Detroit techno is an early style of electronic
music beginning in 1980s. Detroit has been cited as the birthplace
of
techno music. Prominent Detroit Techno
artists include
Juan Atkins,
Derrick May, and
Kevin Saunderson. A distinguishing trait of
Detroit techno is the use of
analog
synthesizers and early
drum
machines, particularly the
Roland
TR-909, or, in later releases, the use of digital emulation to
create the characteristic sounds of those machines.
History
Detroit
techno music was originally thought
of as a subset to Chicago's early style of
house. However, some critics believe that the
Detroit techno movement was an adjunct to
house music, named for the new style of music
played at a Chicago nightclub called "The Warehouse". Although
producers in both cities used the same hardware and even
collaborated on projects and remixes together, Detroiters traded
the choir-friendly vocals of House with metallic clicks, robotic
voices and repetitive hooks reminiscent of an automotive assembly
line. Many of the early techno tracks had futuristic or robotic
themes, although a notable exception to this trend was a single by
Derrick May under his
pseudonym Is , called
Strings of Life. This vibrant
dancefloor anthem was filled with rich synthetic string
arrangements and took the underground music scene by storm in May
1987. With subtle differences between the genres, clubs in both
cities included Detroit techno and Chicago house tracks in their
playlists without objection from patrons (or much notice by
non-audiophiles).
The Belleville Three
The three individuals most closely associated with the birth of
Detroit techno as a genre are
Juan
Atkins,
Kevin Saunderson and
Derrick May, also known as
the "
Belleville Three".
These
three high school friends from the Detroit suburb
would soon find their basement tracks in dancefloor
demand, thanks in part to seminal Detroit radio personality
The Electrifying Mojo.
Ironically, Derrick May once described Detroit techno music as
being a "complete mistake...like
George Clinton and
Kraftwerk caught in an elevator, with only a
sequencer to keep them company."
Origins
Kevin
Saunderson was born in Brooklyn
, New York
.
At the age
of nine he moved to Michigan
, where he
attended Belleville High School
in Belleville, a town some 30 miles from Detroit. In
school he befriended Derrick May and Juan Atkins, both of whom had
been born in Detroit but later moved to rural Belleville. At the
time, the three were among the few black students in their high
school.
Geography
The location of Belleville was key to the formation of the
Belleville Three as musicians. Because the town was still “pretty
racial at the time,” according to Saunderson, “we three kind of
gelled right away.” The rural setting also afforded a different
setting in which to experience the music. “We perceived the music
differently than you would if you encountered it in dance clubs.
We'd sit back with the lights off and listen to records by
Bootsy and
Yellow
Magic Orchestra. We never took it as just entertainment, we
took it as a serious philosophy,” recalls May.
Belleville was located near several automobile factories, which
provided well-paying jobs to a racially integrated workforce.
“Everybody was equal,” Atkins explained in an interview. “So what
happened is that you’ve got this environment with kids that come up
somewhat snobby, ‘cos hey, their parents are making money working
at
Ford or
GM or
Chrysler, been
elevated to a foreman, maybe even a white-collar job.” European
acts like
Kraftwerk were popular among
middle-class black youth.
The segratory stigma attaching to
Eight
Mile Road was comparable to that of Watts in Los Angeles, The
Bronx in New York or South Chicago. Although the
Belleville Three lived outside the city
limits, their influence in loft apartment parties, after hours and
high school clubs and late night radio united listeners of
progressive dance music from above and below
Eight Mile Road. Even Techno-friendly
regular hours clubs like The Shelter, The Music Institute and The
Majestic were incubators Techno's progress from basements and late
night radio onto the dancefloors of the world.
During the first wave of Detroit techno scene of the 80s, huge
parties were held with upwards to fifty or more competing DJs. Most
of the early party-goers were made up of middle-class black youths.
