Techno: Made in Detroit, Heard in Berlin
Near Detroit, Michigan
In the early nineteen eighties, three friends who had gone to high school together in Belleville, Michigan, a suburb southwest of Detroit, began making music in their bedrooms and home studios using synthesizers that were inexpensive enough to buy secondhand. Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May. They were listening to German electronic music, specifically to Kraftwerk, and also to the Midwestern funk and electronic influences around them. They were also listening to the sound of the city they could see from their suburb: a post-industrial landscape of abandoned factories, silent foundries, empty buildings.
The music they made was called techno, though they did not name it that immediately. It was fast, machine-precise, melodically spare, and built on a four-four beat that borrowed the physics of dance floors without the warmth of blues or soul. It sounded like Detroit looked. Atkins released records under the name Cybotron starting around nineteen eighty-one. May released the track Strings of Life in nineteen eighty-seven. Saunderson created records that crossed into mainstream dance music in Britain and Europe before they charted in the United States.
The transfer happened in an interesting direction. Detroit made techno, and London, Berlin, and Frankfurt received it. European record labels signed the Belleville Three and their associates. European clubs built entire programming cultures around the sound. The movement known as the Detroit sound was celebrated as a cultural export in the same European cities before it was widely recognized in its city of origin.
The Detroit Electronic Music Festival, launched in two thousand, brought the music back publicly to the place where it started. The festival is now called Movement and takes place annually in Hart Plaza on Memorial Day weekend. The parking lots and empty buildings in the background of the earliest photographs of those festival years are the same landscape that Atkins, May, and Saunderson had heard and turned into music twenty years before.
