THANK YOU FOR SHOWING UP. YOU BROUGHT THE VIBE. TO THE ARTISTS — YOU MOVED US. OAKLAND — WHAT’S UP?
SPECIAL THANKS:
THEO PARRISH, SMARTBOMB, ONMOMMAS, SPACE GHOST, RITCHRD, THREE6SASHIA, ET IV, ERIK WILSON
BBQ — MARTY + NANI DOOR — SCOTTIE + DANA LIGHTS — RADIANT ATMOSPHERE, TERRAC, ANDY, AND ERIC CAMERA TEAM — THEO SCHEAR , AMELIA ALEMAYEHU, IMAN RODNEY & ETHAN GOLDWATER SOUND — WAVEWORKS AV THE LOOM — ANTOINE, JAMES, BROOKE THE AMAZING VOLUNTEERS EMT — RGX MEDICAL
Written by Bernardo Attias aka professor ben – FOR·MA·TIVE Contributing Editor
“Say nice things about Detroit!” When I think about Detroit, I always remember these words of KR, the driver who gave me a ride to my hotel in 2012, my first time at Movement. (I would eventually learn that he was repeating the words of Emily T. Gail, who promoted this slogan in the 1970s to bring a sense of pride back to Detroit despite the city’s abrupt abandonment by its economic heart, the automotive industry, to a rapacious and corrupt corporate elite).
It feels like a lifetime ago, especially when I recall that I secured a hotel room in walking distance from Hart Plaza for $89/night. That festival—which many were still calling DEMF while many locals referred to it as “the tech fest”—was something of a pilgrimage for me. As a vinyl DJ as well as an academic researcher I had started a project inquiring into the relationship between space and sound in dance music that took me to venues and festivals in Miami, Chicago, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, and, of course, Detroit.
When KR learned I was going to the festival and exploring Detroit music history, he gave me his number and offered me rides to various music history landmarks. He took me to the Motown Museum and shared stories about Detroit’s deep history of rock ‘n’ roll and soul music. He had very little background in electronic music, however, and was surprised when I asked him for a ride to the techno museum Exhibit 3000.
“There’s a techno museum?” he asked.
This was a year before Mayor Dave Bing would officially recognize the week leading up to Movement as “Detroit Techno Week,” and KR was only vaguely aware of the festival. It turned out that the “museum” was an exhibit in what looked like a large residential house. This was the headquarters of Submerge Records, housing the techno museum as well as the manufacturing and distribution hub for the Underground Resistance label.
KR was reluctant to drop me off alone as he thought it looked too sketchy. So he joined me. After the museum tour, led by John Collins of Underground Resistance (UR), I spent a few hours browsing and listening to records in the basement record store. I also met UR co-founder Mike Banks and bought what is still my favorite sweatshirt as well as several records on the UR imprint.
It was the beginning of a magical weekend filled with music, dancing, education, and serendipitous encounters. I took a four-hour bicycle tour of techno history (led by another UR member) that brought us to various venues, warehouses, studios, and record stores that played significant roles in the emergence of Detroit techno. I heard mind-blowing sets from Detroit mainstays and newer cats including Carl Craig, DJ Minx, DJ Psycho, T.Linder, Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes, Stacey Pullen, Kevin Larkin, Kevin Saunderson, Jeff Mills, Marcellus Pittman, Mike Huckaby and more. I had made an intentional effort to focus on Detroit artists but also grooved to sets from the worldwide talent pool pulled into Movement, including Mr.C, Maya Jane Coles, Maceo Plex, Claude VonStroke, and even the hip-hop headliner Public Enemy. I was also able to meet several of these talents face to face at many of the afterparties and was consistently touched by everyone’s friendliness and humility.
I met some locals who snuck me into a sold out event at St. Andrew’s Hall where I met Kevin Saunderson before watching him play a spectacular set, with surprise guest Paris Grey joining to perform the duo’s hits as Inner City: “Big Fun” and “Good Life.” The latter was the song that first introduced me to the Detroit sound in 1988. I recall sitting on the floor in the balcony with a perfect view of the stage, transfixed as I contemplated my relationship to Detroit techno as a sound and concept.
