Episode 3 explores how affordable electronic instruments like the Roland TB-303 and TR-606 empowered Detroit’s Black youth to invent techno. It highlights the role of experimentation, Afrofuturism, and cultural resistance, framing techno as a unique sound shaped by innovation, struggle, and speculative imagination.
Host: Julian Chambliss. Featured Voices: Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale, Reynaldo Anderson, Erik Steinskog, John Collins, Mike Banks, Thomas Sugrue, Carl Craig, Ytasha Womack, Tobias c. van Veen, Omar Meftah, Ingrid Lafleur.
Presented by WKAR Public Media in partnership with MSU Museum at Michigan State University.
Supported in part by MSU Federal Credit Union.
Includes:
A Brief Story of the Roland TB-303 Bassline Synthesizer, 2022,– Johnny Morgan Synth Dreams
Amp Fiddler on Working With George Clinton, Jay Dee and Maxwell | Red Bull Music Academy, 2017.
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 Machine Music. A new podcast made possible through the generous support of the MSU Federal Credit Unit. My name is Julian Chambliss. I'm professor of English and the Val curator of history at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. I'm the lead curator for Techno the Rise of the Torch Machine Music.
This is episode three, the Machine and the Music.
How do you make machine music? If you think about the sounds, they were making them right up on the fly. That stuff wasn't charted, it wasn't written. . But they were great musicians and so they would come up with different rifts, with tired, just different things. And Stacey Hot Wax, hell, talking about a reality of techno music, you can never get away from.
It's incredibly innovative. It's incredibly different. It's incredibly new, and one of the ways that as we've seen before stands out is because of that innovation, it's hard sometimes for people to associate it with Detroit, especially black youth in Detroit. One of the things I've asked myself as I was designing the exhibition was how did African American youth in Detroit get on the creative path that gets you technical?
As we talked about in the previous episode, the diseases history and culture is a major part of that. It's a platform, but techno does represent a particular generation of black youth and dial in love with the world around them. As Ronaldo Anderson talked about here, what's happening in Detroit is not isolated as part of a pattern of black people engaging and kind of sonic conversation.
Each region telling a story about blackness in conversation with the changing social economic times. Those were exciting times, the late eighties, early nineties. A lot of experimentation, and I think as I've told students before, what I miss about that period is you used to, we had regional variety. The guys from Texas and the South had a different sound than the guys from the Northeast and the guys from the Midwest and the guys from the West coast.
Each had a certain sound that we could all vibe. To me, coming from the Baltimore DC area, I would talk about e rare essence and the experience of unlimited and goat music and the rap music and and tech techno. You know, you had some Detroit and Chicago guys when we had the techno in house in there. From an Afrofuturist perspective, one of the things that makes sound Afrofuturist is an intersection, lyrics, technology, and performance.
It's these three things together that highlight an Afrofuturist framework. I wanna focus on the idea of the new technology at the core of the techno story, because no matter how people tell the story or when they tell the story, I. They always talk about the tech to pair with this Ki Komodos team also developed a TB 3 0 3 baseline at under $400 US each.
This was a very modest price to pay to now have the ability to program and synchronize a rhythm and base section for a gig, and was marketed as such. Both units even came with their own small gig carry bag.
That audio from a YouTube video on the roll on 3 0 3 from a username Johnny Morgan sent is one a plethora of history, stories and media dedicated to the 3 0 3.
The rolling 3 0 3 is at the core of every story that we tell about techno.
It was designed by EO pimo around 1981 for the Roland Corporation, and it was recently designed to simulate the S of a bass guitar from the beginning.
This new technology offering a challenge to traditional musicians. We talk about techno in-house. And the unique sounds that we associate with both. Although the TR 6 0 6 was relatively easy to program, the TB 3 0 3 had a rather complex programming nature where the base notes had to be entered into the sequencer separately from the note links and rests.
