TECHNOTRONIC

Best buy: "Pump Up The Jam - The Album" "Pump Up The Jam", "Get Up", "This Beat Is Technotronic" ... sound just as fresh and danceable in 2001 as they did in the days when they shook the foundations of dance music. >>> Buy this CD at Proxis <<< >>> 690 Bfr - 17,11 Euro - 15,12$ (on Oct. 10, 2001) <<<

Technotronic was a project of Belgian producer Jo Bogaert at the beginning of the nineties, comparable in fame & status to the acts such as C+C Music Factory, Snap, S'Express and Soul 2 Soul.

In 1983-84, he was the keyboardplayer for the band WhiteLight (intimistic, sober Velvet-Underground-ish songs). After the demise of this, he turned into a solo-"do-it-yourselfer" in his attic in Aalst. At the time of the eruption of New Beat, he operated under a number of pseudonyms (Nux Nemo, Acts of Madmen ...).

Unlike most of the other producers however, Bogaert didn't stop at this point, but went on to develop a sound of his own - based on New Beat and house - and to hire a bunch of singers to perform his songs.

The result : "Pump up the jam", the first of a series of hits by Technotronic. The song was performed on stage by blue-lipped Felly, but was rapped in the studio by Zaïrean Manuela Kamosi (Ya Kid K). It did well in almost every single country in the world and went to number 1 in the hitparades in a lot of them (sadly enough, it peaked at n° 2 in the Bilboard U.S. chart, meaning that "Dominique" by the Singing Nun remains our biggest hit there). In total and worldwide more than 3.5 million copies were sold of single "Pump up the jam".

Other faces & voices for the project came from MC Eric (a dutch rapper) on "This Beat is Technotronic" and Ya Kid K (who finally did get her place in the spotlight. She would later have another hit, with Hi Tec 3 "Spin that wheel", and was guest-rapping in 2001 on a DAAU-album). These successors to "pump up the jam" all sold very well, but lacked the surprise effect of the first single. But although the successor "Get up" didn't get past the 1,9 million copies, it clearly showed that Technotronic wasn't a "one-hit-wonder".

For the 1991 album "Body to body" he teamed up with Reggie, one of the two cheerful ladies who we know from their period with Indeep (remember "Last night a DeeJay save my life"?). This record didn't get half the sales success of the first one, although the single "Move that body" went to number 5 in the Billboard-charts in the USA (thanks to its use in a Revlon television commercial). In the meantime, another Belgian duo of producers had surpassed Bogaert with Two Unlimited. In 1996, Technotronic teamed up with CBMilton and Phil Wilde from that group for "Move it to the rhythm".

Jo Bogaert also released a record under his own name in 1993 (Different voices), with a more experimental approach to electronic music. In 1996 he did a project called Millenium: "Millennium is a project of Belgium producer Jo Bogaert (of Technotronic fame), drawing from an extremely varied number of sources: an unusual mix of electronic beats, acoustic textures and song structures. Aided by the guitar of Michael Brook or the occasional violin of Chikako Sato, and serving up the exquisite voices of singing legend Robert Wyatt and the not so famous Blissphemy, Bogaert comes up with a highly convincing hybrid. Not soundscapes per se, nor songs per se, but something in between. This music would have been impossible five years go, but sounds well at ease in the mid '90s."

Jo Bogaert was and is also an established producer of "regular" rock-groups (e.g. Mensen Blaffen, Gorki, An Pierlé), even doing production work for - at first thought quite an unlikely combination - folk-hippie Jan de Wilde.

In 2000, he decided to have a new go at the Technotronic project. First, there were two singles "Like This" and "G-Train" with Monday Midnite (a clubdeejay in Antwerp), and then there was latin-oriented "The Mariachi", for which Ya Kid K did the vocals once again.
A year later, Jo Bogaert hopped on the Moby-bluessamples bandwagon, with the song "Runaway Blues" , for which he used voice samples of singer and blueslegend Vera Hall (the same voice of Moby's "natural blues", remember "trouble so hard").

Buy CD's of Technotronic at

Albums :
- Pump up the jam (ARS - 1989)
- Trip on this (the remixes (ARS/Clip - 1990)
- Body to body (ARS/Clip 1991)
Compilations
-

Platen (Jo Bogaert) :
- Different voices (XXP - 1993)
- Millenium (... - 1996)

Websites :
- More about TT at the flashed website of ARS-productions
- Technotronic-page at Danceartist info
- Technotronic at Yahoo Music