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Does techno have signifiers?

I wrote yesterday about this as a genre “largely lacking identifiable signifiers which demand to be read”. I spent this afternoon wondering what exactly I meant by that. Consider this track I’ve had stuck in my head for the last few days. It would seem problematic to describe this as a sequence of sonic events, entirely lacking in signifiers. Indeed I realised the thing which lodged this in my unconscious was the chants which are sampled in the backing track.

These are a signifier which the track, hymn, finds itself named after. But they don’t demand to be read. I’m not hearing these and wondering what Charlotte de Witte intended to communicate through them. I’m not reflecting on what they provoke in me as a listener and why. They are mysterious but they are not enigmatic in the Laplanchean sense. It’s not a signifier which carries a surplus dimly sensed just beyond the threshold of consciousness. It just is what it is. It means whatever it means. It provokes whatever it provokes. Its power comes from how it is layered, a moment of signification amidst a ceaseless parade of sonic events. It’s a signifier which is enrolled into a sonic assemblage in which the doing it contributes to swamps its own capacity for signification. Its put to work through repetition as a sonic element rather than left to find its own place within the articulation.

This is music in which the signifier is dethroned. Not obliterated in the manner which, say, breakcore aspires to. The aspiration to break the signifier is the mirror image of its fetishisation. You don’t celebrate the fragmentation unless you feel oppressed by the unity. The role of the signifier in techno is something far more straightforward. It doesn’t give a shit about the signifier. If it’s relevant then it will be enrolled in the sonic assemblage and if it isn’t then it won’t be. It isn’t music which destroys meaning, a gesture in which I’ve always found a perverse depth of meta-meaning, but rather music which is unmoved by meaning. For someone who has spent their entire life in thrall to the signifier, the sudden demonstration that you can just shrug in the face of it is really rather powerful.

(Note that my response to experiencing music which escaped signification was to rapidly cobble together my own ontology of techno. My psyche refused to sustain the shrug 🤷)

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