IT IS not often that a touring DJ’s career is associated with quiet reflection or a conscientious work ethic. People who make a living as professional party-starters are, one might think, as hedonistic as the sweaty crowds they entertain, with an added pinch of divadom. However, Romuald Karmakar’s documentary “If I Think of Germany at Night” exposes a different side to the Germany-based techno DJs it follows. Over a ponderous, meandering hour and 45 minutes, Karmakar paints an intimate picture of his subjects and their work. His austere film-making treats them as serious artists, heirs to a national cultural inheritance stretching back to the Romantics of the 19th century (the title is a quote from Heinrich Heine’s famously melancholic paean to his homeland, “Night Thoughts”).

The subjects are certainly given to a poetic wistfulness that those Romantic forebears might share. David Moufang, the DJ and techno musician better known as Move D, is featured atop a tranquil hillside looking out over his hometown of Heidelberg in south-western Germany. He muses about how attuned he feels to the sounds of the place, from the traffic noise to the insects, and about his childhood memories of placing his ear next to the draught under his bedroom door in order to better listen to the tone of its whistle. Rather than the swagger of a rock-star, he has the gently eccentric air of a trainspotter.

Ricardo Villalobos (pictured) is a different sort of oddball: notorious for his hallucinogenic marathon sets and flamboyant onstage persona, he swigs whisky behind the decks in between throwing gangly dance moves. In his studio, though, a nest of towering stacks of mixers and synthesisers that blink and whir, he becomes someone different. His frantic energy persists, but it is turned to the single-minded pursuit of new, ever weirder sounds to use in his music, sampled from his compendious collection of records. He haphazardly unfolds and refolds record sleeves with the chaotic relish of an historian uncovering a manuscript: “this one is from the 70s!”

More than being eccentric, the DJs are hard-working. Making techno music requires painstaking labour. Sonja Moonear, a Swiss DJ, is shown poring over synthesisers to achieve just the right pitch and timbre, adjusting a single loop with tweaks of a knob and flicks of a switch. The film’s unblinking focus on the process of music-making elevates it to craft. Lingering shots of nightclubs and studios have the same reverence more often given to a famous writer’s desk or artist’s atelier.

Playing DJ sets is equally tough. In the scenes of the DJs at work in festivals and nightclubs, Karmakar isolates the audio output from their headphones, allowing us to hear the stumbles and stutters of each new track being cued up. The effect is akin to giving away the workings of a magic trick. We see the crowd’s rapturous response to a particularly powerful bass drum drop, having heard it previewed and practiced in advance; the human hand behind the machine-made music is revealed.

This is not a film for those seeking a primer on techno. There are no captions to tell us who is speaking, or which clubs they’re playing in - an opportunity, perhaps, to meet the real people behind the stage names. The pace of the film is self-consciously unhurried, with the interviewees given free range to talk for as long as they want; sometimes awkwardly longer.

The most illuminating of these chats is with Ata, a congenial bearded chap who delves at length into the history of teutonic techno. Tracing its roots to the illegal parties that sprung up in Berlin’s post-reunification euphoria, he places the genre at the centre of his version of German national identity. America’s scene is centred on New York, he says, and Britain’s revolves around London, but techno “is a German sound”. The political backdrop is different now from that of the 1990s, but still present. The interviews touch on the importance of escapism and an artistic Gemeinschaft—a community—in the face of terrorism and turmoil. Heine’s poem was written in the context of similarly smouldering unrest across Europe. “If I think of Germany at night”, he wrote, “then I’m robbed of my sleep”. Learning about what Germans get up to at night, Karmakar’s film suggests, can tell us much about how they think of themselves during the day.

“If I Think of Germany at Night” is playing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London through May 25th.