Joe Rice wearing a Metroplex t-shirt while performing at Freedom ’95.
JOE RICE – FOR·MA·TIVE CONTRIBUTOR AND LOVE THE GROOVE (DETROIT’S STORY) SELECTOR.
Viewed in retrospect, music of decades past often carries a glow of nostalgia alongside only the tiniest ripples of influence. Rave classics evoke sweaty nights and surreal mornings in small screen memory; wind-up music boxes of an era delineated by oft-faded hopes and tropes.
Unabridged has me reflecting on how sounds from Detroit fit in to both musical and personal history.
Over 40 years since Clear and No UFOs and almost as long since Strings of Life or the Reese bassline, the number of cuts from Detroit whose gravitational waves continue to push sonic innovation are almost innumerable (finding a mere dozen or so to play at Love The Groove (Detroit’s Story) is a challenge!), with ongoing propulsion from both originators and scions. (Which reminds me – time to grip a shipment from Submerge…)
Ordering from Submerge (via phone!) was a weekly habit in the early 90s (can’t believe Bridgette is gone – rest in power). Pre-streaming (even pre-MP3), tunes were tipped via what she played over the line, record store listening stations, email lists like 313 and IDM, and 3rd generation mixtape dubs with no track listings.
Jeno’s Inside The Mind mix was like a secret map of San Francisco the summer I moved from LA, and I can still feel the frisson of listening through a stack at Tweekin’, placing the needle on Drexciya’s Sea Snake and realizing I’d finally found an elusive cut from that tape; and more so another crucial 313 element of the soundtrack to our escape into the future.
Another moment of frisson – finding 4 Jazz Funk Classics by 69 (Carl Craig), one of those records I’d read about on the 313 list but never seen in person, in Gaia Mantra – a small upstairs shop in the Mission, run by Alex Windsor. A few years later, Carl Craig would be performing live at Madness, an all-nighter offshoot of the Monday techno weekly (Mad) that several of us threw – Alex, Jon Santos, Sho Kuwamoto, Ethan Miller, and Monty Luke.
Detroit resonated in our record boxes, and Jon, in SF from Detroit for art school, was the nexus who facilitated my pilgrimage in 1995. Mike Banks – whom I’d never met, and about whom not much had been written by then (or I’d have been starstruck) picked me up from the airport in a Honda and immediately gave me a piece of advice – keep your car clean and never lock the doors; it’s a lot cheaper than paying for broken windows.
Over the next few days Banks’s commitment to the UR ethos was as clear as he was gracious as a host. Here was a young techno snob whom he’d never met, and he put me up in his place (with polite but firm instructions not to enter the adjacent studio, where I glimpsed shrouded machines of formidable power and soul) and set me on a whirlwind tour of Detroit. Ken Collier one night (his set cracked my snobbery; maybe disco didn’t suck?!?), a house party with Ron Trent and Chez Damier up from Chicago, and a dive into the Dance Room at Record Time, where Mike Huckaby gave me a peek into the labyrinth of local records that seemed to exist in a place outside of time and space.
I brought back a ridiculous stack of those records from Detroit, but it was the integrity, creativity, and community building Banks showed me – so resonant with what was happening in SF – that planted seeds of inspiration that flourish to this day.
