Techno

Techno was born in Detroit in the mid-1980s — the offspring of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, three young Black producers who fused Kraftwerk's synthesised rigour with the urgency of the city's industrial decline. Mechanical, percussive, and relentlessly forward-moving, techno prioritises function over melody: the kick drum drives dancers through industrial spaces while synthesised sequences build hypnotic pressure. From Detroit the music spread to Chicago, then Berlin, where Robert Hood's minimalist cuts and Jeff Mills' surgical DJ sets defined the 1990s sound at venues like Tresor. Today techno spans an enormous range: the brutal industrial hardware experiments of Blawan, the cold precision of Dax J and SPFDJ, the functional austerity of Planetary Assault Systems. Mixprism captures techno across its most active DJs — festival sets at Awakenings, Movement Detroit, and Time Warp, through to nightly residencies at Berghain and DC-10 — building one of the most complete tracklist databases for the genre.