Dance

The Museum of Modern Electronic Music is a new place tucked into a S-Bahn station just by Katarinakirche.  It's not big; it's pretty new; it's known as MOMEM; it claims it's not a museum but an art and cultural centre.  Here in Frankfurt, a centre of this music.  It was my last outing before the flight home.  It has a series of sessions, DJ workshops or academic discussions, but not this day and probably not in English anyway.  There was a display of the birth of techno ('70s/'80s) and the early interactions between Berlin and Afro-American Detroit.  There was another of "Milestones", the top historical techno hits as identified by a series of working DJs.  The list is updated with visitor recommendations and it can be heard as a playlist on Spotify.  In person, it's an array of headphones , one for each hit, and accompanying pics of party-goers of this scene; all very sexy, very earthy and sweaty.  There's a small display of digital instruments of the era but behind glass, Moog synths and Roland drum machines and the like.  My first encounters with synths were '70s Mini Moog and Arp Odyssey and neither made an appearance.  Techno was slightly later; mainly from the '80s.  There was a screen with drum machine and sequencer apps and that was fun.  My invention was a 4-bar loop on the alt scale.  The most fun was an area where you could play with small physical machines of this style with your own private headphone.  The Boss DR-3 was my favourite: so easy to use and with great samples and grooves although maybe for the newbies rather than the aficionadoes.   This is techno and related dance musics, which is a subset of the broader genre of electronic music.  It was not a big visit (MOMEM is new and perhaps has a limited audience) but a bit of fun to round off the trip and to delay that dreaded return flight.

The Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM) is in Frankfurt.