"Why do bankers love techno?"

boxedjoy

Well-known member
there's techno and there's "techno" and I think it's a fallacy to assume that everyone discussing this or taking part in the article means the same thing. There are so many different axes of dance music now, and they might cross over in interesting ways depending on a DJ's style etc, but generally speaking your Hot Creations and Deeprot fans aren't listening to the new Mr Fingers album. And the audiences for those things have different, distinct tastes - different aesthetic values which influence how they form their preferences and enjoy them.

Plus, if it's just about hedonism then the soundtrack is incidental, really.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
I mean, you can make niche jokes ("I only listen to the good kind of dubstep!") but if your ears are attuned to the stylistic differences as well as audience reaction then it's fair to assume that this is a division of techno vs techno.

If I said I was into rock music, would you assume I was into: metal, prog, indie or shoegaze?
 

chava

Well-known member
It's cos techno and house are corrupt zombie genres for people with simple metronomic minds

Whereas the freewheeling poet types like me will only ever deign to dance to bronx drill
I should be triggered by this
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Corpsey’s ketno crew @ the Garvey

Some memories of the Garvey centre

- Men in the toilets openly selling pills from large transparent bags
- A Nottingham native I meet at a drum n bass night tells me that there are bullet holes in the ceiling from dancehall nights they used to hold there
- I am sat at the back of the hall, alone, coming up hard on pills, and I turn to my right and am sick on the floor; I get up and stumble in the direction of the dancefloor
- Skinhead body builders at Firefly, the techno night, gurning and stomping and their eyes rolling back into their heads to the sound of industrial techno
- Sitting in the lighting booth with my mate who was doing said lighting, tripping my balls off on some weird pill and seeing miniature people walking and dancing around inside a computer processor that was nearby
- Seeing MC Fearless MCing over a techstep set by Break, everybody totally absorbed in it, moodily lurching (same night as various jungle sets from Bailey etc.)

Can't remember much else, I was a pilled up mess, it was the best of times
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
did the arty rounds this morning and ended up in an installation. a major part of it was rhythmic bass pulses, at a club bpm. seen a few things like that over the past couple of years. i always wonder about doing away with the rest of the installation and just having loud enveloping bass. it seems like quite a natural sensual thing to me, to want to be submerged in that. bankers would love it too, and they're ultimately where a load of the art money comes from
 

chava

Well-known member
this thread needs to be closed otherwise I'll start posting endless boring techno clips
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
A recent article in Spectator Life

Why do bankers love techno?
by Josiah Gogarty

"Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc in the first series starts when the protagonist, exhausted after a long night on the powder, executes a trade in the wrong currency.

Some in the field have protested that the on-screen excess is unrealistic. But much of it is apparently inspired by real-world experience. Mickey Down, one of Industry’s creators, spent just over a year working at Rothschild at the beginning of the 2010s. Among his peers, working hard and playing hard was taken to extremes: ‘It’s not natural to do a 100-hour work week, but somehow your body acclimatises to it,’ he says. Those long days in the office turned into long weekends (often starting on a Thursday) of partying at high-end clubs such as Cuckoo in Mayfair, where bankers would spend thousands on bottles of Dom Perignon with sparklers strapped to them.

Aside from among the straight-laced eastern Europeans, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine use was rife, Down says. Italians, Germans and the French were finally able ‘to let their hair down’ after the rigours of business school, while ‘Swedes’ – and Down concedes this is a slight generalisation – would ‘take lots of coke’. But it was the British who held the ‘gold medal’ in drug use, having gone through a three-year intensive training programme as undergraduates.

The same antics still occur a decade later. But what has changed is that more and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance.

Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights. Graduates leaving prestigious universities and considering how to cash in their degrees are confronted by a trade-off between social and financial capital. At one end of the spectrum sit arts jobs which pay a pittance but give you dinner-party cachet; at the other, corporate law and finance, which offer six-figure salaries in your early twenties but little in the way of glamour.

This kindles a degree of status anxiety in corporate types, which some try to quell by striving for a compensatory level of cool in their personal lives. In the 2015 film adaptation of The Big Short, Adam McKay’s biting account of the 2008 financial crisis, a Deutsche Bank salesman played by Ryan Gosling is found in a Manhattan bar filled with yuppies swilling champagne. He turns to the camera and plaintively protests: ‘I never hung out with these idiots after work, ever – I had fashion friends.’

Look at David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs and semi-professional DJ. Solomon started DJing in 2015 – he says it helps his ‘left brain, right brain’ balance – and has managed to acquire millions of monthly listeners on Spotify and high-profile performance slots, despite heading a bank so rapacious it’s nicknamed the ‘vampire squid’. Some of Goldman’s board members are reportedly sceptical about Solomon’s side hustle, especially since he used the firm’s private jet to fly to a gig at Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival this summer. Implicit in the wider backlash (and mockery) is a more fundamental contention: rich bankers simply shouldn’t be allowed to have that much fun.

So, how do you square a job that hands you near-unlimited resources to enjoy yourself with the attendant constraints of social stigma and punishing office hours? As finance folk can probably appreciate more than most, the market finds a way. The relentlessness of the era that Down remembers has been tempered by the rise of wellness culture, and the growing recognition that sleep isn’t an optional extra. This has led to the advent of day festivals such as Field Day and Waterworks. These big-budget parties, held in London’s parks, lay on fancy food stalls and a who’s who of DJs, with ticket prices pushing three figures. Crucially, they also tend to wrap up by 11 p.m., giving attendees the chance to be tucked up in bed by midnight.

Day festivals have multiplied over the past few years, with promoters labouring under the (correct) assumption that many partygoers want their hedonism at least a little gentrified. If, Down says, enough bankers find social refuge in clubbing, it’s unsurprising that eventually clubbing starts to reflect their own, less subversive habits: ‘It’s a snake that eats its own tail.’"

nothing new, all the rave promoters were city boys, libertarian tories etc. This is just a fight over is it better for them to promote it or enjoy it. And ignore corpsey, drum n bass is full of tory promoters.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'll take the war on the house/techno front (even though I don't really believe that – well, I do up to a point, up to a very large point, there's so much boring house and techno it's unreal)

This always makes me laugh. Not cos you're wrong, in fact I probably completely agree that the majority of house/techno is boring, I probably just have different gradiantgs for picking the good stuff, but it's such a non-senius take. @blissblogger should defend the boredom of senius.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I can sort of see techno as a right wing thing, cos it's at its best when reductive down to a few elements. Whereas jungle is a more left wing cosmopolitan mixing melting pot thing. Techno is about simplicity and sharp black lines.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I can sort of see techno as a right wing thing, cos it's at its best when reductive down to a few elements. Whereas jungle is a more left wing cosmopolitan mixing melting pot thing. Techno is about simplicity and sharp black lines.
you mean coz its german
 

chava

Well-known member
I can sort of see techno as a right wing thing, cos it's at its best when reductive down to a few elements. Whereas jungle is a more left wing cosmopolitan mixing melting pot thing. Techno is about simplicity and sharp black lines.
This take was hot among mainstream music journos back in the early 90s.
 
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