hy doesn't electronic music age as well as guitar-centrist rock? Does it have something to do with how we listen to it? Is it because the timbres and tones of contemporary electronic music are constantly in flux, always being upgraded and downgraded by technology?

These are some of the questions that ran through my mind as I listened to Tietchens' Biotop, reissued now over two decades after its original release. I remembered the first time I heard the sped-up breakbeats of drum'n'bass, and I thought - 'that's the first time I've ever heard robot drums do something that no human drummer could.' And I also remembered the time two years ago when I downloaded those old drum'n'bass tracks again and was shocked by how flat and simple they sounded. By contrast, if I played Coldplay's "Yellow" and then the first Radiohead single and then some early Counting Crows single, I'd almost be convinced they were released in the same week.

The second time I listened to Biotop, I was thinking - If nostalgia can't save music, what can? It sounded old. I heard robot drums that sounded like robots. Various antiquated drum machines (Roland CR8000's?) ran through distortion boxes, looping their simple patterns, panning back and forth in stereo. Behind them, Asmus was banging away on old synthesizers. He was playing wobbly little melodies and big atonal chord clusters. And there were a few gritty noises and some processed vocals too, all arranged into parodies of rock songs, or just melodic noodles. Catchy melodic noodles, that is.

When I was listening to Biotop for the third time, it struck me that if I burned these tracks and sent them off to independent electronic music labels today, they'd probably think I was some high school kid who'd just got his hands on some warezed audio software. I don't mean that in an insulting way, but these days, it would be quite easy to make almost any of the tracks on this disc with just a computer and a few stolen programs.

When I was listening to Biotop for the fourth time, I got to wondering why I was listening to it so many times in a row. I decided to google the hit singles that had been doing well in the states in the year this album was originally released, and I came up with such deformed monsters as Air Supply's "One that You Love" and Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl." (There was also Kool and the Gang's "Celebration," but one good apple can't unrot the whole barrel.) I knew that Asmus' music would have been mind-blowingly original when heard in the context of this pap-rock, but same goes for Cybotron or Model 500, and I prefer Professor Atkins over Asmus.

The last time I listened to Biotop it was four in the morning. I realized that the high school kid with the warezed software couldn’t actually do it, but that’s what people would think. There’s a difference! And what’s more, there is something unclassifiable and appealing about this disc that gets stuck in your craw.

I decided to throw out the unneccesary baggage of history. This music can stand alone, but only if you throw out the present, too. Try to forget that house music ever existed, and that Stock, Hausen and Walkman ever existed.

In a city where apartment buildings and nightclubs are built a hundred miles over a swamp, held erect by a network of rusty metal poles, and interconnected by a series of rickety gondolas, jaded future hipsters shuttle themselves back and forth between dilapidated watering holes, smoking incessantly: and in each nightclub, various victrolas play warped copies of this album, all simultaneously and at different rotation speeds.