As a former resident of New York City (Brooklyn to be specific, and Bushwick-in-the-’80s if I’m trying to impress), there are any number of cultural events that only happen in New York. Some of them really make me miss the place (even as I recall that when you do live in NY, you’re often so busy you miss most of the cool-ass stuff). I’m definitely upset I missed Manuel Göttsching’s debut American performance of his amazing, proto-techno composition E2-E4 outdoors at Lincoln Center on August 15th of last year. A closer-up look of the end of the thing is here.

What’s awe-inspiring when you listen to E2-E4 is not that this guy was making techno in 1981 using synthesizers, a guitar and nothing else — but that the original was largely recorded live in a Berlin studio. The album was later played in legendary house/ techno spots like the Loft and the Garage, often in its entirety. Göttsching’s himself a bridge between psychedelia and techno, as he was the main force behind the mind-fuckingly great Ash Ra Tempel, whose 1971 debut is one of the best pieces of music to trance out to, ever. This connection was really brought home in the New York show, as they got the dude who used to do hippie light shows for the fabled Fillmore East to do projections onto the performance.

I love when people do things before a genre, or an easily understood setting for their art, even exists — from Alfred Jarry being a performance artist in 1896 to the Last Poets rapping in the early ’70s. We all dream about being ahead of our time, but so very few folks are, you know?    —Mike AKA DJ Yeti