THE HISTORY OF TEKNO: FROM FREE PARTIES TO THE SOUND OF A GENERATION

If you listen to today, some tracks can sound almost primitive. Rough kicks, repetitive and tribal patterns, distorted percussion, screaming acid lines. But that's exactly what makes them so powerful. The reason this culture is so important to us is that it’s thanks to it that we became obsessed with electronic music and started producing our own sound more than 10 years ago.

Tekno wasn't built around polished productions or traditional music industry rules. It grew from rave culture, sound systems, DIY parties and a desire to create something outside the usual club circuit. To understand the sound, you have to understand the culture that came with it.

BEFORE TEKNO

The story starts before tekno itself, with the electronic music and rave movements of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Detroit techno, Chicago house, acid house and British rave culture all helped create the foundations. As the music became faster and harder, hardcore pushed the kick further into the foreground. Distortion became a real part of the sound!

At the same time, parties were moving away from traditional clubs. Warehouses, abandoned buildings and outdoor locations became places where people could build their own events.

And this is where the sound system became so important.

THE SOUND SYSTEM

A sound system wasn't just a big stack of speakers. It was the centre of the party.

A crew would bring the equipment, find a location, set everything up and create the event themselves. No club was needed. No conventional promoter was needed either.If you've ever been involved in organizing a free party, you know it's a massive amount of work

That physical relationship with the sound explains a lot about old school tekno. A kick didn't need to sound perfect in headphones. The music was made for that environment. It had to work for hours, at high volume, through a huge system surrounded by people.

SPIRAL TRIBE AND THE FRENCH FREE PARTY MOVEMENT

When talking about the history of free tekno, Spiral Tribe is impossible to ignore.

The British collective emerged around 1990 and became one of the most influential sound systems of the early free party movement. After the pressure on the British scene increased, members of Spiral Tribe travelled across Europe.

In 1993, they arrived in France and helped organise the first major French Teknival near Beauvais. This became an important moment for the French free party scene.

What they brought wasn't simply a particular sound. It was a way of doing things: travel, build a sound system, find a place, organise the party yourself and keep moving.The idea spread quickly.

HERETIK AND THE URBAN SIDE OF THE MOVEMENT

A few years later, Heretik became another major name in French sound system culture.

Created in Paris in the mid-1990s, the collective became known for taking the sound system mentality into unusual urban spaces. Their parties in places such as the Bercy freight station and the famous Molitor swimming pool became part of French rave history.

What makes this period interesting is that the sound system wasn't limited to a field somewhere in the countryside. The location became part of the experience : an abandoned industrial building, a swimming pool or an unexpected urban location could become a temporary rave space.

SO, WHAT ACTUALLY MAKES OLD SCHOOL TEKNO SOUND LIKE OLD SCHOOL TEKNO?

Listen to enough old records and you start noticing the same things.

The kicks are often rough and heavily processed. Percussion can be repetitive and almost hypnotic. . Sounds aren't always perfectly clean, and the production can feel much more physical than polished. And that's probably one of the biggest differences with a lot of modern electronic music.

Today, we have almost unlimited control. We can clean every frequency, perfectly shape every transient and make everything sound incredibly precise.

Machines like the Roland TR-909 and TR-808 became some of the building blocks of electronic music, while the TB-303 helped shape the acid side of the culture.

WHY WE CREATED OLD SCHOOL TEKNO?

Our love for this sound is exactly what pushed us to create OLD SCHOOL TEKNO SAMPLE PACK (VOL.1)

We didn't want to make another generic "retro" sample pack and throw some distortion on everything.

We wanted to capture the hard side of the music that made us fall in love with it in the first place: the free parties, the sound systems, the tribe atmosphere, the dirty kicks, the hypnotic loops and that slightly unpredictable character you get from old hardware and rough processing.

At the same time, we wanted the sounds to be useful today.

That's why a large portion of the sounds in this pack were created on our machines and then carefully reprocessed using modern tools.

We've been working for months to bring you the best collection of old-school tekno sample pack online. If you're a producer of tekno, tribe, acid, or mental, this is the pack you'll want to add to your library.

→ DISCOVER OLD SCHOOL TEKNO 

KEEP THE SOUND MOVING

Tekno has changed a lot since those first free parties and travelling sound systems.

The technology changed. The styles changed. The scene grew, split, evolved and reinvented itself. And that's for the best! There are so many contemporary artists we love who are doing justice to these styles, while older acts like Spiral Tribe keep the music alive.

If you're making tekno, tribe, acidcore, mental, hard techno or anything somewhere around that world, we hope it gives you something useful to work with.

Keep it raw. Keep experimenting. And make it yours.