Anne Petiau

Techno Music and the Postmodern Hypothesis

This article questions the validity of the postmodern hypothesis as regards to the study of techno music and culture. The postmodern reflection breaches from a disaffection from modernity’s ideals of Progress, Reason and History in contemporary Western societies and draws attention to a social complexification and a recrudescence of values and behaviours already present in modernity’s social scene — but only, then, as secondary realities. In the light of these considerations, a large piece of our object consequently makes sense, and particularly the constitutive plurality of techno music, as well as artistic practices of the likes of mixing, sampling and the use of machines in the process of composition, and finally the musical characteristics of techno itself, such as its repetitive and non-narrative structure.