Host Julian Chambliss explores the deep connections between techno music and Afrofuturist worldbuilding, focusing particularly on the legacy of Detroit’s Underground Resistance (UR). Techno is framed not only as music but as a medium of resistance, imagination, and cultural storytelling.
Host: Julian Chambliss. Featured Voices: Ingrid Lafleur, Tobias c. van Veen, Mike Banks, AduQadim Haqq.
Presented by WKAR Public Media in partnership with MSU Museum at Michigan State University.
Supported in part by MSU Federal Credit Union.
Includes:
Deborah Ray, “Sun Ra,” Detroit Public Television’s American Black Journal, 1981.
Juan Atkins - Techno City, 2010.
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, the Choice Machine Music. A new podcast made possible through the generous support of the MSU Federal Credit Union. Sunrise Writer porn and musical Pioneer has been in the music industry some 50 years and has been called a prophet by many. Sunrise's philosophy of music has been identified as being ahead of his time.
And the city of Detroit recently paid homage to him by presenting him with the key to the city. You have to play the, you have to, uh, develop your ethnic structures. And every nation has people in there who can look out for their race to develop the ethics structure. Without that, any nation can forget it.
Okay. I Right. Worked out. They don't have a music and they don't have a philosophy, and if they don't have things on higher plane. They're not going make it. Samra is a central figure in the recovery story we associate with aro futurism. His cosmic origins, his dedication to experimentation and his rejections of any limitations linked to blackness are crucial elements of what we understand to be the Afrofuturist ethos.
The world that Sunrise described were unique and ultimately, I think to understand techno, we must also recognize that the music. And the culture it created was also engaged in the kind of world building. Welcome to episode five, world Building and Techno. When I go to Underground Resistance headquarters in Detroit and Mike Banks is giving me a tour that is init the blur.
The thought process, the various ideas that he's unpacking within the work and that his colleagues are unpacking as well, are typically topics that we don't wanna discuss and they're harsh. They're realities of blackness or how the world has treated black people that we don't discuss. You know, in quote unquote polite company or at the dinner table or in our history books right on the ground.
Resistance provided the sound installation at the heart of techno rises of the Detroit machine music. As we were developing the show, the decision to reach out to your became an undeniable way was to adhere to the central premise behind exhibition. We wanted to tell the story of techno and we wanted to ground that story in Detroit, acknowledging and celebrating Detroit.
It's central to ur. As Mike Bank explains, the origins of UR are linked to a vision of community that rejected the ways that the outside world forced a vision of failure on Detroit underground Resistance would, yeah. When they told Jeff Males Don't play this WJLB, don't play public enemy, don't play gang star, don't play.
Uh uh, KRS 1 19 92. When they told Jeff that. We could see what was up they brought out, uh, a lot of this gang affiliated Detroit was through with gangs, gay people in the club, trans people in the club, no violence. Everybody had attorney early in their existence. UR produce its own manifesto that imparted the idea that club ground resistance is a label for a movement. A movement that wanted to change the world through a sonic revolution. They urge listeners to resist, to help them quote, combat the mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the Inhabitant of Earth Manifesto made it clear that this programing, they talked about stagnated a mind.
And built laws between people and prevented peace. They promised to use the untapped energy and potential sound to destroy those walls. One of the things really interesting about this manifesto is that it touched many people around the world, and indeed, one of the scholars of Afu of Sound, Tobias Van, be you've heard before in this podcast, talks deeply about the impact.
On the ground resistance, an early focus of his research into futurism and sound, and he highlights the ways that the manifesto is central to the mission of UR. And their short manifesto actually say like, you know, sound can shatter glass, transmit these tones and wreck havoc with these frequencies.
Transmit your tones, create your own sonic universe. Sound is just potent and powerful. It assembles people. I have to speak of the context where I encountered this because in a way this sort of autoethnography matters at this point, because what I started seeing was the promoters of the raves were bringing in the Black Chicago house, DJs and producers, the Black Detroit techno producers, and I was like, this music's black.
