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Absolutely have to start with Basic Channel for dub techno. Mark Ernestus & Moritz Von Oswald were central (if not the central) figures of the start of Berlin’s techno culture in the early 90s. Absurdly influential, they’ve released many, many all-time classics.

Ernestus founded Hard Wax Records,, arguably the most famous/important record store of the techno world, and is credited with introducing Berlin to the Detroit techno artists - first importing their releases, later inviting them to perform their first German shows. A little later, Ernestus connected with Von Oswald and they started making their own music together under a variety of aliases, which they released on a series of labels/sublabels they distributed through Hard Wax, with Basic Channel as their main project/label. Several releases featured Detroit artists as remixers (including the overtly political Underground Resistance, who were somewhat vocal about their skepticism of European artists appropriating techno - UR contributing to one of their releases speaks to the respect BC earned from Detroit).

As BC took off, Hard Wax turned into more of a collective than a record store. Other Hard Wax employees started making their own music, notably, Vainquer and DJ Pete/Substance. (Vainquer was behind the one Maurizio record where BC wasn’t the primary artist). Vainquer and Substance started to make more music together (mostly as Scion), which became the foundation of Chain Reaction, the label BC used to release other artists’ stuff. (Substance & Vainquer had their own Hard Wax-affiliated label, Scion Versions). Ernestus and Von Oswald also founded Dubplates & Mastering, probably the most ubiquitous mastering studio of the techno world, which helped create this whole network of labels and artists directly connected to Hard Wax. Many other Hard Wax employees went on to become big names in the scene with their own Hardwax-connected labels (Marcel Dettmann, Shed, many others).

Ernestus and Hard Wax have also always had a big focus on (surprise) dub & reggae.

Hard to draw strict lines between their various projects, each had a certain flavor:

Basic Channel / Maurizio: their earliest stuff was split across these two labels, which Includes (probably) their most famous releases. A mix of harder, full-on warehouse stuff and more experimental/ambient-leaning stuff. The last core BC release came out in 94. They decided the project had run its course and shut it down, but the name continued to be used as an umbrella term for all of their related-projects. They continued releasing under Maurizio after shutting down BC - the later Maurizio releases (the M-Series) are where I hear the genre sound starting to become more defined - less aggressive, stripped down, more introspective/lowkey.

Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix: Their most blatantly reggae-influenced releases. More "techno dub" than "dub techno" - good if you're into King Tubby/Lee Scratch Perry, etc., stuff.

Main Street Records: their "house" label. Despite being mostly known for techno, released a couple of the biggest house tracks of all time (especially “Round Two - New Day (club vocal mix)”). The "Round Three" release is where you start to hear the overtly Reggae-influenced sound that turned into Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix.

Chain Reaction: what they used to release stuff from other artists. On a similar level to their own releases in quality/influence. There’s a more "experimental" side (Vladislav Delay, Monolake), which led to new subgenres (like clicks&cuts, glitch) branching off. The other side, people like Porter Ricks, Fluxion, and Vainquer/Substance, led to today’s dub techno sound. Substance & Vainquer's label Scion Versions is closely related & also worth checking.

BC and the chain reaction artists as a whole would be considered the first generation of dub techno - there's more experimentation, less of a clearly defined genre, but everything that comes after can be traced back to BC and the Hard Wax community.

Rod Modell (Deepchord) and Stephen Hitchell (Intrusion/Soultek). Release together as CV313 and Echospace. They're a pillar of the second generation of dub techno - most of the calmer sound people associate the subgenre label with today can be traced back to them. You could say they belong to the Porter Ricks / Fluxion lineage. Their label "Echospace [Detroit]" is great, but a lot is vinyl-only (dub techno scene is known for having a vinyl fetish). While they'd been established for a while already, The Coldest Season album got a lot of praise when it was released and considerably raised their profile, which grew even more with Liumin.

Starting in the second half of the 90s, more people started moving away from the harder/faster styles tslowing and stripping things down, getting more introspective - I could write an essay about the sociopolitics and cultural history of that transition, but the superficial answer is that the genre (and listeners) started "maturing".

