Inside the Weird World of #Technoscenequotes

Get past the cat photos, the all pervading passive-aggression and the increasingly fallow periods between posts of note and Facebook can still throw up the odd surprise. A half-hungover trawl through the photos of a stranger’s best mate led me to Techno Scene, a space for techno fans the world over to congregate in like a virtual smoking area. It’s a place for Berghain battlers and Trouw troops to hang out and shoot the breeze about all things in thrall to Detroit. Alongside good old fashioned content aggregation, Techno Scene also indulges in one of the Internet’s favourite pastimes: plastering inspirational quotes over low-res .jpegs as a form of free therapy. With Techno Scene you’re more likely to see Peter Van Hoesen than you are Peter Griffin.

The page’s fans — and there’s a decent amount of them — seem enthused by the material, genuinely appreciative to take on the experiences of others and live life with new knowledge in their pockets. Not wanting to miss out on that, and fearing myself to be a miser, I decided to submerge myself in the finest #Technoscenequotes out there in the hope that I’d emerge a willing man, new man, a happier man. A better man.

Though Surgeon plays the kind of techno that gives me nosebleeds I wasn’t going to let his abrasive tastes put me off him as a thinker. I’m here to learn. What I think he’s saying is that to get ahead in dance music you’ve got to let the music do the talking, which seems a little ironic in the context of an interview which is then removed from any overarching context by being placed over a picture of the speaker as he talks about letting the music do the talking. But hey, that’s #technoscenequotes for you – this is a place where thinking is king and the status quo isn’t blindly accepted.

Minneapolis’ biggest export since…no, not even Google knew anyone or anything famous from or about Minneapolis. I hung out with the Techno Scene lads because I thought we were all there to get along harmoniously, to harness the collective power of a teeming mass of individuals with a common goal but DVS1 doesn’t want to play ball. He’s got going to give us what we want, apparently, but rather what we need. Except how can anyone truly know the needs of another? How can one know one’s own needs? What if right now, more than anything in the world, I feel like I need a bottle of Lucozade and a Mars Bar? Is he going to tell me that, actually, Josh, you just want that, you don’t need it? Is he?

There’s something problematic about techno’s most cosmic producer rejecting humanity in favour of kickdrums. Music is pretty good but, come on Jeff, it doesn’t exist without man, maaaaan. As someone who doesn’t mind the company of other people – for about half an hour, maybe longer if we both have pints in our hands – I’m saddened to see one of the community’s most important figures turn against us. Does he not read Techno Scene? Does he not know that without anyone to hear it a record doesn’t make a sound?

I’ve read this one over and over for the last half an hour and I’m still thoroughly perplexed by it and I’ve got two English degrees.

Apart the great hat, which makes Hood look like a sturdy, trusty, dependable preacher straight out of an American romance novel, everything about this is devastatingly sad. It’s crushing to hear a man who brings genuinely ecstatic, in the truest sense of the word, joy to thousands on a nightly basis — in clubs and bedrooms the world over — is so lonely. How can the man who gave us “We Magnify his Name” be so blue? If I didn’t live thousands of miles away from Robert Hood and wasn’t pathologically afraid of human contact and wasn’t skint and knew exactly where he lived I’d jet over to Alabama just to give him a hug.

Am I happier person now that I’ve taken these quotes in, bathed in their glow, sunk my teeth into their fatty deposits of knowledge? No, not really. I tried though. They tried too. Thank you Techno Scene. You mean well. God lives a trier. He’s a DJ too, lest we forget.

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