The New Dance Sound
I had my earliest experiences with electronic dance music in college, just outside of Chicago in the mid-late 1980s. This was deep into the era of Chicago house music, and acid house in particular was newly on my radar. I wasn’t aware at first of the music blowing up clubs and warehouses nearby; as a young college student in the burbs I didn’t yet have any connections to the inner city black and gay scenes where house music was born. It was literally by reading music journalism from the UK (and through British musicians like Psychic TV) that I first learned about raves and acid house music.
By this time there was already a vibrant relationship between musicians in Chicago and Detroit, and as I said my awareness of this started with the pop dance music of Kevin Saunderson and Inner City rather than the darker sounds that would truly define the sonic characteristics of what was not yet being referred to as “Detroit techno.” Of course, there were hints of the darker and moodier sound available to us at the time: I may have heard Cybotron and Rhythim is Rhythim at local clubs or on college radio, but likely played alongside Chicago house, various shades of disco and techno pop, and the industrial music that was popular in Chicago (the latter of which shared with Detroit techno a deep anxiety about the pace of technological change and economic dislocation). Urban decay in particular—what I have thought of as the “sounds of the city in distress”—was already a theme of a lot of the music I was listening to well before I dove into Detroit techno or even understood it as a distinct genre.
In hindsight there was something liberating about the lack of clearly defined boundaries between genres and subgenres of electronic dance music in those early days. There was freedom in enjoying music without worrying about how it fit into specific “scenes,” especially as some of those scenes became tribalistic at times. Indeed, house music had emerged partly in reaction against the kind of tribalism embodied by the deeply racist and homophobic “Disco Demolition Night” that took place in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979.
As a multi-genre DJ myself, I found it inspiring when I first learned that many Detroit techno innovators were themselves influenced by Charles Johnson’s genre-defying radio show the Electrifyin’ Mojo, which played soul and funk alongside punk, new wave, pop, jazz, rock, gospel, and even country. At Movement in 2012, I recalled being perplexed by Jeff Mills’ headlining set, mixing house, hip-hop, 80s pop, acid, hard techno, funk, and rock in a way that felt more jarring than groovy. That was before I understood he was playing as The Wizard, a persona developed in the 1980s in his own fast-paced, genre-traveling scratch-and-mix performances on the Electrifyin’ Mojo’s radio show. After someone on a DJ discussion board set me straight about this, I came to appreciate Mills’ set on a whole different level.
For me, this is the beauty of Detroit techno: it emerged from a kind of experimentation that bridged and combined genres and sonic styles rather than reifying the walls between them. It’s not just about its afrofuturistic sonic (as well as narrative) signature or its insightful (and inciteful) commentary on race, economic dislocation, or technological dystopia. It’s also about the joy that inhabits the revolt against these things, breaking down barriers and bringing in various cultural signifiers to create new sounds and new experiences that help listeners imagine new realities.
In recent years, my research has taken me to various cities in Japan where I have been exploring (and enjoying) the “record-bar” culture of jazz kissas, soul music bars, listening bars, and audiophile DJ venues. This might seem (geographically as well as figuratively) a world away from the gritty sounds of Detroit techno, but my last trip to Japan found me at the Underground Gallery in Kobe, where I met and had a long conversation with the owner, Masaaki Ishizaki, aka Ish from Underground Resistance. He was selecting music as we chatted, and these selections wandered like the trajectory of our conversation—reggae and dub, jazz, electronic, disco, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, and more. He pointedly did not play techno (this was a listening bar), though we spoke about it at length, as well as about his influences and his time in Detroit. We bonded over, of all things, Lou Reed’s New York album.
One thing that occurred to me during and after this conversation was that just as Detroit techno uses musical samples and references to communicate with jazz, soul, hip-hop, funk, new wave, punk, and industrial music, music fans similarly use such references to communicate with each other. Ultimately, my understanding and experience of the music is inseparable from the social relationships and interactions I’ve had and continue to have both in and out of Detroit.
