A couple of thing have stood out to me in this discussion -

Less 4/4 - I often think that, but then when I'm lost on the dancefloor it's the hypnotic stuff that really does it for me - and like Dave the Drummer said it's annoying when someone starts to be all weird and **** up my buzz.

The melody Idea is something I've tried - or rather chord changes - putting tension in with subtle pads and stuff bringing in 7th and sus4 type chords like you would in a guitar piece - sometimes works, sometimes goes cheesy.

For me techno's always dancefloor music and certainly in a club the simplicity and drive is what does it. I think you can still get that with a complex rhythm and really thinking on how the different parts interact, which sometimes seems to be done in a simplistic way - I'm not quite sure how I'm trying to explain this, but imagine classical music where you may have a fairly simple chord progression, but different parts of the chord are played by different instruments at different times.

Having said some of this I went to a psy-trance night on saturday and one DJ - don't know who - was playing quite hard kind of psy stuff with lots of wierd rhytms, messing around -what would have, had it been the night before, when I was out dancing to techno would have "**** up my buzz." And I loved it. I think it's a mood thing - for a saturday night when I'd had a friday of hard nasty stuff and was just wanting to launch into a full on weekend of sillyness with my Girlfriend it worked - Would that kind of wierdness work in techno??? Don't know...

I think there's always room to push boundaries and always room for innovation, but I also think theres space to stay at least some of the time with what we know. I do like a mix though that starts off with more obvious stuff and then slowly introduces more different things...