It’s to a weekend years ago at Berghain that I owe my love for minimal techno: The weekend that, delirious but lucid, I was first swept along in those intense, hypnotic sounds to which, in the darkness, the thousandfold revelers around me, naked or in fetish gear, were oscillating their tattooed limbs.

I had spent my initial hours in that bedlam building panicking. Inadvertently, I had taken a dose of psilocybin and gone on an intense trip in this most insanely trip-uncongenial of settings. Eventually, it was morning, and the crowd had thinned out, as Dasha Rush in the main room played a set of hypnotic techno, I was finally placid enough to absorb the music properly.

The bare, pounding, kick drum pulse sounded steady and alone, drawing in your ear to its heartbeat periodicity. Gradually, over this, an explosive, filtered noise was resounding, once every six beats. The huge noise’s rich, resonant decay flowed slowly out, hissing and tidal, to submerge the hall, fusing one’s body to the expanse of teeming nothingness.

I Shazamed the track: “Lustration Six” by Mike Parker.

As in much of modernist music, everything recognizably musical was stripped away: no melody, no harmony, no verse or chorus or formal structure, nothing that could contain or pin down the fluid rush of the sound itself, which poured all over us like intoxicating wine. Techno’s goal, achieved through extreme repetition, seemed to be to strip away everything historically determined—in other words, sullied by having been assigned an identity—and to let sound resound in its true voracious anonymity, its core nothingness, unconstrained by musical forms.

After a while, I leaned back against the latticework barrier spanning the back of Berghain’s dancefloor. Behind me was a fall of twenty meters down to the concrete ground level. I arched my head up. Red laser lights were making slow sweeps, flickering and configuring into polygons. Then, at once, the laser lights turned blue. And the room, too, full of dry ice, turned blue. Staring at the boundless, floating blue, I had the sense of my individuality evaporating. I was united with the blue and with the droning bass, pouring out of myself through my eyes, pouring out of myself through my ears, becoming the faint scintillations, becoming the space between things, becoming the radiant nothing.

It felt like the experience I had once at Tate Modern before a Rothko canvas, when, having stared at it for half an hour, I abruptly found myself become the canvas; since, for your vision and your audition, there is no absolute frame of reference, no changeless object, only continually ongoing becoming and annihilation. It briefly shows you that a universe subsists outside your body, with which, through the artwork or music, transcending beyond the boundaries of personhood, you can be united.

All of which is very highflying, indeed. And all of which disappeared, like a dream broken by a slap in the face, the moment I shakily stepped back outside that old Soviet power plant.

Back then, the ubiquitous form of club techno was minimal techno. When a harder version of techno appeared in the early 1990s, with stripped-back tracks like Marc Trauner’s “We Have Arrived” and European industrial influences from the likes of Belgium’s R&S Records, its guiding principle was reduction. Stripping away melodies, stripping away harmonies, stripping away verse and chorus meant that, in principle, electronic sound itself might determine its own forms, wild and untamed. Sonically, it was far from early techno—YMO’s sleek whimsy and Cybotron’s cold funk.

As I saw it, this reductionist, less-than principle paradoxically created not impoverishment, but excess. What we might call constitutional inadequacy—the way in which the stable ‘macro’ of the musical note becomes incapable of containing the wild teeming ‘micro’ of frequential noise—opens the ear to a wider reality of sound, beyond the bounds of historically dead models, as natural as corrosion on walls or rust on metal.

A long time after that initial experience of melding into his “Lustration Six” at Berghain, I reached out to Mike Parker to ask him about his music. I had learned that he produced his tracks exclusively on a set-up of hardware synthesizers and, that he taught fine art and was a painter based in Buffalo, New York. I wanted to learn more about the guiding principles behind his brand of minimal techno, which, innovating on the template initially developed by Robert Hood, pushed it towards the arcane.

I started by asking Parker what he called his type of techno. Some had come to call it hypnotic techno; how did he feel about that name? “I don’t object to the term,” Parker replied, “but I don’t really like it all that much either, and I wish we had a better way to describe it.”

