In Episode 1 of the RISE Podcast, we explore Detroit techno as a form of Black speculative practice and Afrofuturism, rooted in innovation and cultural expression by Black youth. It highlights techno’s origins, its transformative power, and the ways sound and technology reflect Black futures shaped by imagination, resistance, and community. Host: Julian Chambliss. Featured Voices: Julian Chambliss, John Collins, and Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale.
Presented by WKAR Public Media in partnership with MSU Museum at Michigan State University.
Supported in part by MSU Federal Credit Union.
Includes:
Cybotron Alleys Of Your Mind, 2008
African Drum Music, 2014.
Julian C. Chambliss and Tobias C Van Veen, “Interview of Afrofuturist Sound Scholar Tobias C. Van Veen,” Michigan State University Library, G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection: Voices of the Black Imaginary, June 2021.
Julian C. Chambliss, “Interview of Erik Steinskog of the University of Copenhagen,” Michigan State University Library, G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection: Voices of the Black Imaginary, October 24, 2020.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Rise Detroit's Machine Music. A new podcast made possible due to generous support of the MSU Federal Credit Union.
That was allies of your mind recorded by Juan Atkins and Richard Davis under the moniker of Cybertron in 1981. It's one of the first records Identify a techno, and I think it highlights why we associate that very distinctive sound to the future and why many people, moreover, associate techno would have for futurism.
The sound that is here and allies of your mind is influenced by technical and cultural conversations of the moment. It's driven by the creativity and vision of African American youth in Detroit, and it's the reason that we think about techno as a part of the emergence of what Afrofuturism is in the United States is at the core of what we're gonna talk about in this podcast.
My name is Juliann Chad. I'm professor of English and a bow bearman curator of history at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. I'm the lead curator for Techno the Rise of Detroit Machine Music. The new exhibition about techno at the MSU Museum. You might be wondering. Is he a fan of techno? Well, yes.
Like many of you, I grew up listening to tech, but I'm also a scholar, fascinated by Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that calls attention to the intersection between speculation and liberation by black people, the herald, a better future, greater care, and less harm for all. We can see black speculative practice.
Fancy term that describes futurism and comic books, time fiction, visual culture, and many other fields of endeavor. This exhibition is about techno music and recovering the factors that make it for futurist practice. This is a story of technological innovation driven by black people in response to changing social, economic, and political realities.
This is a story we can tell in many places at different moments, but it's a particularly interesting story in the context of Detroit and the rise of the machine music we call techno.
Over the next few episodes, we're gonna talk about the connections between araz and techno. Talk about the city and its relationship to the emergence of the sound. Talk about what it means to say that it's machine music and talk about some of the figures that help to make the unique experience of techno what it is and how they help propel it into the global conversation that we note today.
We're going to ground our journey in the exploration of techno as a particular phenomenon rooted in Detroit and the experience of black people, the imagination and liberation driven by the work of black youth in that city and the ways that those youth imagine a future through their cultural production.
Welcome to episode one. Tech Note is Black Speculative Practice. At the core of our exhibition is an understanding that tech note is a defining sound of a tism. Now I know what you're thinking. Since 2018 everybody talked about futurism, and indeed that's a symbol moment where many people in the United States and around the world came to understand that there is a vision.
Of the future framed by a black perspective and black experiences that we understand to be Afrofuturism, to tell a story about a hopeful future as opposed to a dark and traumatic past. That approach is an alternative way of thinking about blackness and our future. As people learn more and more about Afrofuturism, we're increasingly understanding that there's a long legacy of black cultural practice that demonstrates that vision of a better future.
We can trace that vision through many different kinds of cultural production, be it literature, art, or music. All these practices demonstrate the way that there is a transformative potential. Offered by black people imagining blackness through their own actions and perspectives to project into a more hopeful future.
I often tell my students, Afrofuturism can be understood as the intersection between speculation and liberation, and. Born of the efforts of black people working in opposition to oppression. This means beyond science fiction writing from Octavia Butler and Sammy r Delaney, or horror films like Get Out.
There are black traditions in art and Culture that offer pathways to liberation that have inspired black people for generations. One of those pathways involves sound.
When I wrote my book Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies, I was trying to figure out is there a kind of a border between an Afrofuturist music and a black music that is not necessarily Afrofuturist, but it's related either by genre or by sounds or, or by ways of thinking. This is Risten KU from the University of Copenhagen.
