest American industrialist of all time could diminish: Berry Gordy’s timeless work as chief of Motown Records – inspired, somewhat ironically, by the brutally efficient production lines of Henry Ford – foreshadowed the rich lineage of funk, disco and soul groups that carried the torch till The Belleville Three’s techno dreams were ready to take flight.
Today, those dreams have turned into a truly global phenomenon. Go out past midnight in any major party city on Earth and you’ll hear techno: throbbing up stairwells from basement clubs, bleeding through the windows of taxis, sub bass booming into lines of thousands of clubbers waiting outside super clubs at the edge of town. London is no different, and if you’re on the hunt for the best techno nights in the capital, look no further than Ministry of Sound.
Our main room The Box is the perfect arena in which to stay out till dawn making questionable decisions while listening to overwhelming 4-4 untz-untz music with lots of smiling strangers. Every month, we attract a mix of techno royalty – Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, Nina Kraviz – and the hottest new DJ talent blowing up your apps – Kettama, Mall Grab, The Blessed Madonna – to our all-night parties.
Just south of the river, at our Gaunt Street address in SE1, we have been putting on the best techno nights in London since 1991, paying homage and respect to the staunchly individual visionaries who invented techno while ushering through successive generations of bright young things destined for the pantheon. The sound of the London techno scene can be heard in full effect at Ministry of Sound – check our listings pages for proof.
Just as techno emerged from the rubble of Detroit, so the sound itself has birthed an endless multitude of subgenres. The detached, serene progress of minimal: a strange, alchemical blend of raw percussion and barely-there bass that pulls you into its hypnotic spell over the span of a five-hour club DJ set in a way that makes even the slightest deviation in the pattern feel like some epochal hard-trance drop.
The minimal sounds you love – from names like Daniel Bell, Kompakt, Ricardo Villalobos and Robert Hood – have all found their home at Ministry of Sound over the years. The same can be said of the dub techno and industrial techno sounds that have emerged from Berlin in the time since Ministry of Sound first opened its iconic doors in the early ‘90s.
Then there are all the mutational fusion genres that have sprung like tributaries from the main river of techno – the lascivious, ass-shaking chaos of ghettotech; the dirty fashion mag glamour of electroclash; the swung and righteous rigour of Angolan kuduro; Ed Rush and Trace’s dubious mid-90s ‘techstep’ variant; a thousand more diffusions that have penetrated the public imagination to differing degrees over the years.
Yet doof-doofing away through it all, since the last knockings of the 1970s, has always been that original and classic techno sound, arguably the most durable expression of club escapism ever conceived. From Underground Resistance to Sven Vath, Drexciya to LTJ Buken, techno has thrived on the dancefloor at events and in the headphones of ravers and dreamers ever since it first took flight from Detroit more than 40 years ago.
So load up your hi hats. Beef up that snare. It’s time to 303 yourself into the future at the home of techno events in London: the iconic Ministry of Sound.