The epithet ‘hypnotic’ was meant to express that aspect of the music that seemed designed to slip around and bewitch our cognitive categories. In terms of meter and rhythm, tracks by Parker (and those of producers like Takaaki Itoh, Rrose, Donato Dozzy and Planetary Assault Systems) often aren’t in a usual 4/4 meter, but are instead in, say, 6/4 or 5/4. Or, if they are in 4/4, they might be characterized by a repeated arpeggio motif sounding in triple time over the four, creating recursive, undulating textures (as in Takaaki Itoh’s track “Warbler”).

The layering of foursquare meter and syncopated rhythmic figure generates a play of pulsation, an urge to and incapacity to complete itself. For me, it recalled abstract visual art—Bridget Riley’s Op Art or Paul Klee’s modernist constructivism. Did Parker think of his music in these terms? “Paul Klee came from a musical family and music was important to him throughout his career,” he replied. “For me, it is only natural for an artist to be involved in multiple artistic disciplines and practices. The parallels you suggest might be described as ‘Undulating Frequencies.’”

Parker has described his desire as a producer to create as much as possible with only a few elements—the classic minimalist ethos. One example among many is his beautiful 2001 track “Reduction,” recently rereleased in a remastered version. As a techno artist, what could he achieve through reduction? His answer was appropriately minimal: “By reducing the number of sounds used to create a track, I attempt to make each element significant.” I realized that, in this regard, through letting each sound breathe its own air, the music appeals to something we crave: quietness and simplification. Reduction to the essentials is an effective way of quietening the overwhelming noise of everyday life—a purification (which is, of course, contrary to the clichés of techno clubs as being all about corruption).

I mentioned to Parker my experience at Berghain when I heard Dasha Rush play “Lustration Six.” On that track, as elsewhere, his techno style is full of sounds that are often too fast, too small, too granular to grasp—a positive thing, because through this, the music opens a liberating zone in which the listener is freed from the oppressive everyday scale of the outside world. I asked him how much he thinks about this effect for the listener on the dancefloor when he’s creating tracks. “Working in techno is a way for a single person to orchestrate a really big, immersive, time-based experience using only a small amount of equipment,” he replied. “I agree that listening to it on a proper sound system can make it a catalyst for liberation, like standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. At least, I hope that my music invokes scale and an experience of transcendence.”

Drawing the interview to a close, I asked about what techno meant to Parker. Did he identify with the early creators of synthetic electronic music, such as Stockhausen, who thought that the music enabled us to re-access that primordial state where we could generate sounds for which there are as yet no names? “I agree with Stockhausen,” he said. “I have always been attracted to synthesized sounds because they present themselves as being outside of the natural world.”

Our world, though, is one of grit and stone and everyday chaos. At the time of our interview, Parker’s house in Buffalo had just been damaged in a catastrophic blizzard. “The Anthropocene has created some really bad environmental problems,” he said when I asked whether, for him, techno retained a utopian force, “and I wish I had the foresight to answer your question in a meaningful way. Techno as an art form is still evolving. If not utopian, it still has the potential to be otherworldly.”

I had, indeed, experienced techno as otherworldly that night at Berghain. And I was to do so again when I heard Robert Hood, the founder of minimal techno, play there on a summer evening years later.

In the early 1990s, after they had left the Detroit act, Underground Resistance, it was Robert Hood and Jeff Mills who explored reduction in techno with the most rigor and inventiveness. “Rhythms inside of rhythms inside of rhythms… that you would perceive only after listening a while,” is how Hood explained his aim when developing what came to be known as minimal techno. “Real trance music, hypnotic, drawing you in.” Aside from its musicality, Hood’s music was historically significant for Berlin as the main stylistic influence on Berghain’s in-house techno artists (under the Ostgut moniker). Without Hood’s album, Minimal Nation (1994), there would have been no Ben Klock or Marcel Dettmann.

In minimal techno, familiar musical elements are defamiliarized through ad nauseum repetition. A well-defined melodic figure will be repeated at length with careful micro-modifications while, in a polyphonic manner, other figures subtly well up and fade out. In “Ride,” which is based on two simple, simultaneous, melodic lines, each line’s litheness stresses the empty space through which it passes: Space is created by the energetic line flashing briefly across it, where it is as much about absence as presence. In “Station Rider E,” parsimony is the watchword. Only what is absolutely necessary is included and everything extraneous is rejected. In this music, what at first appears austere through repetition reveals itself as rich.

