The roots of techno are often forgotten. Dive into how they came about in the decaying city of Detroit, the Techno City.
Watching the bobbing crowd as the thudding beat shook the walls of the dilapidated North Dallas warehouse, I thought I was in a kind of heaven. Underage teens and twenty-somethings flashing light sticks, popping tabs, communing in black lit lounges, living the weekend with a kind of temporal agency never found at a club, as the entire establishment would be gone the next day and moved somewhere else—maybe a place that you could find, maybe not.
The rave circuit was late getting to the Southern city, but it picked up strong in the late nineties and early oughts. It was good timing for me, but by the time I got to experience the lifestyle it had already mutated and transformed, far from its original roots. And at that time, living in the pre-Internet age, it was nearly impossible to discover those roots, as whitewashed as they were.
The trance and drum n bass I was listening to in the Big D, though descendants of techno, had little to do with it anymore. It had become a refuge for drug-addled, disgruntled white youths from the suburbs, no longer a thing for Black kids to feel a few moments of freedom from police batons. Few there probably even knew that it was a Black art originally.
The drugs for one were alien to the original culture. “Only a few of us understand what it’s all about,” said Derrick May, a founder of the techno movement in an interview with Mixmag. “The rest of these guys popped up out of the water and they’re taking the scene exactly nowhere. And the drug culture is right along with it because most of the kids out there dancing to this music don’t understand why anybody else would like this music until they pop a pill and all of a sudden the music sounds funky.”
Those later genres, born in Europe, were the same location I thought real techno came from. Little did I know at the time that it was from Detroit, a given now for any newcomer into the genre because of the ease of clicking through pages on the Internet.
A collapsing city
For some reason, techno gravitates to collapsing industrial centers. Sometimes rich in car culture—as is the case in Detroit and Berlin—and sometimes just collapsing, like in Sheffield, England. But it’s a universal. The futuristic sounds of computer beeps and vocoded messages seem to shine their best in cities that are much past their heyday and are in some kind of depression.
Techno is a rebel culture. It comes from the LGBTQ and Black clubs in the early days of Detroit and it still inspires rebellion. “Techno is a movement,” Robert Hood, an early techno artist, said in a 2014 interview with Red Bull. “It’s a revolution. It’s a culture.” At Berghain in Berlin, it exploded into a pop global culture that broadcasts to the unwanted elements of societies, it’s now found in new cities across the world, like in the Caucasian city of Tbilisi where it’s constantly a factor in avant-garde and counterculture movements, mostly based out of the club Bassiani.
“All these industrial places influence the music that you make,” British techno pioneer Rob Mitchell tells Jon Savage for his article “Machine Soul”. “Electronic music is relevant because of the subliminal influence of industrial sounds. You go around Sheffield and it’s full of crap concrete architecture built in the ’60’s; you go down into an area called the Canyon and you have these massive black factories belching out smoke, banging away. They don’t sound a lot different from the music.” To me, a long time resident of Tbilisi, I can understand techno’s popularity there as well.
Perhaps because Detroit was a city with perpetual problems that it also became a city with perpetual musical solutions. With the race crises in the 60s—which culminated in 1967 with one of the US’s most deadly and costly race riots—came the life and soul of Motown. Meanwhile the financial devastation of the oil crises in the 70s wreaked havoc on the auto industries that had made Detroit famous. Industry collapsed and Motown moved to LA. And though the left-behind Black party culture was clinging on to disco and Chicago house, there was a perfect brew for a new style to emerge from that.
From Kraftwerk to Techno City
Techno started when three kids in Detroit’s Belleville neighborhood, Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, would stay up late together discussing what they heard DJ Electrifying Mojo play on the radio. They each would begin their own party DJ careers, each contributing to the Black electronic music circuit in their own ways.
DJ Electrifying Mojo played the ingredients that would later be baked into techno. Side by side he spun Parliament and Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Prince. It was that combination of funk with European synth-pop that would come to define the sound of techno. Techno is, as May would later famously put it, “George Clinton meeting Kraftwerk in an elevator.”