Because at that point there was no internet. There's no way to find it out. And I'm like 15. And so the only way was to go to the record store, start buying the records. So I started buying the records and I saved up for my first turntables and on the records would be a fax number. So I faxed underground resistance and said, can you send me your catalog?
'cause that's what you did back then. No website, right. Mad Mike faxed back. And so the opportunity to reach out and establish an interesting dialogue at that point to when I started buying the records and getting involved and then with each record become a press release and the press releases from like Jeff Mills undergone resistance.
There was, it was crazy. It was like full like interstellar manifestos and they get like the Drexia press release and it's full of their like mythology, which is now very well known and celebrated and comic booked and talked a lot about. When that stuff was coming out, it was like wild underground. No one knew really what this meant.
This was not a press release. You were getting some kind of fragment of like an ever evolving like science fictional universe, and we had no name for it. And then with early internet, this is where we started to see people like try and get together to talk about what this. Underground resistance made the claim that sound brought people together As we can hear from Tobias Seed.
Van Dean's recollection, the pool of music did change mind and open pathways to new experiences.
URS Manifesto ends with a call to arms that urges brothers and sisters of the underground to create and transmit their tones and frequencies. No matter how primitive the equipment may be, transmit these tones and re havoc on the programmers they proclaim. Underground Resistance Manifesto PERTs a kind of speculative fiction in literature.
Speculative fiction encompasses writing that explores human problems by transcending conceptive perceptions of reality prompting us the reader to consider something new. Speculative fiction might elicit visual of the future, but the reality is that any fictional narrative is really building on concerns of the present day and the hopes they have for the future.
In the case of techno, creating visuals that help amplify the message was a crucial part of the experience.
To learn more about this process, I spoke to Abdul Kadeem Hawk, a visual artist credit with creating album covers for many techno artists.
Ha is The Man behind Third Earth.
Visual Arts has worked with many iconic Detroit techno musicians and labels, including Derek May and Dmat, Carl Craig and Planet E and the Ground Resistance. But his path to this work started out much earlier. I was a very sick child in the seventies when I was growing up. I had asthma really bad, so I would watch a lot of the TV shows that were on at the time for the kids.
A lot of Japanese shows were on at the time, and I, I watched a lot of Godzilla, a lot of Ultraman. I. A lot of anime as well, battle the planet, speed racer. So I watched all that stuff with amazement. And also on the weekends, star Trek came on every weekend, so just was totally amazed by that. And then when else a boy, of course, star Wars came out.
Uh, yeah, I just soaked all this in and started drawing as a kid and later on in high school. Really picked it up and went in on to art college and started learning more about the culture and started having that, reflecting my art. And then in 1989 is when I started doing stuff for Detroit techno music and then was able to put everything that I was envisioning in art school into the art itself.
Like many people, Hawk became aware of techno through the city's vibrant scene. So October 89, I was just an art student. I had been going to different clubs and different things like that, music Institute and Ts, and the City Club and things like that. They were starting to play techno music, and of course the music Institute was based on techno music and house music was going to that every weekend.
We, one of our friends had a contact with the guys in the Eastern market at the time. There were three labels there. Preacher Derrick May Win, Atkins and Kevin Sanderson, trans Metroplex, and KMS records. It was a hotspot at the time, thriving with activity. So we were. Introduced to Derrick May and he liked our arc and division of what we were doing.
I was heavily into cultures, different indigenous cultures, so he really liked that and really liked the futuristic stuff I was doing. So that's when I was hired. It was October, 1989, and I was really impressed with the whole [00:09:30] scene down there. Everybody was making music. All these young black entrepreneurs had their own thing going.
I just thought it was really amazing seeing these guys. They was only a few years older than me and I was just really impressed with the whole situation down there. They called it Techno Boulevard looking back now, but yeah, at the time, right there on grass and Rip Hill Grass. And Rip Hill is where it all.