Hood’s most famous track is “Minus” (1994). Over a four/four pulse, the placement of a triple-time, minor-key ostinato creates an interminable effort to resolve. That constitutional inadequacy is its energetic engine, opening our ear, beyond the surface features, to teeming micro-activity in the shadows underneath. “Minus” struck me as techno become almost nothing, artistically comparable, as I’ve said, to the modernist painterly abstraction of Klee and Kandinsky, an auditory canvas reduced to lines and points. (It is notable that, before becoming a professional techno artist, Hood was a graphic designer, just as Parker is a painter.)

Hood’s was a music whose working and reworking of elementary tonal loops towards an end unforeseeable in advance has kinship with Paul Klee’s careful working and reworking in painting of elementary forms (circles, squares). Repetition signals the energetic trace of a point in motion: a dot moving becoming a line, a line ever expanding, a creative genesis releasing us briefly from the mundane. “Becoming is more important than being,” Klee said, speaking of his conception of the painted canvas in terms of dynamic genesis:

This fate of boundness should not deter us from knowing that our existence could also be different, that there are regions where other laws are in force, and that we must find new symbols for these laws to reflect their more fluid mobility and more moveable localities.

Everything was stripped away in a liberating manner to reveal what lay underneath. Plus and minus, a dot and a line: In Hood’s minimal techno, in dark club spaces, a melee of creative energy sweeps up from reduction to the molecular scale.

The music’s reductiveness, too, seemed to be reflected in Berlin’s clubgoers and how they dressed. Among queers and bohemians and marginalized people, minimal techno affirms not fitting in, affirms constitutional inadequacy, affirms the wild micro over the stable macro. This occurs through immersive darkness and delirious repetition. Here, you can evade the tyrannical Cartesian searchlight of the everyday world. As an aesthetic, much of this went back to Hood’s music.

“Now, the real Klubnacht begins,” said my friend beside me. Dressed in a pink t-shirt with a gym-toned body, he was one of the regular Berghain faces I’d gotten to know recently, and he had noticed Hood entering the DJ box. Through the combination of immense architecture, dim light, ancient-looking grey walls, hundreds of bodies, and the intense anticipation for this high priest of techno to begin, Berghain’s main room took on the dramatic quality of a temple during some sacred festival. Given Hood was a pastor, the comparison wasn’t inapt, I thought.

From my vantage on a bollard by the darkrooms, I could see a hush fall over the hundreds of expectant faces as this don of Detroit techno appeared in the booth. Then, instantaneously, like flicking a switch, once Hood dropped the beat, the crowd exploded in raptures of sweat and cries and raised hands.

Hood’s three-hour set leaned heavily at times towards Floorplan, his gospel house project. Floorplan’s other member, Hood’s daughter, sat silent and expressionless behind him through the three hours in the dark of the DJ box. But the standout moment was entirely singular, unlike anything else Hood played. It was the abovementioned track “Minus,” one of my favorite techno tracks.

“Minus” sounded spectacularly weird at Berghain. Its appearance was as if, through a clouded city night sky, that urban night of which YMO had sung, a UFO had silently appeared—a triangular UFO, since in its relentless motion of three pitches, there was something of a triangular form. “Minus” struck me as a bone fide artwork where the other tracks were just music. And, just like a UFO, after three minutes, it silently vanished, leaving you bewildered as to what the hell had just happened.

Surprisingly, “Minus” was too weird for most of the Berghain crowd. After a couple of minutes of its endless arpeggio, its Klee-like elementary iterations, people around me started talking.

The set rolled on to more conventional territory. We carried on dancing. But there remained, for me, a sense of wonder and of not quite knowing what had just happened. This is what techno does at its best, I thought: It opens up a space for the unrecognizable to pass through. To my right, behind a gay couple in an embrace, was a man wearing a t-shirt on which was written: “Black Joy is Revolutionary.” Seeing the DETROIT legend on my green belly top, he smiled, and I smiled back.