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Ranked list

The 10 Best Techno Albums

Techno as the four-four machine music that runs from Detroit outward: the Motor City and its second wave, Berlin's dub and reduction, minimal, the hard schools of Birmingham and Rotterdam, and everything hypnotic or industrial that came after. House, IDM and ambient are ranked on their own lists, and records that belong to those traditions were judged there. From 1990 to now.

For its first decade techno lived on twelve-inch singles and lived well. Albums were for other people. You pressed a track, the record shop took forty copies, a DJ played it at four in the morning and that was the whole transaction. Nobody in Detroit in 1990 was sitting down to write side two.

So the ones who did had to invent a reason. Robert Hood found it in repetition, Jeff Mills in speed, Carl Craig in harmony, Porter Ricks in water. Basic Channel never wrote an album at all and got one anyway, which is a problem the list below has to deal with rather than dodge. What unites these records is not that they are longer than a twelve-inch. It is that the length is the argument.

Detroit and Berlin do most of the work, and the British entries are what happens when Detroit's machinery reaches a city with worse weather and a grudge. A few very large names are missing. Some of them made their best work as a run of singles, some as a DJ, some as a label, and no amount of goodwill turns a career into an album.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Robert Hood — Minimal Nation1994

    № 40 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    One idea per track, followed until it gives something up. Hood removed the drama from techno and discovered the drama was never in the drama. Still the hardest thing in the genre to imitate, because there is nothing to hide behind.

    Why it is number one

    Axis, 1994. Hood had already helped build Underground Resistance's noise and militancy, then walked away from nearly all of it. What is left on Minimal Nation is a kick, a bassline, one moving part, and an hour that does not get boring, which on paper should be impossible. The trick is that nothing is decorative. Every element is load-bearing, so the smallest change lands like an event. Techno absorbed this so completely that the record now sounds like the genre's default setting rather than one man's severe idea about it. The 1994 pressing was tagged an EP and half the reissues since have called it an album; it runs to album length, works as one, and has been treated as one for thirty years.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Jeff Mills — Waveform Transmission Vol. 11993

    № 55 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Tresor's most punishing hour. Mills plays the drum machine like a transmitter, not an instrument, and never once slows down to help you. The speed and severity of nineties techno were set here and the decade spent itself catching up.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Basic Channel — BCD1995Collected works

    № 20 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Chords buried so deep in reverb they arrive as pressure rather than notes. It collects the twelve-inches instead of being written as an album, which is a real objection, but nothing else in this canon has been copied so often by so many people getting it so wrong.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Carl Craig — More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art1997

    № 56 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Craig spent his career insisting this music belonged next to jazz rather than beneath it. Here he stops insisting and does it, with harmonic movement almost nothing else at this tempo attempts, and without ever sounding like a producer showing off his range.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Model 500 — Deep Space1995

    № 54 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The man who named the music, proving three decades in that the futurism was a working method rather than a moment he happened to be present for. Still pointed at orbit, still swinging harder than a founder needs to.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Plastikman — Consumed1998

    № 117 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Hawtin turns the volume down and the record gets heavier. Long stretches where almost nothing happens and the almost is the whole point. One of the very few minimal albums that works at home without becoming furniture.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Underground Resistance — Interstellar Fugitives1998

    № 125 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Plain sleeve, no faces, and a position argued through sound rather than a press release. UR made techno a politics as much as a music, and this is where the collective states the case at full length.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Surgeon — Basictonalvocabulary1997

    № 130 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Birmingham answering Berlin: drier, harder, built by a man who performs live rather than assembles at home. British industrial techno stops being a local scene here and becomes a lineage.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Ricardo Villalobos — Alcachofa2003

    № 7 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Tracks that wander off for ten minutes and come back with something. Villalobos stretched what techno could get away with in length and looseness, and the decade of minimal that followed borrowed the length and missed the joke entirely.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Skee Mask — Pool2021

    № 44 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Two hours, no filler, and no interest in choosing between jungle, ambient, electro and techno. Müller works out of Munich with almost no public presence, and this is the most complete argument anyone has made for what the form can still absorb.

Eleven to twenty

Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Porter Ricks — Biokinetics1996

    № 102 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Hydrophones and harbour noise through Chain Reaction's reverb. Less an album than a body of water you are briefly inside.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Regis — Gymnastics1996

    № 140 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Downwards at its least welcoming. British industrial minimalism starts here and has never got friendlier.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Shed — Shedding the Past2008

    № 105 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Berghain-era techno with hardcore's ghosts still rattling around in it. Half a scene took notes.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Objekt — Cocoon Crush2018

    № 165 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Sound design at a level almost nobody reaches, and warmer than his reputation for precision suggests.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Sandwell District — Feed-Forward2010

    № 92 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    A collective delivering an album rather than a compilation, which was exactly the argument they were making.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Speedy J — Ginger1993

    № 71 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Rotterdam bluntness with an unusually light touch. Sits between the armchair and the floor and refuses to choose.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Marcel Dettmann — Dettmann II2013

    № 104 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    What Berghain sounds like when someone finally gets it onto a record. Austere, physical, in no hurry.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Donato Dozzy — Plays Bee Mask2013

    № 100 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    One synth piece by someone else, turned seven ways. Proof that techno minimalism could be devotional.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Beatrice Dillon — Workaround2020

    Dry, precise and completely unlike anything around it. The most genuinely new rhythmic thinking in recent techno.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Techno Albums

    Voices from the Lake — Voices from the Lake2012

    Donato Dozzy and Neel building one continuous piece out of field recordings and almost no drums for long stretches. Hypnotic techno's most complete album, and the record that made the style a destination rather than a tempo.

Near misses

Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.

How this list was built

Ten from 232 records considered, the largest field on the site. It took in everything tagged Detroit, minimal, dub, acid, hypnotic and industrial techno, from 1990 to last year, because a techno list drawn from a purist's corner of the genre would be settling the argument before it started.

BCD collects twelve-inch sides rather than being written as an album, and is ranked anyway. Basic Channel never made an album; the CD is the only form in which that music exists as a listening object, and a rule designed to keep out DJ mixes should not be used to delete a label's entire output. The same reasoning admits the Maurizio and Derrick May collections, both of which sit below rather than inside the ten. Minimal Nation was tagged an EP on its 1994 pressing and an album on most of what followed; the number one argument deals with that directly rather than leaving a reader to find it.

Every techno record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the techno genre page.

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