The cult electronic project Techniques Berlin is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. In a discussion with Dave Rout, we explore the band’s legacy as they prepare to perform in Warsaw during the Vieux Crâne Francophone Festival
JOANNA D’ARK: On March 29th, you will perform with Techniques Berlin at the Vieux Crâne festival in Warsaw. We are thrilled to hear this news! What motivated your decision to come to Poland, and what have you prepared for us?
DAVE ROUT: We are very excited to be playing Poland for the first time! After our show at Gothic Pogo in Leipzig last year, we were approached by a few people who were interested in having us come back to Europe. I think they were surprised we were still performing after 40 years!
Julianna from Vieux Crâne was there and messaged asking us if we were interested in playing the festival. We’ve never been to Poland, and the timing worked, so we said yes! We’ll be performing songs from our current set, but we’ve added a “Warsaw only” surprise. Andreas looks after the streaming for the band, and he looked into the most popular songs from our Polish listeners, and as it happens, one is a track we wrote way back in 1987, but we’re never performed live. So we’ll be playing it for the first time ever!
You are coming to Poland to the occasion of International Francophone Day. How is this holiday celebrated in Canada?
Canada is an officially bilingual country and 20% claim French as a first language, so it’s celebrated all over the country. Here in Toronto, Alliance Française puts on a “French films marathon for the “Semaine de la francophonie de Toronto” in March. Andreas and I were both born in Montreal, and we both speak conversational French, so it’s a great fit.
This year, you are celebrating 40 years of existence, and it’s fantastic that we will be able to celebrate this anniversary with you. There was a time though, when you stepped away from the music scene, but you made a comeback with the outstanding album „Suburban Playgrounds And Concrete Beaches.” What inspired you to return in 2000, and how has the musical landscape evolved since your original formation in the 1980s?
We took a break in 1991, as more guitar oriented music was happening, and the music scene was changing, as it always does. We took the time to work on other projects like !Bang Elektronika, my EBM project that I started in 1986 and Andreas joined in 1991. We played quite a few gigs here in Toronto and the „Aktivierung” CD was released in Germany.
We were also both involved in a lot of our own solo/side projects which kept us busy for those years. Andreas and I were drummers in local Toronto industrial/EBM band Digital Poodle from 1990–1995. In 2008, Andreas had remastered 10 tracks and sent them to internet radio stations which then added these to their playlists.
As these tracks started to become popular there was a renewed interest in the band. Andreas also worked hard and pulled together the vinyl for Fabrika Records in 2012. It seems that we were doing “minimal synth” but we were calling it “new wave” for all those decades lol!
We decided to start doing live performances again after that record came out, and the first one was in Montreal in 2013, in an illegal after hours space that had a special wall that could hide the bar if the police came. A fan actually flew in from France to see us play that show, which was crazy ! After that we never looked back and have been performing ever since.
Many years have passed since the project was founded. How has your perspective on music changed during that time?
The musical landscape has definitely changed since we formed in 1985. The way in which the music is created, the people who create it, and the way it’s consumed. When we performed back in the 80s, we would bring multiple synthesizers and drum machines, and sequencers that used floppy disks (!), and hope that nothing crashed!
One thing that never changed however, was how Andreas and I approach the live aspect of the performances. Andreas still sings completely live with no backup vocal track, and both us play as many synth parts as we can live. We can change the order of the songs, nothing is 100% locked in. We don’t stand around & watch the machines do all the work!
It’s also fantastic to see such a diverse range of people and cultures shaping the scene now as well. The different influences coming in from everywhere has definitely changed things for the better, you never know what to expect next, which is amazing!
Last year, you also released a great album, „The Language of Machines,” which is a collection of original recordings from 1985-1991, featuring hits like „Metropolis” and „Watching You,” as well as several unreleased tracks/versions. Can you share a bit about this release?
Thank you! We are very proud of this release. César Moscoso from Mecanica Records approached us about doing it. We already had a relationship with him, as he released the !Bang Elektronika 12” of „Aktivierung!” on Mecanica in 2021. We always felt we wanted a proper release of our older material, since Andreas and I had hundreds of songs in the archives.
Mecanica Records is a fantastic label, and it’s in Poland as well! César did such a fantastic job on the Aktivierung! 12” that we were very excited to work with him again. César was a very good “filter” for us, and also a great help; right up to choosing the final tracklist.
One other thing I would be remiss if I skipped it, is the artwork for that release. It’s from a local collage artist here in Toronto, Monique Vettraino. She’s incredibly talented, and when I came across her IG page, I knew right away that I wanted her to be involved, and I think César and her really did an amazing job with it. It’s just as important as the music, as I think it really gives a romanticized feel that really takes it from the past and brings it to the current!
It seems that in recent years, there has been a resurgence of nostalgia for new wave, synthpop, and minimal synth music with a retro analog sound. This trend appears to be gaining recognition among younger generations. Do you observe it by how your music is received today?
Absolutely. Most of our fans are much younger than we are, some not even born when we started the band! Although I hate using genres, we were fortunate that minimal wave/minimal synth has such a strong international community, and the intersection of it with goth/dark wave etc has brought on so many new young people to not only listen to it, but to also start new bands themselves!
