Dr. Motte at Forty Years: A Lifelong Question of How We Want to Live

Count the rooms if you like. Off locations where the floor wobbled a little. Warehouses where the air tasted of metal. The established festivals like Mayday, Fusion, Nature One. The numbers tell one story. A better story sits in the continuity of intent. From the first nights in 1985 to a summer that places him again in front of vast crowds, Dr. Motte plays with the same central idea. Music is a tool for public joy, and public joy has political content.

This is not preaching. It is design. A set that moves with care teaches a kind of citizenship. People learn to give each other space. They practice consent with their bodies and with their attention. They carry that practice outward. In his hands, the craft is never cut off from its social frame. Which is why the return of the parade on 12 July 2025 matters. The street is a different classroom than a club. The message travels farther. A new hymn with Marc van Linden lands on 13 June as a banner you can also dance to. The titles are tidy, yet the feeling behind them is what counts.

There is a tendency to freeze pioneers into statues. Motte refuses the pose. He keeps working. He keeps arguing for UNESCO grade recognition not as a trophy, but as a policy that secures space for the next generation. He keeps finding records that complicate the map of what techno can be. He keeps pushing back against the idea that the scene’s best days sit in the past.

So the anniversary collects many facts and turns them into one question that he asks out loud and with action. How do we want to live, and with whom. The dance floor gives a provisional answer every night. With curiosity. With care. With a beat that does not insist on control, only on presence. Forty years in, that answer still sounds fresh. It is not a slogan. It is a practice that keeps meeting the future as if it were already here.

https://www.drmotte.de/techno/