This was also when DAWS really started to enter the picture. Very dotcom era vibes, music reflecting an increasingly “digital” world. Basic channel was a big influence, both directly and indirectly: several of the chain reaction artists (Vladislav delay, monolake/robert henke) went off in more “experimental” directions and helped shape new subgenres like glitch /“clicks & cuts”. The label Mille Plateaux was central to that sound, the successor to Chain Reaction in a lot of ways, releasing a lot of the same artists.

On the Dancefloor-focused end, Microhouse and minimal (the genre) started to take shape (terms often used interchangeably to describe the sound because artists dabbled in both). Incorporated a lot of dub ideas, but punchier than the Echospace sound that people associate with the dub techno subgenre label now. Labels like force inc. music works (especially its sublabel Force Tracks - Mille Plateaux was also their sublabel) and Richie Hawtin’s label M_nus focused on the tech-y end of the sound - Theorem, Swayzak, and Stewart Walker were some of the main artists. The biggest club in Berlin in the 90s, Tresor (still one of the biggest today), had a “chill” area/room called Globus (Globus is to Tresor what Panorama Bar is to Berghain, basically). In a lot of ways you could call what they were doing the "globus" sound.

Another one of the people pioneering it was Wolfgang Voigt aka Mike Ink (as in one half of Burger/Ink - I’d call the Las Vegas album an early example of this style). One of his better projects was Gas - heavily dub-influenced but definitely its own thing. He was one of the founders of Kompakt, a label/distributor/record store that was one of the biggest labels of the 2000s and helped push a lot of this sound.

This is when I got into techno, so a lot of personal attachment to stuff from this time.

Context: “minimal techno” dominated most of the 2000s (semi-jokingly stylized as "mnml"), but my interpretation is that it entered a new stage in the mid-2000s, when Ricardo Villalobos and the second generation of artists on Richie Hawtin's label m_nus (like Troy Pierce, Ambivalent, Magda, Mathew Jonson) became the face of the scene.

There was a lot of self-consciousness at the time about saying you were into techno. Outside of Germany, vast majority of people just didn’t really know what actual techno was. To most, It was all tiesto and bad trance - techno wasn’t “serious” music. This was also the time of "indie-dance" or whatever shit (LCD soundsystem, etc.) and filter house (stuff like Justice, Ed Banger records): peak hipster-era shit that had limited connection to traditional techno culture (the “Detroit techno continuum”, if you will) - so people latched onto “minimal techno” as a descriptor for a range of stuff that was more tied to the 90s techno scene. (Or “berlin techno”, since it was one of very few places that had proper techno clubs or anything more than an extremely niche/small scene anymore - there were like 3-5 promoters doing events like this in NYC at the time, all very underground and very rarely at proper clubs).

All that had a big impact on the sound - sparse, introspective, very very stripped down, very long tracks. I wouldn’t call any of this dub techno, but Basic channel was a big influence. Later on, became a bit of a meme to make fun of "mnml" stuff by describing a Ricardo Villalobos track as a kick drum for 10-mins, but Villalobos released a lot of good stuff. His album Alcachofa is great (not available to stream anywhere though). The best thing I can find available is his Shackleton remix - very good, very trippy.

This was also the start of the Berghain era, when the Berghain mythos started spreading, which helped lay the groundwork for the scene's growth in the 2010s.

Here’s a list of stuff that would have been lumped together as “minimal” at the time.

CONTEXT: Around 2009-2010, techno’s popularity really started to take off again, in many ways directly tied to technology changing how people accessed the genre.

1990s, record stores were people’s point of entry. I’ve mentioned record stores elsewhere, like hardwax and kompakt - they had a massive influence on shaping tastes/determining what was cool. That also encouraged the development of distinct, location-based scenes that led to cities developing distinct sounds. Late 90s/early 2000s, many independent record stores were closing down and there weren’t as many spaces for people to discover the scene. Coincided with Crackdown on NYC’s club scene and scenes elsewhere. Main place for people to discuss/discover music became niche message boards.

