Detroit techno
Detroit techno is a type of techno music that generally includes the first techno productions by Detroit-based artists during the 1980s and early 1990s. Prominent Detroit techno artists include Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson, Blake Baxter, Drexciya, Mike Banks, James Pennington and Robert Hood. Artists like Terrence Parker and his lead vocalist, Nicole Gregory, set the tone for Detroit's piano techno house sound.
Detroit techno
The Music Institute[edit]
Inspired by Chicago's house clubs, Chez Damier, Alton Miller and George Baker started a club of their own in downtown Detroit, named The Music Institute at 1315 Broadway.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]
Success abroad[edit]
In 1988, due to the popularity of house and acid house music in Great Britain, Virgin Records talent scout Neil Rushton contacted Derrick May with a view to finding out more about the Detroit scene. 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).[19]
Recent work[edit]
Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May remain active in the 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."[20] Kevin Saunderson helmed the festival, renamed FUSE IN, the following year. Saunderson, May, and Carl Craig all performed but did not produce the festival in 2006,[21] when it was again called Movement. Saunderson returned to perform at the 2007 Movement as well.[22]
Politics[edit]
The first wave of Detroit techno differed from the Chicago house movement, with the former originating in Detroit's suburban black middle class community. Teenagers of families that had prospered as a result of Detroit's automotive industry were removed from the kind of black poverty found in urban parts of Detroit, Chicago, and New York. This resulted in tensions in club spaces frequented by ghetto gangstas or ruffians where signs stating "No Jits" were common.[23] Suburban middle class black youths were also attracted to Europhile culture, something that was criticized for not being authentically black. Schaub's analysis of Underground Resistance valued "speaking out of the perspective of the hood than about providing new visions of identity formation for people in the hood"[24]
Identity politics in Detroit techno is focused mostly on race relations. Throughout the creation of techno there was this constant and strong "progressive desire to move beyond essentialized blackness".[24] Even though the classist nature of techno avoided the artists and producers to separate themselves from the urban poor, especially in the first wave, it helped them make metropolitan spaces the subject of their own vision of different, alternative societies. These alternate societies aimed at moving beyond the concepts of race and ethnicity and blend all of them together. The early producers of Detroit techno state in multiple different occasions that the goal was to make techno just about music and not about race. As Juan Atkins said, "I hate that things have to be separated and dissected [by race] ... to me it shouldn't be white or black music, it should be just music" [25]
Second wave[edit]
The first wave of Detroit techno had peaked in 1988–89, with the popularity of artists like Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Blake Baxter, and Chez Damier, and clubs like St. Andrews Hall, Majestic Theater, The Shelter, and the Music Institute. At the same time, Detroit techno benefited from the growth of the European rave scene and various licensing deals with labels in the UK, including Kool Kat Records. By 1989 May's Strings of Life had achieved "anthemic" status.[33] several years after its recording.
By the early 1990s a second wave of Detroit artists started to break through, including, among others, Carl Craig, Underground Resistance (featuring Mike Banks, Jeff Mills, and Robert Hood), Blake Baxter, Jay Denham, and Octave One.[34] According to music journalist Simon Reynolds, in the same period what began as a Europhile fantasy of elegance and refinement was, ironically, transformed by British and European producers into a "vulgar uproar for E'd-up mobs: anthemic, cheesily sentimental, unabashedly drug-crazed."[35] 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 1980s 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 Acquaviva 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.
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, takes course over a period of three days, and is considered to be the best underground electronic music festival in the United States. There are also many events outside of the festival, including the largest afterparties at the Detroit Masonic Temple and another popular party at The Old Miami with a surprise line-up.