Hawk's contribution to techno rest in his collaboration, DJs and producers, he worked with them to give substance to the imaginative worlds within their music. Yeah, listening and interpreting. Mostly because previously to, to us joining Doing Art for, they had Alan Oldham doing art and his stuff was completely different from the stuff we were doing.
His was like an anime style and featuring different characters and things like that. And I was just spacey and. Really out there. We used a lot of fractals at the time because that was something that was new. Some books had just been came out about it and we were fascinated with the whole science behind it.
So we would meet with the person, like at first we met with Derrick and he would show us all this stuff and then he would give us the music to listen to. And I mentioned the brainstorm we would do. It was really a nice. One-on-one interaction with a person like Derek May, and then later when Carl Craig was just starting out, I met with him and he was a real nice young guy and had a lot of ideas and he really liked my science fiction concepts.
That's how I came up with intergalactic beats. I would even, it was before he even moved out of his parents' house. So I would go to his, met him in his basement once, and had a real nice interaction in those early years, and some years later would start working for undergrad resistance. As he explains Hawk's work with the second generation techno artists highlights the world building that captures so many people's attention around the world.
Yeah. When I first started out, what we promised, , the second generation, it seemed like they were really into the deep science fiction concepts and ideas, and, and a lot of my first art reflected that, like, for example, Platy and Intergalactic beep. And the mural I did on the Submerged Ceiling, which was astronauts and planet.
And so a lot of my early work reflected that, especially like the work I did for Trans Man and Planet E, those early years and a lot of the first album covers I did overseas reflected those science fiction concepts that, that I thought of when I listened to techno music. That's the impression I got was deep science fiction.
So. That's what I tried to convey in, in a lot of the arc in the, in the very beginning. Yeah. That's, that's pretty much it. The, the concepts that we had when we listened to the music, one of the most compelling visual concept created by Hawk is linked to Drexel, actually was a seminal techno dual that consisted of James Stinson and Gerald Powell voted for their isolated sounds.
Extensive mythology. The story of Drexia was throw through the music album, art Created, and the Wier notes produced by the duo. Cisson passed away in 2002. Here Hud recounted his interactions with Stinson and learning about the Drexia mythology. In 99, I was, uh, commissioned to do the artwork for a Drexia album called Neptunes, and so I got a chance to meet with James Stinson.
Because at the time my house was only two or three blocks from where their studio was on the east side of Detroit. So he would come over and we would discuss concepts about Drexia and he laid out the whole idea of his vision of Drexia and everything he told me appears or the artwork of that album. So I was very honored to take part in something.
Like Dr. Sierra. 'cause even back then, 25 years ago, they were known as one of their greatest electoral groups of that time. And so I was really pleased. And I had met James previously here and there and submerged. And so I, I knew he was real deep and getting into the conversations with him and discussing the science fiction aspects of Drexel was one of the nicest.
In preparation to do a commission, one of the nicest, uh, conversations I've ever had with anybody discussing concepts to put into a album. Do you remember, was there a concept in those first conversation that really stood out to you as an artist? Yes, the, the, the bubble buildings he described. At first, he wanted to make 'em domes, but then, uh, Phantom Menace came out at the time and I told him, I just seen Phantom Menace.
They had the underwater city with all these domes. Oh, no. He was like, ah, looks. And he was like that. And then I said, we'll just make 'em into the spherical bubbles under underwater. And, and that's when we decided to change 'em to actual spheres and, and have the lines coming down, the tendrils coming down for the energy.
That's when he decided to do that. And tie in the polyon Plexus gel, which is the energy source for the axions. They had already tapped into almost unlimited energy because of their advanced technology, so he was sure to emphasize that. And also the equation that appears on the album. He said that was very important to the Drex as well.