Every sound we hear has meaning because it connects us to other sounds, histories, experiences, and, ultimately, to other people. There is no sound in a vacuum.
WRITTEN BY THEO SCHEAR / FOR·MA·TIVE CONTRIBUTING MEDIA PRODUCER
Detroit is not just a city. It is the spiritual and literal birthplace of techno, a place where industrial resilience and Black creativity fused into a global musical language. Every Memorial Day weekend, that legacy converges at the Movement Music Festival in Hart Plaza, a three-day pilgrimage connecting foundational pioneers with the next generation of innovators.
At the center of that continuum isCraig Gonzalez, one of Detroit’s understated but deeply respected selectors, known for prioritizing depth, pacing, and emotional continuity over spectacle. In this interview, we hear from Craig about his influences, techniques, and philosophy playing sets from the underground to the main stage at Movement.
Unabridged: When preparing for a Saturday afternoon set on the Movement Stage, how do you balance underground sensibilities with the scale and visibility of a festival crowd?
Craig Gonzalez: To be honest, I don’t focus much on the labels of underground versus festival. I view a stage like Movement as an opportunity to showcase the results of my sonic travels. It’s a platform for me to present the unique and interesting music I truly believe in and to put my own distinct stamp on the afternoon. My goal is to curate those tracks in a way that’s engaging for the crowd, but ultimately, staying true to my personal curation as to what DJing has always been about for me.
You’ve spoken before about treating a DJ set like a compositional space. How has your background in visual pacing influenced the way you shape the arc of a 90-minute set?
Regardless of the medium, pacing is everything. A 90-minute festival set is definitely a compositional space, but at the end of the day I’m playing for a dance floor. It’s a constant, delicate balance between executing an artistic vision and keeping people moving. How far I lean into either side changes with every gig and you have to read the environment. But there are absolutely times when I prefer to take the reins and strictly dictate a composition, challenging the room to follow a specific narrative rather than just keeping things comfortable for the party.
You’re also known for extended sets that can stretch far beyond the usual one to two hours. What changes psychologically when you’re building one of those longer DJ sets?
You become responsible for the whole life cycle of the party. You’re handling the warm-up, the peak hours, and the final closing. I love the space it provides; it lets me feel things out and lean into different genres or moods. Those stylistic tangents are what keep it interesting for me, and usually, that’s when the most memorable moments happen for the crowd too.
In an era of fragmented attention spans, how do you keep people locked into a deeper listening experience over the course of a long set?
The key is trust. If you win the crowd over early, you can push and pull the energy in ways that keep them engaged for the long haul. I try to avoid the trap of playing constant bangers with no breathing room, that lacks nuance and becomes exhausting for the listener (and myself). To keep people locked in, you need a real arc and the willingness to explore the valleys between the peaks
How did the Ann Arbor scene during your formative years shape your style?
Although I only lived in Ann Arbor for a short time, my residency at the Blind Pig lasted a bit longer and laid the foundation for the versatility that defines my style today. The venue booked a highly diverse lineup and I took it upon myself to actively adapt my sound to complement whoever was headlining each week. That mindset taught me how to read a lineup and adjust accordingly. I still operate that way today, focusing on being the DJ needed for that specific slot, which keeps things fresh and unpredictable.
When layering techno, house, and hip-hop together, how do you make those transitions feel seamless?
Honestly, you’d have to catch me playing an extended set to hear hip-hop, house and techno all in the same night!
But jokes aside, that question touches on a core philosophy of mine, which is aiming to be completely genre-agnostic. When you’re traversing different musical styles throughout a night, rhythm and context are the key parameters that hold everything together. On a technical level, it requires foresight. I’m always thinking two or three tracks ahead. If I decide to shift directions, I map out a sequence in my head through my track selection to ensure the transition feels seamless and intentional, rather than jarring for the floor.
U: You’ve never seemed tied to one style, but more responsive to the room and the energy unfolding in real time. How do you organize your catalog so you can access the right direction instinctively in the moment?
