Detroit Techno — The Belleville Three, Underground Resistance & the Records That Built a Genre

Techno was invented in a Detroit suburb by three high-school friends. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson — the Belleville Three — were listening to Kraftwerk, Parliament, the Electrifying Mojo's radio show and Italo disco imports in equal measure, and by the mid-1980s they were making records that sounded like nothing else on earth: soulful, futurist, made on the cheapest available drum machines and synths, and aimed squarely at the dancefloor rather than the charts.

The labels are the map. Juan Atkins's Metroplex — Model 500's 'No UFO's' (1985), 'Night Drive', 'Techno Music' — is year zero. Derrick May's Transmat gave us Rhythim Is Rhythim's 'Strings of Life' (1987), still the most emotionally overwhelming twelve inch in the entire genre, plus 'Nude Photo' and Suburban Knight's 'The Art of Stalking'. Kevin Saunderson's KMS put Inner City's 'Big Fun' and 'Good Life' on the charts and quietly stayed the deepest of the three catalogues.

Then the second wave: Underground Resistance — Mad Mike Banks, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood — turned techno into a militant, anonymous, black-owned militant sound-system programme. UR 12 inches from 1991 to 1993 ('Riot', 'Sonic Destroyer', 'The Final Frontier', anything on Red Planet) are the records every serious techno DJ still carries. Carl Craig's Planet E opened the door for the jazz and Detroit-string-quartet side (Innerzone Orchestra, 69, Paperclip People). Robert Hood's Minimal Nation invented what everyone now calls minimal. Jeff Mills's Axis LPs invented what everyone now calls fast.

The collector market for Detroit techno is unlike anything else in dance music. Original US pressings of UR 12 inches, especially the hand-stamped white labels and Red Planet series, regularly clear $200–$500 in clean shape. First-press Metroplex and Transmat 12 inches from 1986–1988 are steadily climbing. Model 500's 'No UFO's' on the original Metroplex, Rhythim Is Rhythim's 'Strings of Life' on Transmat, and the earliest UR sides are already four-figure records in mint condition. Even the mid-90s Basic Channel / Chain Reaction Berlin dub-techno sides that grew out of Detroit are moving.

To start a Detroit shelf: Model 500 'Classics', Rhythim Is Rhythim 'Innovator', Inner City 'Paradise', Carl Craig 'More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art', Jeff Mills 'Waveform Transmission Vol. 1', Robert Hood 'Minimal Nation', and any UR twelve inch you can put your hands on. Then look at what Theo Parrish, Moodymann and Omar-S have built on top of that foundation for the last twenty-five years — the city never stopped.

The pre-history is essential and almost always skipped. Before the Belleville Three there was Charles 'The Electrifying Mojo' Johnson on WGPR and WJLB, whose late-night radio show between 1977 and the mid-1980s introduced a generation of Detroit teenagers to Kraftwerk, Prince, Parliament, The B-52's, Tangerine Dream and the Yellow Magic Orchestra played back-to-back with no genre logic. Every interview any Belleville Three member has ever given credits Mojo as year zero. Alongside him, Ken Collier at Heaven and the Music Institute, and later Jeff Mills's WJLB radio residency as 'The Wizard' (broadcasting nightly mix sets in the mid-1980s), built the local audience that the labels then sold to. Without Detroit's specific radio culture there is no Detroit techno.

The Music Institute is the club that most people outside Detroit have never heard of and should know about. Opened by George Baker, Alton Miller and Chez Damier in 1988 at 1315 Broadway, it ran for only eighteen months (November 1988 to November 1989) but it was the physical space where Detroit techno went from a group of teenage friends to a scene. No alcohol, no dress code, Saturday nights ran from 11pm through Sunday morning, and the residents were Derrick May, Alton Miller and Chez Damier. Every current European festival that treats techno as sacred and communal — Berghain, Panorama Bar, De School, Bassiani in Tbilisi — is downstream of that room.

Underground Resistance is a whole political and structural conversation, not just a label. Mad Mike Banks and Jeff Mills built UR in 1989–1990 explicitly as a militant Black-owned counter-model to what they saw as a white, European colonisation of what was, at that point, Detroit's own invention. UR sleeves were anonymous, artist photos were prohibited, DJ sets were played in balaclavas, and the entire distribution operation ran from Submerge — the UR-owned brick-and-mortar shop and distribution warehouse at 3000 East Grand Boulevard, which still exists and still operates as a museum, distributor and pilgrimage site. If you go to Detroit and only visit one music-related building, it should be Submerge.

The second-generation Detroit producers are the ones keeping the city current, and they should be on any modern shelf alongside the founders. Theo Parrish's Sound Signature catalogue (particularly 'First Floor', 'Sound Sculptures Vol. 1' and everything with Kenny Dixon Jr.), Moodymann's KDJ and Peacefrog releases ('Silentintroduction', 'Mahogany Brown', 'Silence in the Secret Garden', 'Black Mahogani'), Omar-S's FXHE catalogue, Andrés on Mahogani Music, Marcellus Pittman's Unirhythm imprint, Rick Wilhite's Vibes Merchandise store and label, and the Reese / Santonio / Chez Damier axis on KMS all form a continuous second wave. Prices on original KDJ and Sound Signature 12s from 1994–2005 have tripled in the last five years.

The Berlin-Detroit axis is arguably the most important international relationship in dance music history. Basic Channel (Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus) in Berlin took the Chain Reaction / Rhythm & Sound / Maurizio 12 inches directly from the Detroit template and built dub-techno out of it — and then Ernestus and von Oswald built Hard Wax, the Berlin record shop that has functioned since 1989 as the European clearing-house for Detroit vinyl. Almost every serious European techno producer of the last thirty years learned the canon by walking into Hard Wax and being handed a stack of Detroit 12 inches by a staff member. The Tresor label (opened 1991 in the old Wertheim department store vault) then formalised the Berlin-Detroit exchange by releasing Detroit artists — Blake Baxter, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Eddie 'Flashin' Fowlkes — on a Berlin imprint distributed through Europe. That is why Berlin sounds the way it does.

The Movement Festival — held every Memorial Day weekend at Hart Plaza on the Detroit riverfront since 2000 (originally Detroit Electronic Music Festival, then Movement) — is the annual heartbeat check for the whole scene. Free in its early years, ticketed since 2006, it remains the single most important techno festival on earth in the sense that it is the only one where the founders, the second generation, the international headliners and the Detroit residents all share stages in the city where it started. If you have never been, plan a Memorial Day weekend around it once. The after-parties across Detroit (TV Bar, Marble Bar, Spot Lite, Deep Space, Old Miami) are as important as the main stages.

For the digger, a working method for Detroit vinyl. Buy on label rather than artist wherever possible — a random Metroplex, Transmat, KMS, Underground Resistance, Red Planet, Planet E, FXHE, KDJ, Sound Signature, Mahogani Music, Sound Signature or Submerge catalogue number in the correct condition is almost always a good record even if you don't know the specific track. Check the runouts: original Detroit pressings from the late 1980s were mostly cut at National Sound Corporation in Livonia by Ron Murphy, whose 'NSC' initials in the runout groove are effectively a quality mark. Ron Murphy died in 2008; his masters and the specific NSC lathe sound are now historical, and any record with an NSC runout from 1986–2005 is worth pulling.