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Loss of a Techno Rebel: Why Dan Sicko Will Be Sorely Missed

Monday, August 29th, 2011

Journalist, techno organizer, lecturer, and creative director Dan Sicko has sadly passed away this weekend, the victim of the rare but devastating condition of ocular melanoma. Sicko is best known to electronic music fans as the author of the terrific Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (Billboard: 1999). A uniquely techno-focused story, that book is a particularly good tome on the underground roots of the techno genre.

But Sicko contributed more than just that book, as a music writer (Rolling Stone, Wired, Urb), and a lecturer on Detroit music culture, as well as a fixture on the techno music scene and a key figure in the appreciation of its music. He had worked as a Creative Director with the Detroit office of Organic, Inc.

He also launched Reverb, one of the first digital music magazines – distributed on floppy disks and FTP sites, even this site owes something to its legacy. (I can relate: I ran an early e-publishing effort on CompuServe at around the same time. If anyone can find copies of Reverb…)

As reader Klaas-Jan Jongsma notes, in passing us the news:

Besides being a friend of mine, he was always willing to help people who visited Detroit (I stayed at his place a couple of times when we visited Detroit) he was a major influence on scene. He wrote with so much passion about music for several magazines, blogs and newspaper. He was also one of the driving forces between the 313 mailinglist (an essential mailinglist, especially in the 90s about Detroit techno). He was one of those unknown forces behind detroit techno, a true techno rebel.

Mr. Sicko has left behind many digital footprints, right up through this month; if you didn’t know his work, retracing them can introduce you to some great music. A few examples:

Moodmat contributions, Metromode

The [313] mailing list

Personal website

Twitter feed

Most importantly, though, you should pick up a copy of his book if you haven’t. There are still more thoughts on that site, including a response to the May NPR roundup of Detroit music picks with his own suggested gems. He leaves behind an extraordinary set of resources for those wanting to learn more about this music, and records to spin in his honor. Sincere condolences to friends and family.

http://techno-rebels.com/

Latest on gofundme.com on arrangements.

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Egnater Rebel 30 1 x 12 combo

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

The Egnater brand may not be so well known here, but in the USA, Bruce Egnater is rightly recognised as one of an elite handful of designers who’ve had a profound impact on the electric guitar’s sonic development.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Egnater grew up learning guitar with the music of the local bands of his era, including Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad and Bob Seger. His frustration at not being able to find an amp that did what he wanted it to led to Bruce designing and building one of the first cascaded gain lead channel guitar amps.

Ever since then, for three and a half decades, he’s run his own custom amplification shop and worked with some of the world’s top players, including Kirk Hammett, Steve Vai and Dimebag Darrell, as well as Randall and Rocktron.

Besides licensing his modular concept to Randall for the MTS series, Egnater hand-builds his own custom amps in Berkeley, Michigan and also has a range of Chinese-made products – including the Rebel 30 1 x 12 combo – which have been out for a couple of years, but only recently made it to the UK.

Hear the Egnater Rebel 30 in action in the following audio demo:

It may be a Rebel, but it’s a smartly dressed one, with a suit of two-tone cream and black vinyl that’s much thicker than we’re used to seeing on Chinese products. The Rebel 30′s cabinet is compact and deeper than you’d expect, making it very nearly a cube, but is easy to carry single-handed.

The electronics are contained inside a tough ‘L’-shaped steel chassis, mostly on two large high quality printed circuit boards, one mounted vertically for the preamp stuff and one mounted horizontally for the output stage. These hold nearly everything, including the valve bases – the output valves hang upside down from the bottom of the chassis, while the four preamp valves are mounted horizontally and accessed through a removable grille, nearer to the top of the cabinet.

Egnater rebel 30

The colour scheme carries on to the control panel, where the Egnater’s boutique heritage becomes clear. Channel one, the clean channel, features volume, bass and treble; channel two handles overdrive with a familiar layout of gain, master volume and three-band EQ.

Both channels feature sub-miniature toggle switches to operate Egnater’s ‘bright’ and ‘tight’ functions, making it easy to add a little extra snap to a Les Paul or girth to the low-end of a Strat or Tele.

(3 pages; go to page: 2 3)