My master organization could probably use some work but my approach is all about staying adaptable. I build specific folders for each gig and pull all the potential tracks into a main playlist within that folder. Then if I’m really feeling saucy, I’ll create more specific playlists based on the timeline of the set, like the beginning, middle, or end, or by using my own labels for tracks.
Once the gig is done, I export the set history right back into that folder. It turns into a great reference library. If a track suddenly flashes into my mind during a completely different set down the road, I know I can jump into my past histories and find it instantly, even if it didn’t make it into that night’s primary playlist.
How have Interdimensional Transmissions parties shaped your evolution as a selector?
We are all from the same generation and I think we still hold onto the same core principles. There is a constant curiosity and a shared love for exploring music, whether that means digging through an artist’s deep back catalog or uncovering modern gems. Their parties are a direct reflection of that ethos.
Seeing those events thrive is incredibly validating because it shows there is no shortage of people who genuinely value that level of depth. It is especially meaningful in an era where the music and the craft itself can often feel secondary. Which is perfect for me because it gives me a space to be my genuine self behind the decks.
What lessons from hip-hop storytelling still influence the way you structure a techno set today?
I was never actually a hip-hop DJ, so to speak. I was just really into music at a young age and I didn’t get into DJing until after I discovered techno. But I never stopped loving the genre and I’ve built my own personal collection over the years simply because I appreciate the music. Playing hip-hop for fun or for a special mix has taught me a lot about the craft as a whole. Different styles require different technical approaches and those skills always translate across genres.
While techno lends itself to deep layering and long transitions, hip-hop is all about precise timing because you don’t want to have lyrics clashing on top of each other. House music requires a bit of both, where you can execute long blends but still have to be incredibly careful not to let vocals or chords clash. Because of that, I see storytelling as a fundamental part of the art of DJing overall rather than something specific to hip-hop. Even when I do play hip-hop, I don’t play it like a traditional hip-hop DJ. I don’t do the quick “one verse and out” style. I let the tracks play and mix them more like house music, using instrumentals to give myself a transitional bridge because I’m more of a beat guy anyway.
Last year you played the 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM slot on the Movement Stage — a set bridging the daytime atmosphere into the festival’s larger evening momentum. What was your intention going into that transition? Did you arrive with a clear plan, or respond instinctively to the energy in the moment?
I went into that set with a very clear plan. It was actually a progression of an idea I started back in 2023 on the Detroit stage. That year, I took a gamble and played a very specific style of drum & bass/half-time/grey area music, which lives at a fascinating intersection of techno and DnB. Before that festival, mostly close friends had heard me play that style but I wanted to bring something completely distinct to Movement that year. By 2025, I had recorded several mixes in that realm, played it out more at gigs and my Third Thursday monthly with Paxahau and felt much more dialed into executing it on the main stage.
However, one of the more compelling aspects of that music is its use of polyrhythms. Through those complex structures, you can actually beatmatch a track at two entirely different tempos depending on which rhythmic layer you choose to key onto. So for the 2025 set, I started at 85/170 BPM, then at about two-thirds of the way through, I used one of those polyrhythmic tracks to shift the tempo to 113.3 BPM. I then slowly built the tempo back up from there. I really wanted to use that main stage platform to put the actual artistry and technical craft of DJing on full display.
What does 2026 look like for you? Will we see you back on the Movement Stage, or involved in other events surrounding the weekend?
I won’t be playing the festival itself this year but I am playing the opening party on Friday night and opening No Way Back on Sunday night. I can’t even begin to explain how much it means to me to open No Way Back, especially alongside a lineup full of friends I’ve known for over 30 years. That connection and history is really what this community is all about.
As for the rest of 2026, I will be playing in Columbus the weekend after Movement and then I am heading to The Great Beyond in July. That festival is incredibly meaningful to me because it taps so deeply into our raw Midwest roots.
I have a few more exciting projects in the works that I am really looking forward to but those announcements will have to come a bit later!
