In the final episode of RISE, host Julian Chambliss examines how Detroit-born techno became a global phenomenon while its Black origins were often overlooked. Featuring artists and scholars, the episode explores techno’s deep ties to Afrofuturism, the cultural disconnection caused by commercialization, and the ongoing efforts to reclaim its legacy. It’s a powerful reflection on Detroit’s lasting influence and the music’s role in shaping global conversations about identity and innovation.
Host: Julian Chambliss. Featured Voices: AbuQadim Haqq, Adriel Thornton, Tobias c.Van Veen, John Collins, Reynaldo Anderson, Ytasha Womack, Andrew Charles Edman, Blake Baxter.
Presented by WKAR Public Media in partnership with MSU Museum at Michigan State University.
Supported in part by MSU Federal Credit Union.
Includes:
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.
Universal Techno -1996-, 2022.
Transcript
I was amazed by it for sure. And I was very happy that everyone was finding so much success overseas and I know people was traveling there quite often. And I was just happy for everybody that they were able to do this and be able to go over there. But also on the other hand, it was a little bit sad that it wasn't more popular here.
That was Abdul Kadeem Pop, a seminal techno artist we heard in episode five, reflecting on the ramp and rise of popularity of techno in a ways it immediately became a global conversation. In this final episode of our series, we reflect on the global nature of techno. One of the questions that informed our approach to the exhibition, Techno, the rise of the Torres Machine music, is how it became that techno, a music created in Troy by Black people. It's not known as such. As we have talked about throughout this series, there are cultural and historical circumstances that explain why Techno emerged in Detroit. Yet even today, with an annual international musical festival dedicated to electronic music held in the city, there are people in Detroit and around the world who continue to divorce the music from the place that created it. That divorce began very early.
Even in Detroit, after a while, it seemed to fade a little bit.
This is Abdul Kadeen Hawk again.
After the Music Institute closed and everybody left Techno Boulevard, only Derek was left over there and seemed to fade a little bit, in my opinion, locally. But like you said, it was repackaged and sent back and it became popular again, which is a really strange experience in all these things.
Hawk's recollection of the changing landscape of the city highlights an important reality. The Music Institute opened in May of 1988 and closed by November of 1989, a venue that highlights the rise, fall and rise of spaces linked to techno in the city. As we have seen, these venues were important for experimentation and creative make, but it also served as a informational hub to capture and inseminated ideas to countless fans coming from the local community and the wider world.
Adriel Thornton, native Detroiter. I've been producing events in the city for 32 years now, primarily electronic music related events.
Andrew King of age at a pivotal moment, bridging the gap between those originators and the second generation and the transformation around techno, not just a local sound and scene, but a global conversation.
I think the first club I experienced it at was this place called The Alley, which was at Trumbull and Holden, Lincoln and Holden, sorry, which is what Trumbull turns into, I think. But it really was a buddy of mine. We were the same age, but he had older cousins and stuff, just like I did who were in the scene already, who were going to the Music Institute, which we were a little too young to go to, but he knew of some party happening at the spot. We were always up for an adventure. And so we went there and it was the first time I really got to see how people specifically going out for this music interacted with it. That's the first time I saw this guy, his name was Hassan. He had all baggy clothes and was doing what we would call house dancing, which is wild and chaotic.
I'd never seen anything like that. And right next to them on the dance floor was a wedding party, which was, again, very pivotal to me because it was like, wow, this is like any and everybody. And the only thing that really mattered was that they were getting down to the DJ. And if I'm not mistaken, I think that might've been D. Win that was playing. And again, it's weird because I could barely remember yesterday, but I can remember that. This is like 9091 we're talking about, but it was a dark room with just a couple of strobe lights and people were just getting down and it just didn't matter where people were from or what they looked like or anything like that. So it was really a special and pivotal moment for me. And it was actually at the alley that me and my friend Damon went to Carlos Oxen, who was the owner and told them, "Hey, we could help get people in here.
We could hand out flyers at places and stuff like that. " So that literally is how I started promoting. In that same time period, there was also St. Andrews/Shelter and another spot called The Warehouse, which was not necessarily solely dedicated to the music, but you heard it.
These spaces in Detroit were gateways to a broader conversation happening in culture. And the idea displayed there captured the ideology that we would come to understand to be afrofuturism as to biase Van Bean explains.
So the birth of the afrofuturism.net listserv and mailing list with Alandra Nelson and DJ Spooky, Paul Miller. I saw Paul Miller speak in 97 at UBC and ended up having a long conversation with him. The spaces that the music creates isn't necessarily just the physical space where you get together and dance. That space is in the mind. That space has to do with a networking of spaces too that reaches out globally into the strangest of places. I'm from Vancouver, Canada. Most Americans wouldn't know where that is on a map. Maybe I'm making assumptions, but I'm just some white guy from a corner to Canada because end up bringing fully into this world.
