028 – TAKIS SPECTRE

Guest: TAKIS SPECTRE

Takis Spectre is the stage name of a digger with 16 years of experience exploring 1980s electronic music (new wave, coldwave, EBM, new beat, early techno), a former administrator of several private Discord channels dedicated to searching for old electronic music, and a resident of the ITALLIKA party.

Politics (the Cold War) and economics (scientific and technological progress, the decreasing cost of microchips for synthesizers, and major economic reforms) directly influenced the development of electronic music in Europe. Starting from the first punk rock concerts, electronic music underwent significant changes: the DIY approach opened up unlimited access for young musicians to experiment with synthesizer-based music (including in areas such as poster design, album artwork, and perspectives on religion, politics, etc.).

Formally, techno is considered to have originated in Detroit, but the music created there found strong demand in Germany. On the other hand, Belgian new beat (which originally combined slowed-down synthpop (AB sound), acid house, and EBM) became the “missing link” between futuristic Detroit and industrial Berlin.

Slow, dark music with hypnotic basslines and an EBM aesthetic perfectly resonated with European youth who were tired of the pop-oriented mainstream sound of the 1980s. It was precisely from Belgium that the atmosphere of the “dark dancefloor” spread to Germany, later transforming into hard German techno.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989—triggered by mass protests, a political crisis, and a mistake by a GDR official who announced the immediate opening of the borders—granted access to newly liberated spaces in the western part of the city (abandoned warehouses, basements, bunkers). These spaces became venues for uncontrolled underground raves where it didn’t matter what your education was or what family you came from; dark electronic music drowned out conversations about politics, while the absence of light erased the visual distinctions between Berliners previously divided by the Wall.

Parallel to the development of electronic music in Germany, in the mid-1980s DJs in Valencia (Spain) were among the first to mix post-punk, industrial, and EBM (alongside new wave and new beat). Over time, and with the growth of the local music industry, the Valencian scene transformed these influences into its own genre called Bakalao (which later evolved into the faster and more commercial genre Makina), itself influenced by early German techno.

And while Berlin, after the fall of the Wall, was only beginning to establish itself as a techno capital, the Ruta del Bakalao (or Ruta Destroy—meaning “the route of destruction”) was already a fully formed industry, attracting tens of thousands of visitors to various techno clubs every weekend.

Link: https://soundcloud.com/dazeraw/takis-spectre-podcast-028-wav/