Jeff Mills: Metropolis Metropolis Cinemix Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, US
Jeff Mills’s performance of his Metropolis Metropolis score, which he mixes in real time alongside Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, takes place as part of Unabridged: Detroit Incoming, a year long celebration of Detroit club culture in the Bay Area created by local promotions company As You Like It.
The evening begins with Mills talking toKEXP DJ and host Sharlese Metcalf about his homage to Lang’s science fiction epic and his career as a whole. He tells how he composed the original version of his score while living in East Berlin, working with a VHS tape rented from Blockbuster. After releasing Metropolis on hisAxis Records label in 2000, he began performing it at events around the world, and credits the description “cinemix” to an anonymous French journalist.
UFA Studios, which owns the rights to Lang’s film, was initially apprehensive about what Mills jokingly admitted was his “bootleg” version. But the two parties eventually built a collaboration, and UFA asked him to create a new version when it premiered a restored version of Metropolis at the Cinémathèque Française in 2011 — a version which apparently has never been publicly released.
For this performance, Mills utilises a third version of his score, Metropolis Metropolis, released on Axis in 2023. He explains that he sought to capture the inner lives of the characters in the film, adding, “My approach with this soundtrack is not to reflect what you see on the screen.” He also notes the contemporary relevance of Lang’s film, which depicts a princeling, Freder, falling under the spell of Maria, a kindly spiritual figure, and rebelling against his industrialist father who foments inequality by having the city’s populace toil underground for the benefit of a small group of oligarchs. “There is a need to show this film and remind people about this crazy world we’re living in,” says Mills. “Some of us don’t believe that we’re all soldiers, and we can’t just sit on the sidelines.”
However, the pleasures of the evening lie mostly in hearing Mills unfurl his soundtrack on three Pioneer CDJ-2000 media players and a mixer. He introduces sharp techno keyboard stabs when the demonic machine Moloch appears, then builds drama with repetitive chimes and melodies while shifting percussive hi-hats underneath as Freder and Maria talk and embrace. The Axis Records version of Metropolis Metropolis is only an hour long, but on this night, he has rearranged and blended its parts to stretch across the two-plus-hour film and end credits.
Belying his reputation as an innovator of pummelling and percussive techno, much of the music is decorative, beatless and attuned to the characters’ emotions, revealing ideas not necessarily reflected on screen. At times, one can tell that he’s repeating musical sequences like an arpeggio, especially during a terrifying cave scene when Maria is chased by The Thin Man, a thug enforcer.
The Metropolis Metropolis performance is magical, a unique expansion of Detroit techno’s creative possibilities.
Everyone has their story: the first time they went to a party, a club, a rave and heard music that altered the course of their life. A time when the experience was more than the music, it was the crowd, the vibe, a moment in time more than the sum of its parts. This is my experience hearing Detroit techno for the first time.
When raves first came to southwest Ohio in the early 90s, they were more of a curiosity than a cultural revolution. The music was an extension of industrial club music and European dance, sample-heavy, blunt, and disconnected from Chicago and Detroit—odd considering both cities were only five hours away.
At the time, I was already interested in this concept of a rave, having read in music magazines about the rise of rave culture in England in the late 80s and having listened to the Madchester sound, groovy rock music from Manchester heavily influenced by the feel-good vibes of this new youth dance movement. The first parties I went to drew a mixed crowd from the different subcultures of the time, and I, like many others, wandered through, danced, and then went back to the industrial clubs and indie rock scenes that were thriving at the time.
Then in early 1995, a new friend told me about this sound coming from Detroit called techno. The raves had changed, the music was different, and he spoke reverentially about a certain artist: Plastikman, the alter ego of Richie Hawtin. That’s how I ended up in a small Indiana* town on a cold February night, walking past a country-western bar to an abandoned theater to wait in line to experience FUK, the name of Plastikman’s 1995 tour of the Midwest.
I’ll never forget walking into this alternate dimension: The walls were lined with black plastic, the only lighting were two lasers behind the smoke-cloaked stage. Then there was the music. It had the edge of industrial music, but it was faster, sparser, groovier. Futuristic sounds drenched with Roland 303 acid lines. This wasn’t the dance music I was used to. This music was serious.
