WRITTEN BY JACK O’SHAUGHNESSY – FOR·MA·TIVE CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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.
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* 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.