The Drexel mythology stands as a compelling engagement with Afrofuturism as ing Lefler explains here that mythology has been transformed for people all around the world. So you have Drexia creating this mythology that has literally influenced. So many creatives over the past couple decades to the point that we have a major exhibition at the Smithsonian by Ayana b Jackson, who did a whole solo show influenced by the mythology.
And again, it's like a, an awesome way to like never forget about the chand transatlantic slave trade and. How many people drowned is like the baseline of that mythology, but it comes out in this like really magical, mythical way. That's the fantasy of it. You get carried away and it so much so that the pain of knowing that some of your ancestors might have drowned in that ocean dissipates because now they've created this aqua utopia and this whole world that then moves into space.
This vision continues to compel artists and performers , and it serves as a basis for the drex and comics that Hawk has created. Those kind of steps were the basis of the graphic novels that were later go on to create, starting in 2019, 20 years after first meeting with James about the Neptunes Larry album.
And so to do that, I got permission from Gerald Donald. I sent him the different artwork and concepts I had, and then we got support from Zo. And so we came out with this direct geographic novel and it, it really wanted to just tell the story based on James' Vision and uh, that's how the graphic Bible came about.
So. It is one of the greatest things ever did in my career, and I'm very proud that we were able to produce two graphic novels. I wish he could have done more, but yeah, really glad to be able to tell the story of Drexia and that advanced black civilization living at the bottom of the Oshi floor. What skepticism, mythology captures is a sense of collective uplift and care Central to Afrofuturism, not surprisingly direction produced their work under the offices of submerged records.
As a part of Underground Resistance. So Merged Record was a vehicle to protect and support artists in Detroit.
This legacy as a leader and protector of culture in Detroit is central to how many Detroiters understand you are as Omar men Explains. Underground resistance.
Their whole building is essentially like a co-op for people who wanna learn. And it still is. But even when I'd first, like when I was telling you the first time I went to the building, I was going to meet up with a friend who had lived there. And the first thing Mike said to me once he did let me in, he said, there's no smoking and no drinking.
You're here to make music. And that's it. If you want to go around, you can get out. And it's still the same way over there, I think. Underground resistance in a lot of these older generations of musicians, they're not doing it selfishly, but in a way they know that they'll not remain relevant if they don't show the next generation how they did it.
And obviously the landscape nowadays is so different compared to what it was back in the nineties, in the two thousands. What they accomplished back then could have only happened back then. Now we have the internet, so a lot of people are just learning from YouTube tutorials, but there's something about having an actual mentor who's been through it has really been through the trenches of being a musician.
Has also seen all the accolades. There's something so valuable and unique hearing their perspective on it. And again, you had Fiddler showing J Dilla how to even use A MPC and look what happened. Everyone is trying to be J Dilla. Now when they make beats, they try and literally, Questlove was talking about how actual like jazz players like changed the way that they even play.
Like he created almost essentially like a new time signature, just by the way he programmed drums on an MPC, which is crazy to think about. And in a time where there's such a massive information in your fingertips on your phone, there were still people. Who were able to change the, the course of music just with a, a sailor essentially.
You have whole bands and world renowned musicians who are classically trained, literally trying to figure out how the hell was he even playing Like a swing like that. And yeah, just the approach. I think mentorship, obviously, depending on what you're trying to do, but. It's one of the most necessary things to have just in order to understand like what we're here for and why I am even able to call myself a music producer and why people have even heard my records and bought is because someone put me up on gate.
The world building techno moves from imaginary spaces to real world transformation. Techno highlights the way that a futurism uses imagination to spur on collective action by imagining something different. People in Detroit built institutions and inspire actions that shape the wider world. In our next episode, we'll dig into techno and that global conversation that it created.
If you wanna know more about Dexia, considering picking up the graphic novel, the Book of Drexia, buying one and two by Abdul Kadeem Hawk, you can find it online by searching for the books of Drexia. I.
This podcast is presented by WKAR in collaboration with the MSU Museum. Thanks for listening.