Talking with me about futurism and sound. KU explains how our collective definition of futurism and its relationship to sound has evolved over time. Informed by the work of black scholars and artists, we all quote the so-called origin of the term from Mark theory. We learned to add something from Natasha Womack.
Uh, we learned to add something from Rena Anderson and for all, it's, it's still a kind of a dynamic term, but it is obviously at its origin, I would say US centric. This is a crucial point. Sound practice is global, but there are particular legacies in the United States that scars like Drdo Anderson with Temple University, editor of Afrofuturism 2.0.
The rise of Astro Blackness and one of the followers of the Black Speculative Arts Movement or B Sound. Talk about these different approaches shed light on what Anderson describes as black speculative practice for Anderson. Understanding Afrofuturist sound allows you to trace a conversation through time and place.
So Afrofuturism is sound. I kind of see 'em as like the descendants of what Du Bois called the Sorrow songs in an American context. And then I think of what, uh, Mary Baraka had to say about our sound in terms of blues people back in the sixties and how it shifts roughly every 30 years in relation to technology and migration and location.
When I go post World War ii, I think how a lot of this shifts to the north when you're talking about sound, and I think of Sun Rah who referred to himself as a tone scientist. So as we can see, Afrofuturist, you sound as a tool to understand the black experience across time and space. And more importantly, as Aris who's talked about this becomes a way to see how black people have asked important questions about the world.
They're asking it through sound, but it originates in understanding as far as I can, uh, see. Understanding the relation between science fiction technology and the contemporary world through an African American lens as a negotiation of the possibility of painting the future from an African American perspective, grounding out consideration of Sal in the black experience, it's crucial to understanding how we should consider Detroit's contribution.
Not simply as a sound story, but also as a story about how black people in a particular place are reacted to the changing world that they see. Technos creation tells a story about black people, community, and action. Sound is key. I. This is Tobias c. Van VE a SC Scholar has written about techno for the journal Dance Cole, I wanna approach this from two angles.
If you're looking at African or African American history, which is to say the erasure of an attempt of a, of African American history by white plantation surveillance capitalism, then sound becomes a way of encoding messaging. It becomes a deeply metaphorical way of actually transmitting. Messages of resistance and rebellion and very specific directions.
If sound is the pathway to understanding black experience, what does Techno's origins and evolution tell us about Detroit and its place in the Wilder world? To get to that question, I spoke with John Collins. John serves as the community curator for techno the Rise of Detroit Machine Music. But more importantly, he's a dj.
He's been there from the beginning. My name is John Collins. I'm from Detroit, Michigan, horse, born and raised. Lived in New York for a while, moved back to Detroit. I am. DJ, producing for Underground Resistance and also president of the Detroit Berlin Connection and Chair of the Detroit Entertainment Commission.
Resident DJ at Spotlight in Detroit, which is a popular, very popular club in Detroit and also sneaker boxing. Played all every club in Detroit, you know, just a long history, travel internationally, participating in conferences, paddle discussions all around the world, and Detroit. I'm considered an expert in the history of techno music, of course, founded in Detroit Mission.
Talking with John is both an education and an exploration. I wanted to get his view on definition of techno and the implications around that definition. Let me first start off with that, with the differences between house and techno and house music, of course, created in Chicago. In terms of beats per minute being how fast the track is, you know, be 108 hundred and 900, 1011 beats per minute, as compared to techno, which could be a hundred thirty, a hundred forty, eight hundred fifty beats per minute.
So it's much more, it's faster and more aggressive. House music, also in its early form, it's inspirational. Had a lot of lyrics, not all very inspirational, uplifting music that spoke to people living together peacefully. One of the things that techno artists and scholars share is this emphasis on the transformative message in techno and barley.
Really a transformative message associated with any Afrofuturist music according to the bias C Van, be That transformative message is really central to understanding techno as well. Sound isn't just about what we normally think of as songs. It's actually like an affect of force that gathers people together in different assemblages and makes you move it to different rhythms.
I think one of the things that really sort of animates our approach to this exhibition is the idea that sound can shape culture and it moves people to think and live in a different way, and that's really central to the impact of techno. Techno emerges as a vehicle to think about time place, and it's really central to a concept of present, past, future framework that changes people's worldview, which is really central to Afrofuturism.
