High Fidelity: Icicle’s 5 Most Influential Techno Tracks

The presence and influence of techno music has been pretty much omnipresent over club music of late as a slew of producers seemed to crawl out of the post-everything quagmire and found these heavy, wooded 4x4 kick drums to latch onto. Alongside illustrating, in part, that cyclical nature of the hardcore continuum (the idea that essentially British dance music will always repeat itself and feast on its own history, eventually), the fact that people are turning to a dancefloor music with such rich history isn’t at all surprising. You could probably forsake all new musics and simply crawl backwards through discogs for a good year and a half and still find new and exciting techno records. With that heavy on our minds we asked the razor edged producer, Icicle, a staunch and vocal supporter of techno, to turn us onto five of his most influential records ahead of his live performance in Room One at Rinse FM’s Easter party here on Thursday 28th March. 1. Jeff Mills - The Bells “It’s just my standard first pick when anyone’s talking about influential techno. It's the first track I can remember standing out for me when I was a kid raver and it is just wonderfully simple, hard and raw but still has some sort of soul. An ethos I've always tried to live up to in the studio.” 2. F.U.S.E. - Substance Abuse “Taken from the album Dimension Intrusion on Warp. FUSE is Richie Hawtin btw. Released around ‘93 this is just perfect acid… I love the bleeps and the drum computers used. The sound is still as relevant as it ever was I think.” 3. Photek - Glamourama “Maybe not as much of a life changing classic as the first two, this track was my favourite on Photek's Solaris album. I think when I picked this up a couple of years after it was released and at that time, I was paying a lot more attention to d&b than techno. This reminded me how much a loud kick excites me!” 4. Shed - EQD 001A “A little more modern once again! Shed! He's been a big influence one me for the last couple of years. He's very versatile and his music ranges from dark drive-y techno to house and broken electronica. His music always has a uniquely human touch, but still sounds very distant as well, and I love that.” 5. Blawan - Breathe Them Knees In “And finally, here in the present, I think that Blawan is one of my favourite producers. Dark and dusty; hollow and droning. When I hear the thump of his kicks I get a very special and indescribable feeling, like I wanna go out and buy two massive subwoofers and wear them on my head like headphones until my eardrums burst!” Catch Icicle performing live in Room One at Rinse FM on Thursday 28th March.