Schranz

Schranz is a German strain of hard techno that crystallised around Frankfurt at the end of the 1990s, named — by common account, by *Chris Liebing* — with a nonsense word for the sound itself. It strips techno to its chassis: distorted, loop-based kick drums at 140 to 150 BPM, compressed percussion, industrial noise and almost no melody, harmony or vocals. Played by Liebing, *DJ Rush*, *Sven Wittekind* and a generation of German and Austrian producers on labels such as #CLR#, #Abstract# and #Compressed#, schranz was the dominant European hard-dance sound of the early 2000s before merging into the broader hard techno category.