The dawn of Zurich's 1990s techno scene, in photographs, ephemera and
testimonials
Titled after the number of beats per minute on a club track, 120 bpm
tracks techno's meteoric rise in Switzerland, where it became one of the
country's last great youth movements, leaving a massive imprint on the
nightlife, clubs and ongoing innovation in electronic dance music to
this day. Swiss photographer Philipp Mueller, who has shot for Vogue,
GQ and Playboy, covered the dawn of the Swiss techno scene in the
early 1990s, in raw photographs of Zurich's first street parades,
underground raves and parties--whether backstage in clubs or in the
intimacy of private venues--for various magazines. Mueller's photographs
are interleaved here with facsimile clippings from rave magazines and
fanzines, as well as firsthand accounts from some of the ravers who made
the nascent scene.