INTERVIEW BY SEAN OCEAN – FOR·MA·TIVE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR.
In the early ’90s, I used to listen to a lot of industrial music from my brother; he always listened to Frontline Assembly, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, Ministry, and all that, but I never considered it my music. And one day, he brought home Kraftwerk’s The Mix and Tresor 2 compilation. I stole them from him.
I listened to that Tresor 2 comp constantly back in the day. Underground Resistance’s Jupiter Jazz, which had technical musical chops I didn’t really understand, and listening to the rounded chords of Jeff Mills’ Changes of Life coming through my brain like a freight train. It was soulful, artistic, and hard as nails. I felt like this was my music. And for the most part, I alone was listening to this music; nowhere else in the world I lived in even understood who these people were and how important they were to everyone else.
The more I tried to look, the more I tried to understand by sifting through the lowest quality bitrate DJ sets on Betalounge, doing dives on websites for any information, plowing through archives of newsgroups like alt.music.techno, I realized more and more how much Detroit techno meant to the world. I kept on looking for more of this, but getting sidetracked trying to find anything related to the world of techno in the compilations section at CD stores and Tower Records. It was honestly supremely difficult to find.
So when one day, I saw the Infonet Detroit 313 compilation pop up in the dance comps sections, I finally found my link to dive deeper. To understand what was going on there that drove such a soulful and technical sound. Admittedly, I wasn’t really into the housey bits that framed Detroit techno’s origins, since San Francisco was awash in house music and this certain “you can’t sit with us” attitude that I already had had enough of when I was a young teen, but I was absolutely floored by Kenny Larkin’s War of the Worlds. And I felt like this must be what Detroit techno really meant and as it was described in Hyperreal.
The more I dug, I realized these people were just like me. Just ordinary people who had dreams. This comes from the DIY spirit of the 90s, and the SF Rave scene, where everyone was welcome, even my freaked-out persona. And.. you know, that was grounding because I felt most unwelcome everywhere else.
The more I embraced techno, the more it became a part of me, as someone to constantly seek out for information on the rare subject. I made pause mixtapes and edits for other people I used to rave with. Compilations that really followed in a logical order. But I didn’t know that the cause for it all was really people like Bissmire and Westbam, who kept the soul of Detroit flooded within the acid house scene of the late 80s. I would find that out later. But in the meantime, I was slowly starting to collect records and using my dad’s old turntable from the 70s because I knew that the rave flyers were at the record stores, and the scene in the mid-90s was swirling up something fierce. One day, I was listening to a lot of mediocre house records at Housewares on Haight. Sorry, but that’s true. Maybe all the housers had already mined the gold and left the techno for me? In any case, I came up on a Trax release with Joey Beltram. I knew of Joey Beltram and I saw this Trax release with him and a set of remixes by Claude Young. Someone I did not know. It seemed interesting. It was called Joey Beltram – The Start It Up (Claude Young Remixes)
I put it on at a listening station and the Claude Young remixes were a wild, swirling mass of drums that would be up in my ears for the next 5 years straight as the sound of that techno took over the scene, and I built a thick techno record collection around these ideas. I think, as a young DJ, it was really just me and this music. I, and maybe 1-2 other people in the Bay Area, were competing for the real, honest-to-goodness techno music in the record bins. Only I got there first (you sucker DJs). And again, techno became my identity. And it still is to this day.
And as a side note, as I sit here as an old af DJ, writer, former promoter, sound boy, techno producer, and moderator for r/techno. I feel personally attacked by the implication that techno was formed anywhere other than Detroit. I’m looking at you Talla 2xlc, your “Techno” compilation was trance. Fuuuull stop.
When I lived through Detroit techno’s influences, heard where it evolved from with Acid House and Detroit Electro, and know the connections and the DJs that popularized techno in Europe. If you don’t know, or willingly want to ignore the fact that Techno is Detroit, and Detroit is techno, you’re either blind, ignorant, or willing to erase a rich culture upon which it was actually founded. Detroit’s culture and tradition are something to be celebrated and loved. From there, all of our ethics in the techno community come. From dismissing the music industry, to keeping art, soul, jazz, and funk alive within the music, to keeping your inflated ego in check as well as encouraging the average Joe to pick up a sampler and making a go of it, we all owe Detroit a massive debt of gratitude. I really wouldn’t be here without Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Claude Young, and Mad Mike. And it’s the visionary work of Dimitri Hegemann and the musicianship of people like Thomas Fehlmann that really helped to make a bridge to open my eyes to it.
Also to my brother. I stole your other CDs, if you’re still looking for them. But you probably knew that.