However, as Detroit experienced heavy economic downfall, many of
the middle-class white families fled to the suburbs in what is
called the "white flight" of the early 70s while middle-class black
families were displaced by the degentrification of once securely
middle-class black districts.
Detroit Techno as a genre created a new-found, integrated club
scene in Detroit that had not been felt in a general sense after
the Motown label moved to Los Angeles. Television programs like
TV62 - WGPR's "The Scene" - featured a racially and ethnically very
mixed selection of dancers every weekday after school, but the
playlist was typically jammed with the R&B and Funk tracks of
the day, like Prince or the Gap Band. Breakouts like Juan Atkins's
Technicolor, under his Model 500 moniker, eventually found
their way onto The Scene, and helped to validate the burgeoning
local Techno underground with the urban high school set, college
radio programmers and DJs from Chicago to London and beyond. In
addition, the advent of a huge circuit of local parties in Detroit
spawned competition between a number of DJs, with a week's
preparation for a party being common.
The club scene was as much in transition as the city they were in.
The wide-spread popularity of techno across socio-economic lines
led to a mixing between West Side and elite high school youths with
ghetto and gangster "jits" (abbreviation for "jitterbug").
Unfortunately, the economic problems of Detroit and the prevalent
social apathy and desolation led to a proliferation of
gun violence within clubs and by 1986, the
techno club scenes were wrought with gun shootings, fights, and
acts of violence further compounding the sociological and economic
recovery of Detroit.
This wave of violence, economic collapse, and socio-communal
atrophy extensively affected the Detroit techno themes. Still
influenced by the same Euro sounds,
Juan
Atkins and
Rick Davis formed
Cybotron producing Detroit hits like
Alleys of
Your Mind,
Techno City,
Cosmic Cars, and
Clear before signing onto the Fantasy label. However,
Cybotron's dominant mood of tech-noir and desolation played into
describing the city's decline. "But for all their futuristic
mise-en-scene, the vision underlying Cybotron songs was
Detroit-specific... from industrial boomtown to post-Fordist
wasteland, from US capital of auto manufacturing to US capital of
homicide." By the end of the first successful wave of Detroit
techno, the city's center had become a ghost town and the techno
landscape was evolving into a more hardcore, militaristic frenzy of
drug-infused rave and trance scene.
Influences
The three teenage friends bonded while listening to an eclectic mix
of music:
Kraftwerk,
Parliament,
Prince, and
The
B-52's.
The electronic and funk sounds that
influenced the Belleville Three came primarily from a 5-hour
late-night radio show called The Midnight Funk Association,
broadcast in Detroit by DJ Charles "Electrifyin' Mojo" Johnson on WGPR
. Juan
Atkins was inspired to buy a
synthesizer
after hearing Parliament. Atkins was also the first in the group to
take up turntablism, teaching May and Saunderson how to
DJ.
Early careers
Under the name Deep Space Soundworks, Atkins and May began to DJ on
Detroit’s party circuit. By 1981, Mojo was playing the record mixes
recorded by the Belleville Three, who were also branching out to
work with other musicians.
The trio traveled to Chicago
to
investigate the house music scene there,
particularly the legendary Chicago DJs Ron
Hardy and Frankie
Knuckles. House was a natural progression from disco
music, so that the trio began to formulate the synthesis of this
dance music with the mechanical sounds of groups like Kraftwerk, in
a way that reflected post-industrialist Detroit. An obsession with
the future and its machines is reflected in much of their music,
because, according to Atkins, Detroit is the most advanced in the
transition away from industrialism.
First Wave of Detroit Techno
While attending
Washtenaw
Community College, Atkins met
Rick Davis and formed
Cybotron with him. Their first single “Alleys of
Your Mind”—recorded on their Deep Space label in 1981—sold 15,000
copies, and the success of two follow-up singles, “Cosmic Cars” and
“Clear,” led the California-based label Fantasy to sign the duo and
release their album,
Clear. After Cybotron split due to
creative differences, Atkins began recording as Model 500 on his
own label, Metroplex, in 1985. His landmark single, “No UFOs,” soon
arrived.
Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May,
and Kevin Saunderson also recorded on Metroplex.
Collaboration
Although the Detroit musicians—the Belleville Three and other early
pioneers like
Eddie Fowlkes, and
James Pennington—were a close-knit
group who shared equipment and studio space, and who helped each
other with projects, friction developed. Each member of the
Belleville Three branched off on his own record label. May's
Transmat began as a sublabel imprint of
Metroplex. Saunderson founded KMS based on his own initials.
They set
up shop in close proximity to one another, in Detroit’s Eastern
Market
district.
Names
All of the Belleville Three have worked under many different names
and titles. Derrick May saw great success under the name is , his
moniker when he released his landmark “
Strings of Life.” Kevin Saunderson’s most
commercially recognized projects was
Inner City with vocalist
Paris Grey. Juan Atkins has been lauded as the
"Godfather of Techno" while Derrick May is thought of as the
"Innovator" and Kevin Saunderson is often referred to as the
"Elevator"
The Music Institute
Inspired by Chicago's house clubs, May, Atkins, and Saunderson
started a club of their own in downtown Detroit, named the Music
Institute. The club helped unite a previously scattered scene into
an underground "family," where May, Atkins, and Saunderson DJed
with fellow pioneers like Eddie "Flashin" Fowlkes and
Blake Baxter. It allowed for collaboration, and
helped inspire what would become the second wave of Detroit-area
techno, which included artists whom the Belleville Three had
influenced and mentored.
Success abroad
In 1988, due to the immense popularity of American electronic music
in Great Britain, dance music entrepreneur Neil Rushton approached
the Belleville Three to license their work for release in the UK.
To define the Detroit sound as being distinct from Chicago house,
Rushton and the Belleville Three chose the word "techno" for their
tracks, a term that Atkins had been using since his Cybotron days
("Techno City" was an early single). However, the trio from
Belleville had some reservations about the culture that surrounded
the drug-filled techno subculture abroad. Derrick May in particular
continues to advocate that drugs are not necessary to participate
in good music.
Recent work
Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May remain active in the
global music scene today. In 2000, the first annual
Detroit Electronic Music
Festival was held, and in 2004 May assumed control of the
festival, renamed Movement. He invested his own funds into the
festival, and "got severely wounded financially." Kevin Saunderson
helmed the festival, renamed FUSE IN, the following year.
Saunderson, May, and Craig all performed but did not produce the
festival in 2006, when it was again called Movement. Saunderson
returned to perform at the 2007 Movement as well.
The Belleville Three continue to tour internationally. All three
maintain popular MySpace pages promoting their music and
performances. Derrick May says that his mission continues to be "to
save the world from bad music."
Second wave
The first wave of Detroit techno had peaked in 1988-89, with the
popularity of artists like
Derrick May,
Kevin Saunderson and
Chez Damier, and clubs like
the Shelter and
the Music Institute. At the same time,
the European rave scene embraced the Detroit sound, thanks to
Kool Kat Records's release of a
number of Detroit records. May's
Strings of Life achieved
"anthemic" status in 1989, several years after its recording.
Once Detroit Techno became a full-fledged musical genre, a second
generation of regional artists developed into techno icons
themselves;
Jeff Mills,
Richie Hawtin (aka
Plastikman),
Carl
Craig, and
Octave One to name just a
few. Mills began his career as "The Wizard" on Mojo's nightly
broadcast, showcasing his turntablist skills with quick cuts of the
latest underground tracks and unreleased music from local labels.
What began as a Europhile fantasy of elegance and refinement,
ironically, by the early 90s, British and European techno
transformed into a "vulgar uproar for E'd-up mobs: anthemic,
cheesily sentimental, unabashedly drug-crazed.", as British
journalist
Simon Reynolds puts it.
