Great passage from Simon Reynolds in Generation Ecstasy on the differences between techno and traditional western music:

Sampladelic dance music also confounds standard notions about creativity and authorship in pop music. Not only is the romantic figure of the creator displaced by the less glamorous curator (the DJ-turned-producer), but the lines between art and craft, inspiration and technique, are blurred. Once, it was possible to distinguish between music and its production, between the song and the recording tricks with which it’s embellished. But with dance tracks, the music is the production. Increasingly, the figure of the producer blurs with the engineer, traditionally regarded as a mere technician who facilitates the sonic ideas and aspirations of band and producer. In most dance music, though, it’s the timbre and penetration of a bass tone, the sensuous feel of a sample texture, the gait of a drum loop, that’s the real hook, not the sequence of notes that constitutes “the melody.”

The problems that rock critics have with dance music are reminiscent of the hostile incomprehension with which highbrow cineastes greet certain sorts of genre movie like science fiction and horror. They vainly search these movies for what they valorize: acting, sparkling dialogue, character development, a non-corny plot, and meaning (insight into the human condition, social resonance). Ironically, these are values that pertain more to literary or theatrical drama than to the cinematic per se.

But these elements of narrative and character are present in genre movies as a mere formality, a structural framework for the purely cinematic: the retinal intensities of uftraviolent action, special effects, and, in sci-fi movies, futuristic mise-en-scène and decor. Here, the true filmic poets are set designers like H. R. Giger (Alien) and effects engineers like Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Blade Runner). With their emphasis on the sheerly spectacular and sensational, science-fiction and horror flicks simply are his prose-poem evocations of cyberspace as a techno-sublime, not the hackneyed dialogue.

If techno can be thought of in this way — the track as a framework for the display of special effects and processing — what, then, constitutes the ‘sub- lime” in techno? The answer is sound in itself. “If I can't create a sound that I like, I find it very hard to create a song,” Kevin Saunderson told Music Technology magazine in 1988. “I get inspired by a good sound... it gives me a feeling for a rhythm or a melody. The sound’s the most important thing.” In most music, timbre and “chromatics” are the medium, the pigment as it were, through which the important thing — the melody, the emotional meaning — is expressed. in techno, melody is merely an Implement or ruse for the displaying of texture/timbre/sound matter. This is why most rave music shuns complicated melody lines in favor of rifts, vamps, and ostinatos (short motifs repeated persistently at the same pitch throughout the composition). In the ultraminimalist “tech-house” of the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels, simple riffs serve to twist and crinkle the sound fabric in order to best show off its properties; what you thrill to is the scintillating play of “light” as it creases and folds, crumples and kinks.

Basic Channel and Chain Reaction tracks have a curious quality: listening to them is sublime, but afterward it’s hard to retain anything but the faintest flavor of the experience. Bar the odd bass line, there’s nothing you can hum to yourself. This is because the tracks are all percussion and timbre, the two elements of music that are hardest to remember. Gracyk points out that our memory of chromatics (timbre/texture in music, color in painting) fades faster than our memory of pitch and line. Similarly, timbre and space cannot be notated on a score. Yet it’s these ineffable, untranscribable elements in music that are the most intensely pleasurable.

Timbre, rhythm, space: these elements in music are all related to sensuously overwhelming immediacy. They are the now-intensive elements in rock and in techno. Rock began the work that techno completed: accentuating rhythm, elevating timbre (distortion, effects, grain of the voice), opening up dub space. Structurally, rock and techno both fit Andrew Chester’s notion of in tensional music (complexity achieved through modulation and inflection of simple melodic units, as in African music), as opposed to the extensional structures of Western classical music (theme and variations, crisis and resolution).

Techno and house create a subtly different form of heightened immediacy than African music — a sort of future-now. (This is an effect of the music’s reliance on the vamp — originally a brief introductory passage repeated sever& times before a solo or verse in order to whip up anticipation, but in techno sometimes making up the whole body of the track). Timbre-saturated, repetitive but tilted always toward the next now, techno is an immediacy machine, stretching time into a continuous present. Which is where the drug-technology interface comes into play. Not just because techno works well with substances like MOMA, marijuana, LSD, speed, etc., all of which amplify the sensory intensity of the present moment. But because the music itself drugs the listenet, looping consciousness then derailing it, stranding it In a nowhere/nowhen, where there is only sensation, “where now lasts longer.”