“They used to call everything techno.”

The refrain comes up often when I talk to other people my age about dance music. Most Gen-X kids grew up with our parents' disco records. Eight-tracks, even. Some of us heard early electro, which we called “breakdancing music,” or freestyle, which we called “skating rink music.” If you had MTV or good radio you heard about something called house music. By the time techno caught on, the labels were calling it all dance, or in darker days, electronica.

Knowing this, it's easier to understand why people applied the techno term to anything with even a vaguely electronic sound. We didn't have excellent books like Techno Rebels to sort it out for us. We certainly didn't have YouTube tutorials or Ableton Live. Like jazz, metal, and hiphop, you had to know someone who knew.

I didn't, really. I simply grew curious. I wanted to see if I could make a bona fide, four-on-the-floor, balls-to-the-wall techno track. I wound up with “Come With Me If You Want To Die,” a song I figured I wouldn't hear about again. I had gotten it out of my system.

Sometimes you choose the genre. Sometimes the genre chooses you. Such has been the case with techno. “Come With Me…” isn't huge or anything, but it's gotten a few more comments from people who like it. (A similar thing happened when I wrote fiction, under the name Greg Forrest. I thought I was a horror writer until I tried a few crime stories.)

Why not make more?

So that's what I've been working on the last month or so. The end result will be a four-song techno EP, which I'm finishing up now. I'm aiming for an early June release date. The foundation is analog, based on a series of drum machines, synths and samplers, with a few plugins here and there for added flavor. It is at various points dark, poppy, trippy, and hilarious.

You'll hear about it here first. Until then, stay curious.