Let's flash-back here to the First World War, to Zurich in 1916, where a fledgling artistic group who got together at the Cabaret Voltaire formulated an ideal called 'dada' to identify their activities; the movement's spirit was best captured by Andre Breton who declared that 'Dada is a state of mind ... Dada is artistic free-thinking.' As such, the Dadaists set about turning 'normal' artistic conventions on their head and severed links with traditional concepts of art, including music, in order to create new and often anarchic forms. During the early 1920s in the USSR physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen ñ a.k.a. Leon Theremin -- developed the synthetic music instrument that became known by his name, and in 1922 performed the world's first 'official' concert of electronic music at the Kremlin before an enthusiastic Lenin. The instrument Theremin developed has been called the first synthesiser -- it operated by using electrical fields which were tuned by the changes in distance between an antenna and the performer's hand -- but his own life was just as remarkable, reading like a trippy episode of "Melrose Place" intercut with "The Maltese Falcon".

Over the next 15 years he taught Lenin how to use his instrument, he worked in the same studio with Einstein, and he reportedly spied on the Americans while living in New York City; after being abducted by the KGB and returned to his homeland, he spent time exiled in Siberia before returning for 'special duties' and developing the first wireless bug that was installed in the US embassy in Berlin during the Cold War. The Theremin instrument he originally developed so long ago has continued to be used here in the West, ingratiating itself with its eerie sound effects in B-grade horror and sci-fi films like ìForbidden Planetî, in Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945), in television themes like "Dr Who" and "Dark Shadows", and in songs like "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love".

Rewind three decades. It's 1939, and the eve of the Second World War. While working with broadcast radio John Cage uses test records of pure frequency tones, which he plays on variable-speed turntables, in his early piece "Imaginary Landscape No. 1". In his subsequent effort, titled "Imaginary Landscape No. 2", Cage pioneers live electronic music by using among his sound sources an amplified coil of wire. But it was the arrival of the tape recorder, invented in 1935 yet not widely available until 1950, that transformed the practice of working with sounds in the studio. Tape presented the composer with a flexible, versatile means of recording and storing sounds; of changing them in pitch and rhythm by altering the play-back speed, of superimposing them, and of rearranging them in any order. Tape was, in effect, the first sampler. In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer, a sound technician working for Radio-diffusion-Television-Francais, extended earlier work with discs to produce several short studies in what he called 'musique concrete', and here tape came to the forefront. Each of his compositions was based upon sounds from a particular source, such as railway trains or the piano, and the recordings were transformed by playing them at different speeds, forwards or in reverse, isolating fragments and superimposing one sound over another, with the intention to free his material from its native associations.

Until the mid 60s, however, electronic music experiments had been confined to the studio; as the decade drew to a close it began its fractious assimilation into popular culture and progressive music styles. Influenced by Stockhausen's work with his own ensemble on such compositions as "Kurzwellen" (1968) rock musicians like Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground and the Beatles began to make use of live electronic techniques and more experimental sound nuances, while with their album "Anthem Of The Sun" (1967-68) the Grateful Dead played on the development of electronic rock by drawing upon references of musique concrete in between songs.

However in the first half of the 1970s there was a conscious shift away from the abstraction, discontinuity and non-harmoniousness that hallmarked the 60s. Assured, often sophisticated techniques of recording, and integrating electronic music into this process, was the hallmark of British bands like Yes, Roxy Music, the Matching Moles and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, yet in general the use of synthesiser was often relegated to instrumental imitation and nothing more definitive.