The crowd was serious as well. I’d never experienced people going crazy over music before. Cheering. Yelling. In perfect harmony with the performance. The floor had puddles of sweat from the intensity of the dancing. I danced until the sun came up and all I wanted was more.
From that moment on, my life changed. I became one of the many Midwestern acolytes of Plastikman. I collected as much of his music as I could: the first album, Sheet One, the one with the insert liner perforated like a sheet of LSD; the second album, Musik, a minimalistic masterpiece; and all of Hawtin’s F.U.S.E. side project (it was rare in the 90s to not hear the track “Substance Abuse” at any proper Midwest techno party).
But the one that stands out the most was Plastikman’s mix for the UK’s Mixmag magazine. This mix perfectly captures the sound of that era, the minimalist rhythms, the intricate mixing, and the build up of tension that peaks with his tracks “Spaz” and “Helikopter”, and then releases into a long outro of deep techno. I keep coming back to it as one of the best studio mixes ever made.
A year later in 1996, my love for all things Plastikman led to a fortuitous encounter with another Detroit legend: Jeff Mills. The rave was called Sickness/Recovery, a two-part night/day party that featured Jeff Mills (“Sickness”) and Richie Hawtin (“Recovery”). At that point unfamiliar with Jeff Mills, I didn’t know another life-changing event was about to happen.
The party was listed to take place in Windsor, Canada, just across the border from Detroit. We drove the five-plus hours up Interstate 75, crossed the border into Canada, and then came to find out the party wasn’t actually in the city, but 30-odd minutes outside of Windsor, down a rural back road, and onto a farm where a circus tent had been set up in the middle of a corn field. Sickness, indeed.
Thousands of people showed up for the party from all over the Midwest and South. We met some kids who had driven over 15 hours up from Florida. The energy was frenetic, electric. When Jeff Mills started DJing, the place went completely mental. I had never seen anyone mix techno at that pace before, three turntables, swapping records so fast he didn’t have time to put them back in their sleeves. He was a force of nature, simultaneously lifting everyone up in that circus tent as he destroyed them with a relentless barrage of beats. Even after going to clubs and parties for over 30 years, I’ve yet to see another crowd react like that to a DJ.
We eventually crashed out in our car as the sun rose, the strain of the drive and dancing having taken its toll. We woke up around noon and found ourselves in an empty corn field in Ontario. The only proof that the night before wasn’t a fever dream was the handful of people picking up the remaining garbage off the ground.
Just as with Plastikman, the effect of Jeff Mills was instantaneous. It was an incurable infection of rhythm and sound. I needed more of his music. But this was still the early internet, so you had to get your fix in mixtapes bought at raves and shared by friends. I finally ended up special ordering his seminal live mix, Live at the Liquid Room, from my local dance music record shop. It was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Perhaps the best live mix ever recorded, Live at the Liquid Room captured the pure kinetic energy that I felt that night.
The next year I bought my first turntables and my first Jeff Mills records. I soon moved to San Francisco, and eventually I was fortunate enough to write about dance music. This music literally altered the course of my life. But that’s the power of Detroit techno. It’s a sound that works on so many levels, stimulating your mind while also sinking its teeth into your soul. It was a satori moment in my life: In an instant, it freed me from the mundane world of my Midwestern youth and gave me the soundtrack to some of the best times of my life.
_________________________
* The flyer says the party was scheduled to be in Lexington, Kentucky, but if memory serves, it was moved last minute to Louisville, Kentucky and was actually held just across the Ohio river in a small Indiana town.
Unabridged printing process with Intrinsic Dreams Studio. Email us for shirts — we’ll have them available at events going forward. S–XL – $40 2XL – $45 3XL – $50 Next up: Backyard BBQ with Theo Parrish April 19 · 3–10PM The Loom · 2220 Livingston St, Oakland, CA 94606 🔗 intrinsicdreamsstudio.com
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