B12’s lengthy hiatus from 1998 onwards perhaps most succinctly sums up the point at which UK techno fractured into many different forms, when the original spirit of the music had either mutated or eroded away. “When we dropped out is when Aphex Twin was making this music that I didn’t really understand,” explains Rutter. “All that glitching and stuttering, and then Squarepusher came along and I thought, ‘I’m not into this and I can’t make this, maybe things have changed.’ We never said, ‘Let’s not do anything any more,’ but I definitely remember we were at a festival with Rob Mitchell, and Aphex Twin was playing, and I just saw everyone going bezerk to what sounded to me like a box of screws being shaken. Not to say it was shit, just to say I didn’t understand it. What I saw was a thousand people going bananas. It had all that energy and movement, and then I would listen to what I would do and it was just not the same thing.”

From that point, B12 delivered one last EP to Warp, 3EP, which by their own admission was an attempt to meet the evolving trend towards faster, more complex productions, before ceasing operations until Josh “Posthuman” Doherty dragged them out of retirement in 2007. It felt like a sign of the time when, at their comeback gig in which Rutter and Golding set up a monolithic live hardware rig, Ed Handley from Plaid followed them and simply plugged his laptop straight into the mixer.

POSTSCRIPT

All of the artists mentioned in this corner of electronic music history have stories that run deeper than there is space to outline here, and most have since gone on to even greater accomplishments. Mark Broom continues to work prolifically in techno and beyond, most recently delivering a second album of complex electronica alongside James Ruskin as The Fear Ratio. Stasis slipped into downtempo productions before emerging with slow, warm deep house as Soul 223, while Baby Ford became a key figure within the European minimal house scene on Perlon and other labels. Plaid continue to work closely with Warp, further developing their distinctive melodic brand of electronica. Kirk Degiorgio balances his jazzy leanings with his techno grounding across many projects and aliases, most recently kicking off the Korrupt Data pseudonym on Planet E.

The shortcoming of a piece such as this is that it can never tell the full story, and there was plenty of other important players in UK techno in the early ’90s. Dave Clarke and his Magnetic North label, Dave Angel and his momentous releases on R&S, Aubrey and the Solid Groove empire, Surgeon, Regis and Female pushing a tough minimalism in Birmingham, Cristian Vogel and Neil Landstrumm leading the wonky techno charge, Bedouin Ascent and the Rising High contingent, Affie Yusuf, Ian O’Brien and many other artists hovering around Russ Gabriel’s Ferox label, Billy Nasty mixing the first installment of the Journeys By DJ series, Spiral Tribe and their lasting influence on free party culture. No matter how many artists you mention, there are always many more who made as significant of an impact in the development of electronic music.