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.
