Skip to main content

In Europe, when a musician named Paul Kalkbrenner releases three new songs, along with a trilogy of narrative videos – and together they make up a three-act narrative film – it's a pretty big deal. The music critics will mention them, fans will download and start remixing them; if you go dancing, you will hear all of them in club sets within the week. Here in North America this kind of thing – dance music for mixing – is still seen as slightly embarrassing, a druggy lifestyle rather than real music.

Kalkbrenner gets little press here, even from the "poptimists."

But he is actually a star, indeed even a movie star: He acted the lead role in the 2008 feature Berlin Calling, written and directed by Hannes Stohr, a film about a drugged-up Berlin techno DJ named Ickarus. All the music in the film was by Kalkbrenner. This movie was so culty in Germany that it ran continuously for several years in one Berlin cinema.

Kalkbrenner's artist cool cred is impossible to beat. He is for one thing of intellectual lineage: His mother, Carla Kalkbrenner, was a well-known East German broadcast journalist. Her father, Fritz Eisel, was a noted socialist-realist painter and muralist also in the communist DDR. Paul Kalkbrenner was for years a protégé of DJ/producer Ellen Allien on her BPitch Control label, which produced the archetypal severe Berlin techno sound. He is admired for "playing live," which means, in the obscure praxis of computer manipulation, that he is constituting his music on the fly, using his own loops and a program called Ableton, rather than just mixing pre-produced tracks. (I realize that is an infuriating distinction to someone who plays the guitar, but it does mean something.) Kalkbrenner can headline massive outdoor festivals and indeed does so in Ibiza and elsewhere.

And here lies the change. As I have been discussing in past weeks in this column, the giant dance music festivals are here now. But they are seen differently, by educated people at least: not as an expression of art or counterculture but as the cheesiest of corporate scams, as places where dumb thugs go to cruise and possibly drug party girls in glittering bikini tops.

A kind of noisier spring break. As a result of this mainstreaminization, the underground culture itself has had to change.

A case in point: the annual Burning Man festival, a famously anarchic and trance-friendly carnival in the middle of the Nevada desert, has just this week announced new "guidelines" for the giant dance-music-generating trucks: they must now be farther away from the centre of the temporary "city" and its art installations. Their speakers must face away, into the desert. The idea is to create a separate rave zone – something contrary, surely, to the laissez-faire Burning Man party spirit?

But the whole thing, and its speaker stacks, have just gotten too big.

Kalkbrenner himself has been evolving in musical style over the decades. His music has always been, though repetitive, lush and melodic, and he has moved consistently towards a more emotional sound. If there is one piece by Kalkbrenner that will sound familiar to you, it is probably Sky and Sand, an actual song, with words written and sung by his brother Fritz Kalkbrenner. It is a plaintive, melancholy song, with a disco beat, such a totally European tradition, that, an odd hybrid – especially since Fritz affects a Deep South African-American accent, who knows why, perhaps because they think the EDM genre demands it. It's a weird but affecting thing.

The new releases – part of an album called 7, whose official release is August 7 – are even more soulful. The first, Storm Rider, is pure gay-club uplifting vocal house: It uses a sample from a 1981 disco/R&B song called You're the One For Me, by D Train, and, it must be said, improves it, transforms it into a soaring sappy anthem. This is going to be blasted at Pride parades and at bro-stadiums alike.

The next video, Mothertrucker, uses more conventional minimal techno, and the third, Feed Your Head, is a clever remix of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, with the sampled vocals of Grace Slick. It too utterly transmogrifies the original; even the basic melody is changed. The electronic version is, perversely, softer and less threatening.

The narrative film part of this package is rather sentimental and so it doesn't interest me as much. But I am impressed by how huge a budget went into it. See: Everything in techno is bigger now.

Paul Kalkbrenner's response to the power of EDM has obviously been to embrace it. Others of his chain-smoking, pill-popping, dark-club clan have had the opposite reaction. Techno is now forced to make a choice: does it go emotional and soulful like this, or does it reject the stadium, angrily go even deeper underground, turning into the kind of industrial drone/noise that was worshipped at the recent Unsound Festival in Toronto?

It is honestly going in both ways, and the result will be, I think, that the darker and more off-putting side of it will suddenly reveal itself, to a now huge audience, to be not off-putting at all, just music.

Interact with The Globe