Techno Is the Perfect Travelling Music

Techno is the perfect travelling music, being all about speed: its repetitive rhythms, minimal melodies, and textural modulations are perfect for the constantly shifting perspectives offered by high-speed travel. Alternatively, the fizzing electronic sounds all too accurately reproduce the snap of synapses forced to process a relentless, swelling flood of electronic information. If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: ‘You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It’s an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn’t been done before.’

Jon Savage, Machine Soul: A History of Techno, 1993