“Robots” would also come to define the early-hip hop sound when NY producer Afrika Bambaataa sampled the beat
Kraftwerk especially was inspiring to young Blacks in Detroit looking for experimental outlets. “But if you want the reason why [techno] happened in Detroit,” said Atkins in an interview with Electronic Beats, explaining that it was all because of DJ Electrifying Mojo’s show. “It was on [DJ Mojo’s] show that I first heard Kraftwerk. Mojo used to play ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘We Are The Robots’ pretty regularly. But the first time I heard ‘Robots’ I just froze. My jaw dropped. It just sounded so new and fresh. I mean, I had already been doing electronic music at the time, but the results weren’t so pristine—the sound of computers talking to each other. This sounded like the future, and it was fascinating, because I had just started learning about sequencers and drum programs. In my mind, Kraftwerk were, like, consultants to Roland and Korg and stuff because they had these sounds before any of the machines even appeared on the market.”
Atkins would team up with Richard Davis and form Cybotron. Their focus on future technological imagery full of cars and computers was an ironic nod to the decaying core of Motor City. They soon termed and immortalized the word “techno” on their album title, Techno City, in 1984. The imagery that they created would later inspire the nostalgic music of the 2010s.
Cybotron’s original mix of “Clear”
The other two friends would make their own acts as well. Derrick May performed under the name Rhythim Is Rhythim while Kevin Saunderson created under the name Kreem, later Reese (he would later be credited to inventing the “Reese bassline” in his 1988 track “Just Want Another Chance”), as well as many other monikers.
Reese introducing the famous bass line name after him on “Just Want Another Chance”
The Belleville 3 though needed a podium from which to shout. And that was the role that the famous DJ “The Wizard” Jeff Mills had on his own show, on which he highlighted local Detroit talent like Atkins, May and Saunderson. Mills later went on to create a techno collective known as The Underground Resistance with Robert Hood and “Mad” Mike Banks, the bassist for Parliament. UR would bring the full feel of “rebellion” to techno, with their balaclavas and black combat suits.
“Part of it was to paint a picture of love and hope and futurism,” Banks said on a Red Bull interview.
Jeff Mills did full sets with playing each track under a minute
Techno goes global
In 1989, the Western city that most embodied economic ruin and industry was Berlin. The wall had just come down and the city irrevocably left the so-called Eastern bloc for the West. The crumbling wall brought an excitement and rebirth to the city, which was given a dance beat by the techno wave. But it did not come from Germany.
Dimitri Hegemann was the German version of the Belleville 3. Throughout the 80s, he was organizing synth pop and industrial festivals throughout West Germany. When the wall fell, he set up the famous (and now defunct) club, Tresor in Berlin. Hegemann was already DJing in the city and working to grow a scene during the period of the wall, and was brought into the more experimental electronic spheres while living there. “The city [Berlin] developed me,” Hegemann said in an interview with Red Bull. “They had music that I had never seen before—I was a country boy.”
Hegemann traveled to Chicago to talk with his American distributor. When he arrived, he saw a bucket full of tapes that the rep was ready to throw out. The distributor told Hegemann to take them if he wanted them. In the bucket, he found tapes that he liked, called the number attached, and discovered Detroit and Jeff Mills.
Underground Resistance playing a show in 2015. Techno is high-tech jazz.
Hegemann invited Mills and the Underground Resistance to play at Tresor. Tresor presented techno to kids both in the East and the West as a “common subject”, Hegemann said. “To meet in dark rooms and not to leave at 1:00 in the morning and you could stay there forever, it was a great feeling of freedom and a new beginning.” Interestingly, this happenstance made it so that techno became known and popular in Europe even before the rest of the United States outside of Detroit caught on to the trend.
The future of techno
Techno has evolved since the 80s. Britain especially was a mill of new styles throughout the 90s, giving rise to acid, trance, breakbeat, drum n bass, garage, jungle, and so on which then all transformed to new styles until you reach the “future” this or that we have today.
While the scene seems centered in Berlin today, it’s starting to pop up in various cities around the globe, challenging the Germans’ hold on the style. As Banks noted in the aforementioned Red Bull interview, he sees a lot of people moving to Berlin to do the techno thing. But it’s already been done there. The revolution is over. It’s saturated. It went pop. People need to go somewhere else, explore new cities, fronts and venues and start from the ground up. And don’t forget what techno was all about. It was and still should be about freedom, change, and loving each other.
Check out some of our techno-centric albums
Looking for similar sounds for your projects? Check out some of our techno-centric and techno-inspired albums, like Techno Dance, Automotive Commercial, Electro Beat, or Night Owls.