Your songs are incredibly addictive. I find myself listening to Love via Computer on repeat ( which by the way seems to have predicted dating apps back in the 80s), along with tracks like Just One Look or Metropolis, which capture the essence of what was best on the scene four decades ago. You are undoubtedly on par with the bands that inspired you, such as Men Without Hats and the early Trans-X.
Thank you so much for the kind words! Love via Computer is now our most popular track with over a million streams ! It’s always fun explaining that song to younger people who don’t know what “video” or “computer” dating was! I have to give credit to Andreas for being so prescient on that. When we wrote it in 1987, I told him at the time that I thought Metropolis was going to be our “hit”. He said that he thought there was something special about LvC and he was right all along!
Computer Assisted Dating actually existed back then and was far from anything we know today. Andreas’ lyrics came from a cynicism about it as he felt this was just another symptom of the 80’s mantra to strive for absolute perfection. All the advertising stressed having a perfect home, a perfect car, perfect teeth… perfect everything that all seemed 100% fake. Having said all that, Andreas met his life partner on a dating app 30 years after we wrote that song!
As for being on par with other bands, once again, that’s very kind ! I don’t think we ever thought that we were on par, we just wanted to make music that we weren’t hearing enough of. Although we both have very similar influences, we also have very different ones. We both listened to bands like Men Without Hats, Trans-X, Kraftwerk (obviously!), Rational Youth, Ultravox, OMD, early Depeche Mode, Human League, Japan, Blancmange, but also Throbbing Gristle, Neubauten, Test Dept, Nitzer Ebb, and many more.
Andreas was into Joy Division, early Bowie and Roxy Music, glam rock, and Neue Deutsche Welle; along with all the synth related bands that inspired him. I was into Jamaican ska and reggae and 2Tone (!) along with the synth/EBM/industrial influences.
Those diverse musical points really made the band what it was, and still is today. The strangest thing for me was joining Rational Youth in 1997 and not only co-writing “The Goddess Electricity” LP, but going on tour and playing in Europe as part of the band. Being able to be part of one of my biggest influences was one of the most nerve-wracking things I ever did. I was so nervous to even think I could write at that level, and I am eternally grateful to Tracy Howe for that opportunity.
You’ve also released an excellent album in 2018 “Breathing” with notable tracks like Cold War or Hollow Graphic Haze. What is amazing is that even your newer songs have this touch of retro analog sound. Do you use old-school equipment in production? Your collection of analog stuff, such as the Korg KPR-77, stands out in your Facebook gallery.
Thank you! We were approached by Nadanna Records in Germany to do an album of brand new material. That was something that at first seemed very hard for us as we didn’t know if we’d just be repeating ourselves or would we be doing something new or both.
We decided to use all original analog gear, most of which we still owned since the 80s ! I brought my TR-808 and Pro One and a few other toys to Andreas’ studio, and we put them on the floor and just started writing. It came a lot faster than we thought it would and using the old gear to write music again felt as natural as it did back in the 80s. Andreas was using his old gear for his side projects and I was using it for my Datafreq tracks, so we were definitely still familiar with all of it.
It was also such an honour for us to have Tracy Howe singing backing vocals on Cold War, which was an obvious nod to Rational Youth! We also added a third member, Dina Naskos, who joined in 2013 when we started playing live again. Dina and I had a side project Colecovision from 2000–2002, and The Beautiful Spies from 2011–2015, so she was already familiar with electronic music. Dina played synthesizers, and we also discovered that her and Andreas were able to harmonize perfectly together, giving a lot of those tracks a lot more depth. She performed with The Beautiful Spies until 2019, playing shows with us as far away as Mexico City.
How does Toronto relate to Berlin in the context of your band? Where did the idea for the name „Techniques Berlin” originate? Is it inspired by history or the local music scene of the 80s?
We were both listening to a lot of European music and Andreas especially was very aware of Cold War and geopolitics of the time. So that influence was definitely there. We wrote Dancing to the fall of the Berlin Wall four years before it came down! We both can’t remember 100% where the name came from, but our first synth was a shitty Technics keyboard, so that’s the first half for sure.
Andreas would take our demo tape around to the few clubs that played new wave, and one of the DJs said the music sounded German. We changed Technics to Techniques to avoid copyright issues and we added Berlin. It just came to us organically like that. Or that’s how we remember it!
What are your future plans for Techniques Berlin? Can we expect some new releases?
To be honest, we’re still on a high from the “Language of Machines“ release and the Gothic Pogo and WGT Warm Up shows last year in Leipzig, and now our 40th anniversary show in Warsaw!
We wrote a new song Amy in 2023 for our friend Jorg Steinmeyer from Kernkrach Records for his vinyl compilation. That was our first new song in 7 years, and we wanted to go back to our DIY minimal synth roots, and we’re very happy with it. We played it live for the first time last year in Leipzig and it was received very well. As for more new music, or another album, we never sit down and try to deliberately write new music, it has to flow naturally. So we’ll just have to wait and see!
You’re very welcome and see you in Warsaw very soon!!!
Follow Techniques Berlin: Facebook
Vieux Crâne Festival: Facebook