This made it difficult for artists to program their baseline and led to much frustration, although unintentionally it also made for some great happy accidents. Those accidents are really crucial when you think about Afrofuturism and techno. It's really trying to teach that you might actually have learned to think in only one way, and there are other ways of thinking and you need to do that.
That's Eric KU talking about Afrofuturism practice and it's interesting, one of the things that helps define Afrofuturism. Is any original definition offered by Mark Derry. He wrote that African American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come. He urged us to look for Afrofuturism and unlikely pace.
So for dairy, the definition of futurism is heavily influenced by the technological transformations birthed by the coming of the internet in the early 1990s. He particularly saw glimpses of this in electronic music. He called attention to figures like George Clinton and Hancock. Black youth in Detroit shared with these iconic figures an innovative engagement with technology.
Chronically, they were doing their innovative work with a product that actually didn't sell that well. Commercially, the TB 3 0 3 and the TR 6 0 6 did not sell very well, as they just weren't very practical for their intended use as accompaniment instruments. By 1984, Roland discounted the remaining units drastically to sell them off and end production.
Flooding the market with the small unwanted silver boxes was probably the best thing that could have happened for the budget. Studio musician creating electronic music in their home, and they found their way into the electronic music studios of those who could breathe new life into these instruments in ways not imagined.
This is John Collins, the community curator for Techno, the Rise of The Joy Machine Music and a member of Underground Resistance Talking about the world where black youth find this equipment and star on the path of creating techno. Some of these machines came out, they didn't utilize 'em, but when, why?
That is, we consider them the Godfather and these guys starts knew about these machines and started manipulating them other ways to create this music. 'cause they found a lot of them at pawn shops and people didn't really know what they did or had no use for them. So that's where they bought a lot of that stuff.
You could create whatever you wants 'cause there was no formula for it. And getting these machines to talk to each other, to produce different sounds that , they could speak together. And so we had to talk together and the DJ producer was able to make up his own recipe or , for a particular track by utilizing these machines, making work in them to work together to produce a al that you think you were gonna get.
But, oh, that's the right one I wanna use, of course, a lot with the kicks and the bass and the drums and all of that. So that's basically how it was back in the day. And I mean, of course there were no lyric, there were no vocals. When I saw the little drone machines, I was a leader of a band and we would gig around Detroit.
I always kept a piece of truck or a van running, so I had to pick up all the guys. You know, get the drum keyboard player, Gerald Mitchell. Right? This is Mike Banks co-founder of Underground Resistance, talking about disruption created by these new machines. And somebody came and said, Hey man, I saw a machine at the music store, so drum machine.
It's like, what? Get rid of the drummer then instead of doing a good enough job. So I did. I bought the machine from Juan AKIs and fired Ray. I. And we was doing the gigs with the machine. Makes experience, highlights the speculative nature of early techno pioneers making sounds and imagining possible pathways using technology in unexpected ways.
I had a song called Final Frontier that we made and out was screwing around with it. A lot of times I use the A four method where you just, you know, you try to put it in and it's weird. That thing beeps on seven, I don't know why. It's a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then it's record and don't go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It is cores at seven.
So it's weird and you're, you're going off of seven, but then once you hook the machines to it, they ain't four, four. That's kind of sweet right there. And then I just built the track around that.
The experimentation, the describe by paints opens the door to recurring questions we face as we were outlining the parameters of this exhibition, how you define techno.
Typically, techno is referenced at 30 beats per minute, so, or or more. Whereas fast, when it gets too fast, it turns into drum and bass. Do this, Stacey Hot Wax. Ha. It's not to say that a techno song can't be less than 130 and still can hold that title, and so in, in my opinion, it's the sounds that are used that give you the flavor of giving it a techno flare or not.
It still has that, that that sound or whatever that artist decide that, Hey, I'm gonna make a techno song.
For scholars of Afrofuturism, that unique element to the sound of the machine music is that it captures both the text of the people and the place, but also a spirit that moves beyond the boundaries of what's expected by the listener.