Apart from the more adventurous offerings of Brian Eno and the German-based dabblings of Tangerine Dream, Neu, Can, and Kraftwerk, music in general had relegated machine-based sounds to a more subservient position. While punk's arrival in the mid ë70s was a subversive way in which to combat the excesses of pomp rock, there was an equally defining and vital underground that surfaced in Britain under the moniker of industrial music. The principle protagonists in this movement were Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, bands as much influenced by Dada and the Beat generation writers as they were by Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Brian Eno, basic sound iconoclasm, the new electronic music technology coming through ... and James Brown. These bands had more in common with Germans like Kraftwerk, Can and Karlheinz Stockhausen than they did with anyone else in the UK, but they made an enormous impact upon the emerging 'hip' new British media cartel that included fledgling magazines like "The Face" and "NME".

What made Cabaret Voltaire unique in their early records -- in particular "Mix Up" (1978) and "Voice Of America" (1979) -- was the way in which band members Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson created their own unique, sometimes obscure, soundscapes and grooves through the use of a collage of effected sound-sources and spliced-up tape loops; for their live shows the band integrated a multi-media approach that included slide-shows and political imagery, for an all-encompassing effect and an often deliberately heavy-handed message. There was a reason behind this apart from basic visual aesthetics: in 1983 Mallinder reflected that 'people react a lot more immediately to a visual image than to an audio one. Audio can be far more subconscious, more subliminal, but audio doesn't have the immediacy of the sense of sight.'

Industrial music as an autonomous artistic putsch effectively sputtered to a halt around 1982, and bears very little resemblance to the music style calling itself 'industrial' that emerged later that decade and continues to be flogged like a dead horse. But the short-lived movement has had a phenomenal impact on the electronic music we take for granted twenty years later. Its impact on young British musicians, artists, designers and music journalists at the time was integral in the development of a better understanding and appreciation of experimental music and underground culture in general; its use of sampling techniques and an untraditional approach to composition, along with the integration of new technology to do so, is a practice that has continued. You can hear its legacy in the soundscapes of artists like Coldcut, Jeff Mills, DJ Krush, Optical, Little Nobody, Steve Law, Aphex Twin, Black Lung, Atari Teenage Riot and Voiteck.

Many of industrial's principle protagonists also helped to develop techno in its formative stages, and some still continue to make vital contributions. Although Throbbing Gristle split in 1981, founding member Genesis P-Orridge went on to form Psychic TV just as his cohorts Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson formed Chris & Cosey. Cabaret Voltaire, while still ostensibly together 25 years after they were formed, has seen Richard Kirk join up with Sheffield's Warp label to create some poignant electronic muzak albums and Stephen Mallinder now lives in Perth, moonlighting as a member of Sassi & Loco as well as the Ku-ling Brothers. Ollie Olsen, who was a member of pioneering local synthesiser outfit Whirlywirld in the late 70s then worked with experimental band Orchestra Of Skin & Bone in the first few years of the 1980s, went on to push the perimeters with No, found pop success with Max Q, and set himself up as one of Melbourne's first purist techno musicians as Third Eye; these days he still produces electronic sounds, he DJs around the traps, and he runs Psy-Harmonics.

So what exactly is this music we call techno as the new millennium kicks into gear? It's a hybrid creature, a fusion of influences and interests, ideas and ideals, that has no specific original source; in its time it's drawn upon previous movements such as industrial, hip hop, house, funk, disco, soul, blues, punk, rock, salsa and Dada. It's been influenced not just by the cerebral experimental studio work crafted from the 1940s through to the 1960s, but also by B-grade 50s sci-fi film soundtracks. Meaningful monologues from "The Twilight Zone" sit comfortably beside news broadcasts appropriated from CNN; inane vocal samples are shaped to become just as pivotal a part of the music as the TB-303 bassline beneath.

Contemporary electronic music is a realm in which culture, politics, history, entertainment, humour and technology can all sit alongside literally hundreds of diverse musical influences jammed together to create the whole; it takes stock from the world we live in and flashbacks to the past in order to create a new and ever-changing futurist entity. It's electronic music that derives its sounds from machines and its ideas from the environment, and it has the potential to restrict itself less than any other musical style in history.

Amen to that.

[ g r a p h i c s . b a s e d . v e r s i o n ]