What’s the Difference Between Techno and EDM?

Michigan hosted two of the most noteworthy electronic music festivals this year. Movement, in Detroit back in May, and Electric Forest, in Rothbury just a few weeks ago. This year’s Electric Forest continues to make headlines, from an unfortunate incident where an infant was found dead in a porta-pottie, but it’s also sparked a new cultural question from outsiders.

What, exactly, is the difference between techno and EDM (Electronic Dance Music)? Are they basically the same thing?

There is, actually, a massive difference between the two. Yet it has less to do with the acoustic specificities of the genres and more to do with their respective cultural heritages and the current groups that populate each scene.

Yes, it’s all electronic music—but that’s an incredibly broad genre, especially today when even the most normie pop songs are electronically produced. But there are a lot of specific nuances when you start to break it down.

Techno is a more specific musical genre, originating in Detroit in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Local musicians, inspired by European synthesizer tunes made by groups such as Kraftwerk, pushed past the limits of Motown soul and forged a new sound altogether.

In techno, wide arrays of drum machines, synthesizers, and sequencers come together to form grinding, rhythmic, repetitive beats. With faster paces, ranging from 120 to 150 beats per minute, techno is a genre for long—often stimulant fueled—dance sessions lasting well into the early morning.

While it still finds its home in Detroit, techno has since spanned the globe, with extraordinary international popularity. Techno festivals and clubs are rampant in Europe and widely considered to be on the cutting edge.

Techno is fairly elitist in terms of cultural cache. The staunchest adherents wear all black, understated fits, trying very hard to look like they, in fact, don’t really care. The most famous techno club in Berlin, Berghain, is known for its strict door policy, with entry lines lasting hours and bouncers refusing scores of people entry for fear they’ll harsh the vibe.

EDM, on the other hand, is a loose term encompassing the broad genre of electronic music coming out of the American dubstep scene in the early 2010s.

Dubstep, which emerged from the U.K. drum and bass scene in the 2000s, suddenly burst onto the American landscape in the peak millennial era, spawning shows and festivals in nearly every major city.

Characterized by intense wobbling bass drops, highly produced vocals, and more emphasis on melody than rhythm, the popularity of dubstep started a cultural surge for electronic music altogether.

Yet, dubstep itself peaked fast in terms of cultural presence. It proved too sincere for an American audience largely shifting towards aesthetics that signaled post-ironic cool.

Quickly, the phrase EDM emerged in its stead, a broader term encompassing other electronic music genres that dubstep started to merge with and fade into. House music, coming out of Chicago in the ‘80s, for example, began to have an increasing prevalence within the scene.

EDM fans don’t wear all black and generally aren’t as fixated with posturing themselves towards coolness. At the big EDM festivals like Electric Forest, the vibe is way more hippy, crazy colorful garish outfits, tie dye shirts and such.

At techno shows, the lights are usually spotlights and neon tubes, lights displayed bare to simply decorate the space. Techno shows are known for happening in warehouses, basements, brutalist concrete spaces and the like. There’s an embrace of raw materiality, a synthesis of form and function.

Techno is heavily post-modern, where the sounds on the track and the aesthetics of the spaces are divorced from any broader meaning beyond their acoustic intonation and physical form.

At EDM shows, the lights are often constructed into symbolic forms, giant heads, mushrooms, trees, and beasts. EDM festivals happen in the woods, like in Rothbury, and tend towards a more naturalistic sensibility.

EDM is heavily symbolic, with meaning imbued in the melodic tunes and vocals, and the natural spaces its adherents prefer.

In a nutshell, EDM is for seekers, people looking for meaning. Techno is for those who’ve either given up on finding it, or already found it within themselves.

You see this in the drugs most popular in each scene too. At Electric Forest, it’s all mushrooms, LSD, molly, and weed. Substances you take to try to discover something new, to dig at the meaning of it all.

At techno shows, it’s all Adderall, nicotine, and methamphetamine. Chemicals to help you dance intensely until the sunrise. Ketamine, too, for those who’ve really given up on finding meaning and prefer to dissociate from it all.

The thing is, the techno crowd is definitely “cooler” than the EDM crowd. There’s a Nietzschean embrace of post-modern man’s situation, where we’re now bereft of the broader cultural, historical, and religious sensibilities that formed the West and must build up our own purpose from within.

The EDM scene is seen as decidedly less cool. Too filled with wooks, as they’re known. The most dedicated, permanently intoxicated, often dreadlocked class of festival goers.

There’s some overlap between the two, of course, but by and large they represent two different cultural groupings: Techno for America A, the well-connected, educated, cultural elite benefitting from globalization, and EDM for America B, the working class largely left behind by our cultural and economic shifts.

The beauty of America, of course, is you can choose which one you like. There’s no state-sponsored music, no cultural dictate from the politburo that EDM is patriotic, and techno is bourgeois.

You’re free to listen to whatever you’d like and go to the festival you choose. But don’t expect to get into the warehouse techno show wearing a drug rug, smelling like weed. You’ll need a sharp black T-shirt and a haircut instead.