Detroit embraced this maximalism and created its own variant of
acid house and techno. The result was a harsh Detroit hardcore full
of riffs and industrial bleakness. Two major labels of this sound
were
Underground Resistance
and
+8, both of which mixed 80s electro, UK
synth-pop and industrial paralleling the brutalism of rave music of
Europe.
Underground Resistance's music embodied a kind of abstract militancy by presenting themselves as a paramilitary group fighting against commercial mainstream entertainment industry who they called "the programmers" in their tracks such as Predator, Elimination, Riot or Death Star. Similarly, the label +8 was formed by Richie Hawtin and John Aquaviva which evolved from industrial hardcore to a minimalist progressive techno sound. As friendly rivals to Underground Resistance, +8 pushed up the speed of their songs faster and fiercer in tracks like Vortex. However, it was the drug-fueled dynamic of Ecstacy and amphetamine abuse that drove Detroit's hardcore techno scene to the extremes of "brain-dead brutalism". What had started as a value system of elegance over energy, restraint over abandon shared by "purists" of traditional Detroit techno evolved through mutation into a mind-spinning, hardcore mix of trance, jungle, and bleep-and-bass.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Detroit Techno producers experimented
with extended aural soundscapes featuring sparse, ambient
underscores punctuated with sporadic, cyclical periods of
percussion. Extended length vinyl projects like those under
Hawtin's
Plastikman facade are
particularly clear examples of this period. Atkins
Sonic
Sunset CD in 1994 also delivered this new tradition of Detroit
techno. This new variant also included new connections to African
percussions. The racial politics of Detroit Techno gave rise to a
new form of African-American expression, "the link to African
drumming and its emphasis on polyrhythms can't be ignored." One
such example by a white artist,
Richie
Hawtin, is "Afrika" which produced a connection between African
drums and percussion with Techno minimalistic programming.
On Memorial Day weekend of 2000, electronic music fans from around
the globe made a pilgrimage to
Hart Plaza
on the banks of the
Detroit River and
experienced the first
Detroit Electronic Music
Festival. In 2003, the festival management changed the name to
Movement, then Fuse-In (2005), and most recently, Movement:
Detroit's Electronic Music Festival (2007). The festival is a
showcase for DJs and performers across all genres of electronic
music.
Presently Detroit has a genuine techno/rave scene with a varied
cast of dedicated DJs, producers, promoters, fans, and dancers. No
other city in the United States has an underground techno party
scene as vibrant and fiercely protected and respected as the techno
party scene/community in Detroit.
Notable Detroit area producers
Notable Detroit area record labels
Interface Records(Metroplex sub label)
Other notable Detroit techno styled producers
See also
References
- http://www.plexifilm.com/title.php?id=27
- Reynolds, p. 7
- TECHNO -Derrick May, Kavin Saunderson, Juan Atkins - the
Belleville Three
- Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of
Techno and Rave Culture Routledge, 1999.
- Reynolds, p.19.
-
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:U6Dk5AXh-_UJ:www.thetechnocracy.net/techfiles/The%2520beginning%2520of%2520Techno.doc+belleville+three
- Juan Atkins
- Techno
- Juan Atkins Interview - Godfather of Techno
Interview
- Derrick May interview: Godfather of Techno ::
CentralStation.com.au
- Juan Atkins
- Derrick
May
- Pitchfork Feature: From the Autobahn to
I-94
- Derrick May
- inthemix | Features | Derrick May: High Tech
Soul
- Movement
- http://www.demf.com/
- Derrick
May
- Reynolds, p. 219
-
http://www.365mag.com/index.php?pg=spec&recnum=679&Title=365Mag+Interview%3A+Octave+One+on+365Mag+International+Music+Magazine
- Reynolds, Simon Reynolds, "Generation Ecstasy." pg.114.
- Philip Sherburne, "Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and
Techno." Continumm, NY, 2006, pg.321.
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