Throughout the late seventies and eighties, the expectations for Detroit, especially in a popular culture narrative, were not good. And this is a crucial part of what techno is offering. It's a response at Exxon Mobile to this broader popular culture narrative here. Thomas grew sketches out what that narrative looked like.
A lot of the pop culture representations of Detroit in this period are ones that are shaped by reactions to the urban uprisings and, and the black power movement whites who are controlling. A lot of the popular culture production in the United States in this period are representing Detroit as this horrific dystopia, a place that's being torn apart by racial violence and rampant crime.
And that's a, a really deep rooted image, the motor city. In this discourse becomes the murder city and. So that's one version of Detroit that's making its way into popular culture in the last third of the 20th century in the aftermath of the sixties Rebellion. On the other hand, there are a lot of cultural producers, artists, musicians.
I. Folks who are beneath the national pop culture radar who are really diverse. It includes techno, it includes punk, it includes a whole scene that's going on the ground, Detroit in clubs, in abandoned factories, in, in neighborhoods that are affordable for people who are engaged in the often not very, uh, rewarding, financially rewarding work of being musicians or artists.
And so. Detroit attracts a lot of folks, in other words, who are see the city as a place where they can practice their creativity, where they can put their ideas into practice. And so there's a really important, really large community of folks who are engaging cultural production in Detroit in the post forward period in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s.
And increasingly, there are folks who are. Coming from sometimes far flung parts of the world to Detroit because they wanna be part of this burgeoning underground or maybe above ground, but often hidden away, often nighttime culture of the city. So the subculture that RI was talking about really becomes, uh, playground for intricate reimaginings of the black experience that works explicitly against these expectations of failure that are being posed on this very black space.
And as someone like Natasha Womack points out, the net result is something that pushes beyond what we understand to be simple reality. It elicits something that is inspirational and transformational for the listener. The music has this life in it, but it also has this, I don't wanna call it dystopian, but surely like a, um, a bit of a surrealism to it.
Technology, uh, from how I understand it, coming into second generation. That is Carl, correct. A legendary dj, record producer and composer who is generally considered part of the second generation of techno creators. Let me from that thought generation and carbon, their own path in the world. And Craig's case, he worked very closely with Derek May, who would go on to become a prolific collaborator working with a number of Detroit artists, including figures like Ken Fiddler.
And digital artists like Abdul Kadeem Hawk, and I've never had this conversation with Juan, but you know, reading interviews with Juan, how he was influenced by the automation robots, that kind of stuff at the Ford factories that gave him inspiration to. Think outside the box and make songs like, uh, off the Battle and no UFOs and, and of that sort Greg experience from the founding generation of techno pioneers.
I liked how techno documented the city's live experience and as they tell, explains, transmitted that to the world. Those particular sounds are born in Detroit. I would say that and 'cause I totally feel like it's taken right off of the assembly line of. The repetition of it, moving and repeating itself and having a, what would they call it, A mechanical.
Tobias c Van v Hones in on this idea of the mechanical and his academic work about techno.
It really pushes us to consider the ways that machine music is an artifact of the ways that African American youth are dealing with the transformations associated with the rise of the internet and of the Cold War, and the emergence of the sort of technologically enhanced future that is so probably in our narratives of science fiction for him.
This music creates an opportunity for all those ideas to be thought of in a different light, driven by the creativity of black people and the considerations of the implications of these kinds of promise technological changes. Several of these ideas were really picked up by Kahan in the 1990s who really did a lot of great work thinking about.
Afrofuturist electronic music and how itore a kind of technological flesh continuum that's very late 20th century and started to think blackness as something that could be transmitted and actually broadcasted cordial une. More brilliant than the Sun Adventures and Sonic Fiction actually published in 1998.
One of the things that actually was doing is really calling attention to the ways that this machine made music created by black artists is attacking the presumptions associated with how we think about categories. All these sounds. Not only is this like a massive communicative resampling network that's constituting a kind of Pan-Africanist sonic community, that's Paul Gilroy's argument.
