01/09/2026
Ten records without which techno would sound like something else. Not a best-of, but the ones that changed how the next record got made.
Every year, label and catalogue number below has been checked against the release itself.
Atkins and Rick Davis recorded it in April 1982; Fantasy put it out in 1983 as the third single from Enter. Atkins was 21. It usually gets filed as electro, and it pre-dates his own use of the word techno. That is exactly why it goes first.
After Cybotron split, Atkins started Metroplex and made this in his mother’s basement on Detroit’s east side. It caught on in Chicago before it did at home, which is how British labels ended up tracing the sound back to Michigan.
The piano came from May’s friend Michael James, recorded at May’s house and then left alone for a year. May sped it up, chopped it into loops and built the record around it. He has said himself it isn’t his favourite of his
Beltram wrote, produced and mixed it in New York before he turned twenty. R&S pushed it across Europe, Transmat handled the US. That 909 kick set the tone for the rest of the decade.
Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, working out of Hard Wax, ran everything through tape delay until the kick sat behind the fog instead of in front of it. Catalogue number BC 02. A whole genre came out of one twelve-inch.
Out 4 October 1993. Hawtin has said it was basically a 909 and an 808, tweaked live on the mixer. No chords, no bassline, nothing but drums and filter sweeps.
Made after Hood left Underground Resistance, mixed at his own M-Plant studio, released on Jeff Mills’ Axis as AX-007. It named a sound nobody was asking for yet.
Curtis Jones as Green Velvet, on Relief. A record built around a tour guide walking parents through a rave, which somehow turned into a peak-time staple and got remixed by everyone from DJ Sneak to Danny Tenaglia.
On his own Purpose Maker label. Mills has said he plays it at every gig and it has never once not worked. The earliest logged play in a public tracklist is Carl Cox at Mayday, April 1997.
From the Before One EP, 12 January 2009, catalogue o-ton 19 — not from the album it preceded, which people get wrong. Function and Regis