The sound of techno is new, but that sound also is engaging in a really complicated kind of cultural recovery. I discuss in my book something I called Sonic Time Travel. This is Ericsson again, which is a kind of about imagining sounds both from the past and the future, and renegotiating historical layers of sonic material, which helps me think about how music both participate in history and is at the same time a way of constructing, uh, historical awareness to, through musical styles, musical figures, and that connote different cultural contexts and different historical layers.
This machine music, and we'll talk more about the machines themselves in later episodes, opens a door to a particular moment in history and black people in Detroit walk through that door as John Collins explains. The first people to be attracted to this music was black people, high school kids, as well as people going to the club.
It was played in black space in Detroit before permeated to clubs and stuff like that. Dis embrace by black people of the sort of transformative power of a new musical form is really what the exhibition is trying to call our attention to. I think the part that I'm most impressed by is the innovation that happened within the creation of techno music.
To dig into the idea of transformative action and worldview in Detroit, I spoke with Ingrid LeFleur. I am the founder of the Afro Future Strategies Institute. I has been an arts curator for over 20 years, and more recently I've become a futurist. Um, I researched the future professionally and uh, I'm a pleasure activist.
Originally from Detroit and currently in Johannesburg, Africa. I'm very proud of our Detroit Techno legacy. The fact that the various artists. Literally created their own mic machine to make a certain sound. And I think that part of it, it's not just the sound itself, but also the production of it, the, the ingenuity that went into the production of it, that really makes it Afro futuristic.
So you're not just experimenting with what is, but you're also creating technology to push that boundary even further. On the one hand, as Ingrid talked about, there's a long history of innovation in Detroit. On the other hand, as we see these scholars sort of allude to, there are particular moments when innovation and transformation take leaps, and there are different sounds created.
In the case of techno, that sound is different. And that's one of the things that people like John College talk about. But I think one thing is like the, the sound just so different and then it became so very popular, of course, everywhere. But I think that people just clearly assume sometimes that this music is noticed, has to be created by white people, you know?
And they don't give it any thought that this form of music could come from acting. It's very inventive for something that's very repetitive. That was Andrew Charles Edmond. My name is Ace. I'm a visual artist based in Detroit. I'm originally from Los Angeles, California for Ace, who created the visual installation that you will see when you visit the exhibition.
Unpacking the hidden complexity of the techno is central to telling its story. When you have something that is repeating very often, but in slightly different ways, over time, you're really making circles. You're making spirals. You're counting 1, 2, 3, 4, and you're going back again. You're going, you know, you're going to eight, you're going to 16, you're making transitions, and that circle or spiral nature of it, I feel is healing in a way.
I think that is, for me, is the core feeling when I listen to technology is do I feel better? Do I feel alive? Do I want to dance? Do I want to get out of my seat? Do I want to live today? For a scholar like Tobias Vaneen, the answer to that question is whenever you have these kind of dancing cultures begin to foam it around the fringes of, of the social norms of heteronormativity and whiteness, you start to get crazy mixings and blendings, and people become challenged, not through argument or ideas, but just through being in a room and moving with other kinds of bodies.
Techno as a sound culture and practice gets people to think about the future. Yet that thinking reflects a black cultural awareness that has been and continually seeks to advocate for a world with greater inclusion and care. At its core, this exhibition is calling attention to the complexity of that reality.
If we truly seek to understand a features of sau, then you must understand Detroit Central Trial D and that story. What I've come to realize is that saying Detroit techno minimizes the importance of techno coming out of Detroit. This is John Collins. Again, long, it's like putting it a in a sub category.
Whereas you know, you have techno, then Detroit techno or minimal techno or then electro, like on a slow chart. But it should be techno. The word techno should be synonymous with Detroit always,
because if it wasn't for the music from Detroit, there would not be any of these subjects.
What is it about Detroit that allowed for techno to be created? Next time, we're going to dig deeper and talk about how the city's culture gave rise to machine music. What circumstances created a context where generation of black you to imagine beyond the color confines of the now and project and create a music about the future.
If you're interested in learning more about the history of techno in Detroit, check out the book Techno Rebels, the Renegades of Electronic Funk by Dan Sitko. If you are in the East Laning, make sure to visit Type to Hope the rise of Detroit machine music at the MSU Museum popup space in the MSU Federal Credit Union Building three 11 Abbott Street.
Can find us on the sixth floor.
This podcast is presented by WKAR in collaboration with the MSU Museum. Thanks for listening.