It's also changing how the world's bodies that hear this sound move in the world. The idea that Tobias Van be suggests here is not just a scholarly abstraction for many people who make the music, machines are important tools for expression, but the need to tell their story. Transcends the tool as Carl Craig alludes to here.
Technology specifically with mid instruments, synthesizers, drum machines, et cetera, et cetera, is the lifeblood of making this music. It is electronic music. It's something that. If we didn't have access to nine oh nines and eight oh eights and June one, oh sixes and H 1 0 1 and Sonic Garage and all these things from, from the early days, we would've still found a way to make something incredible, and it would've still been a movement that came out of Detroit that I think that most of us would've been involved with, but maybe we would've substituted the synth with guitars or substituted with, who knows, an accordion or something.
I think we can see in Detroit a way where new music and a legacy of musical innovation across genre come together. And you can see this. And the way that Stacey Hell talks about Amp Fiddler. So it was very organic, but it stayed funky. And so we kept that rhythm of the funk with it, and that still lives today, and that's what produced and Fiddler.
Am Fiddler's Keyboard is one of the artifacts that we use to highlight diverse, innovative musical culture in Detroit.
He was a singer, a songwriter, a keyboardist, a record producer, and he was drawn to electronic music, and he talked about that journey numerous times through interviews. Here's one in 2003, I started some years ago creating music in a lot of different ways, doing electronic music. I've always bought drum machines, keyboards.
I started playing piano as a kid. Electronics always curiosity ruins my curiosity. So through the years I've continued to do that same thing, and I'm just gonna move quickly through where I started to where I am now, because I. We always made demos and created songs through drum machines. Like when I saw you guys working with that 9 0 9 yesterday out, we bought whatever we can get to try to create music.
And just throughout the past five years, after years of touring, I've decided to create some music myself. I started sending music to, uh, a label in Europe. The conversation came up about the possibility for creating dance music, and I thought, okay, I can do that. Since then, I consider myself an artist first, because being from Motown, you want, I've always been impressed by.
History and Motown Singer. So I'm like a Motown singer in a sense, but I've also create, it gave me the opportunity to do something that I wasn't doing before, which was electronic music in a sense of my dance music. Fiddler studied jazz and began his music career touring, but his turn towards electronic music was bridging the gap between established musical tradition and this unique opportunities represented by inventiveness that understands that it has a longer pass in the black musical tradition, but it's also doing something different.
It's really key to understanding techno as method pops about here. I think even if Fiddler playing in P Fun and then like eventually reaching back to like people like Jay Dilla and Ji and all that, he was approaching it from a musician's standpoint versus I think in Chicago a lot of people would just get their hands on sequencers and electronic instruments and then just see what happens.
At the end of the day, as we can hear from these many voices, the machine music that is created in Detroit, it's not just simply about the mechanical creation of sound, and I think in terms of the sound, it's an interesting sound, right? Techno is not for the faint of heart, and there's a reason for it.
Ultimately that reason that a flour is referring to right there is about creating space to think about blackness, the future and the world in a different way. This is something that Everting Cool talked about very eloquently. There are other worlds they have nots told you about and I think that that opening up to a multiplicity of worlds existing actually, uh, is a kind of a speculative way of illustrating that different communities have different rules and practices that actually influence how the world is perceived, but techno captured is that different perspective.
Coming from African American youth in the late seventies and early eighties, the vision they had was steeped in understanding of where they came from, a recognition of the contemporary landscape they faced, but also a commitment. So a future that was better and really that becomes a core to what makes the machine music so appealing.
I just simply in Detroit, but around the world. In the next episode, we're gonna dig into the DJ, that role as innovators, instigators, and inventors. In the story of techno, if you want to learn more about the machine behind techno, check out Exhibit 3000, curated by John Collins. Exhibit 3000 does a great job of telling the story of technology in Detroit using artifacts from the people who created the music.
Visits are by appointment only. So visit www submerge download.com/exhibit 3000 to learn more by scheduling your visit it.
This podcast is presented by WKAR in collaboration with the MSU Museum. Thanks for listening.
