Achieving techno Zen with Chris Liebing

Do you think techno is the perfect style of music for people to lose themselves in?

It has these monotone rhythms and not really any other obvious parts in it like riffs or choruses that keep you cheering and chanting as with more commercial types of music or EDM. The more commercial type of music basically wants to distract your mind on the dancefloor. I believe that techno is more there to lose your mind. You don’t want to entertain or distract your mind like you do with watching a movie or watching television, you want to totally get rid of your mind, like, completely stop thinking [and] just be in that present moment.

It sounds like there’s something quite Zen with techno.

There might be. Are you familiar with the philosopher Alan Watts? He died in the 90s but he’s my favourite philosopher and in his talks he always comes back to the point that there’s only a few things in our lives we do without a reason. One of them is meditation. It’s just supposed to be like you’re in the moment now. There are only two other things we do in our lives like this. One is dancing [and] the other is when you’re listening to or making music. It’s not supposed to get you somewhere, it’s supposed to get you lost in that moment and there is something Zen about it.