Then mid-late 2000s, online music publications started to take off - pitchfork, which had its beats by the pound (?) column that exposed more people to “minimal”. Then resident advisor and its podcast series started to grow. This was also blog culture era-yea, you had the whole Justice/ed banger blog house moment, but there were a few minimal/techno focused ones like mnml ssgs and Little White Earbuds that became the entry point for a ton of people (including me) learning about the scene. their podcast series were responsible for introducing people to music, helped many artists’ careers take off, and had a huge influence on what was popular. Discogs was also in full swing, giving people access to an endless digging resource.

Then Facebook made it easier for people to learn about and organize events. It was pretty crazy how quickly the Number of people showing up to shows grew. the Noise scene kids started getting into it (LIES records, prurient/vatican shadow/hospital records, eventually PAN records) and bam, techno was cool again.

There was a whole generation of people who were discovering stuff from the 90s for the first time, and while there were definitely crews/labels/parties with their own sounds, people weren’t as fixated on subgenre labels - it felt like it was just house and techno. Along With the noise kids came a backlash against DAWS/digital production. The whole modular synth wave. raw/distorted/lo-fi sounds were big.

Again, not focused as much on release dates as the styles I associate with this time.

Context: By late 2010s, the scene started to explode in popularity. Clubs were opening everywhere in NYC, other cities had scenes that had grown quickly. With the growth, you started seeing the seeds of a backlash against people taking themselves too seriously. The sound was being pushed increasingly dark and aggressive, towards gabber-influenced "ravey" stuff. In the mid-2010s, people started with the whole fetish gear/BDSM thing to try to keep the normies out. They failed - as the darker stuff gained more and more popularity by the end of the 2010s, the fetish stuff got increasingly popular and became costume-y.

Then the pandemic hit. as people lost opportunity to tour, they turned to social media to stay relevant. this was the start of “Tik-tok techno” - algorithm-savvy people throwing up highly polished footage. suddenly the scene exploded in popularity. “Business techno”. people pushed the fast, dark, and ravey sound to the extreme, and techno had its brostep moment. When clubs re-opened, the people who had been in the scene for a while were shocked by the amount of interest in parties and the change in the crowd. The younger crowd's introduction to the scene was almost entirely through social media. There was an influx of people who had no prior connection to the community, and people who had been around were suddenly looking around at a bunch of strangers. everyone had used to know each other.

People also consumed music differently. Streaming platforms, social media, or Bandcamp were now the main points of entry. There was less focus on labels. people weren't learning through discogs. It was disorienting for a lot of us, but I'm of the opinion it was needed. There was too much of an "orthodoxy", too much of a standardized definition of what was good and "acceptable" to be into. People went in new directions, not all good, but it was new. I had taken a step back for a while (life changes, feeling of ennui in the scene, friends leaving during the pandemic) and I was astonished when I came back around. Nothing was familiar, and I'm still playing catch up/trying to make sense of it all.

The trendy end of the people who were involved in the pre-pandemic scene (the Bushwick/bed-stuy "they/them" crowd, if you will) started to go the opposite direction of the hard stuff - a hodgepodge of styles, but generally "dreamy" / playful. Labels like Kalahari Oyster Cult, Nous'Klaer audio were big on this sound. They book a lot of artists who release on those and similar labels. Priori is a fairly big figure in that world and incorporates a ton of different styles into his releases, but he has a lot of dubbed-out stuff. That scene is where you'll find most of the good, more laid back stuff these days and he's a good starting point, since he collabs with a lot of artists and has releases on a lot of different labels. I'll call this dreamy contemporary. In NYC club terms, this is the Nowadays sound (or sustain/release, a festival associated with this crowd).

Then you have the more straightforward, main line techno scene people: focus is more on punchier, early basic channel-style stuff. I'll call this "punchy contemporary dub": Fast enough to fit in with the newer "groove" sound, but not excessively so. Included some highlights from artists I'd group in that category. In NYC club terms, this is the Basement sound.