The moment that Van Bean is describing is a poked part to techno story. Almost immediately music that was techno became a blueprint for people around the world. The themes born of Black Detroit experiences the end of the 20th century urban industrial order, the end of the Cold War realities that created and the challenges and promises of the internet age appeal to Europeans eager to let go of the past and embrace a brighter future.
But once again, just like we talk about Berlin and the relationship of techno to Berlin,
This is John Collin, community curator for techno, the rise of the choice machine music.
They just loved it from the first time that they heard it.
Here's Van. This is the God of techno, okay? Revered as the God as techno in Germany. Sven opened his set playing jungle tracks, drum and bass tracks. He's saying, "I like this. " Playing drum and bass tracks for 20 minutes before he went into a whole melting pot of techno. And this techno, it had all the old romantic influences that the Detroit stuff had, as well as being hard and fast.
That was Jonathan Fleming, a photographer interviewed in a 1996 Prince documentary called Universal Techno, directed by Dominique DeLuce. This is one of the earliest documentaries about the global conversation around techno. Fleming's reference to that romantic impose Detroit stuff underscores an important element of techno's influence. Techno capture the thoughts and actions of a new generation of Black youth examining the world. As Ronaldo Anderson, co-founder of the Black Speculum Arts Movement and Renown Afrofuturist Theorist explains.
It was a new sound like when you think about the sounds of Herbie Hancock and the sounds of Nucleus and the sounds of some of the other creative stuff at the time. I would say if it had a politics, it was the word it would be called a cool politic because it wasn't about moaning and groaning or being sad. It was a moment where you saw emotion and technology and performance come together in a particular way, which was different from the Motown era. That's why I'm saying to you, we don't even remember the civil rights movement, but we were born in the shadow of it, and I think it represented the emergence of a generation leaving the shadow of it to a certain extent. The beats might have been borrowed like they borrowed some of the stuff clearly like James Brown and all like that as an important figure.
And this generation, we felt more positively about what the older people would've called black exploitation. That didn't bother us because when you look at it, that was like some of the people in the street that we knew talked that way and acted that way. So we were the first generation that had no memory of black people being humiliated in a day-to-day setting or we don't remember. We don't remember segregated water fountains and all this stuff of this stuff. So that was the interesting part about the experimental period of what were we bringing forward to mix in with the new technology and the new coolness at the moment and what would we leave behind?
And there's a suggestion that the sounds of this moment, corporate space of mediation, is meaningful. For many scholars of afrofuturism, a core tent of the practice is a present, past, future construction asks us to think about the past, how to shake the present, and use that knowledge to build a better future. Technology either became the soundtrack for this transformer period, in part because that is the role that Black music always plays in society. This is a point that Natasha Walmack makes here.
So the fun thing with a lot of Black American music is that every time a new genre emerges, it's viewed as, "Oh, this is the music of the future." You saw that in writings in the cricket when they were talking about the jazz of a, not just a cold pray, but you're looking at a Alice Coltrane or you're looking at Ebras's dream, these kinds of pieces, more far out jazz. That was called the music of the future, Sunrock, the music of the future. Hip hop, the music of this post-modern future, right? Same thing with house, the music of the future and in techno, the music of the future as well.
Techno's futurity made it appealing to Europeans, and they in turn made music inspired by the sound. Yet, as Blake Baxter explained, Universal Techno, the consequences of success were complicated for Detroit DJ.
Here in Germany and in Europe, techno now became such an industry and people actually, they make a huge profit from it. They sample a lot and stuff like this. This is okay because this is part of techno, but it wasn't always that way. It was a way where frequencies came together and people composed music. Honestly, now everyone samples from Detroit style stuff or they mimic and copy a lot of Detroit artists and they make a killing off of it. Meanwhile, people in Detroit who originally performing and wrote this music, they suffer for it because we don't have the studios or the money to come across as loud and as strong as the people who copy or are influenced by the music.
As Yatasha Womack explains, one of the things that drives the erasio Detroit from the story grows from the way that fans were exposed to the music. I think that some people don't realize if you weren't really a DJ, either house or techno music, a lot of people listening to these songs did not know who the creators were. They didn't always know what they looked like, right? It's the way house music and techno would be mixed. They're just overlapping mixing that you're hearing it on the radio, you're trying to record the mixes because you're so excited about it. Maybe they shout out who did what, but it's not as clear because there's not this heavy promotion and there's no music video.
As John Collins explains, Underground Resistance sought to address this concern by leveraging their collective power to represent DJs on the global stage.
I must also talk about Underground Resistance because we've always had our own booking agents on sites and I was the booking agent for Underground Resistance for several years. So I would get requests
For figures like Stacy, Hot Wax Hail, to tell the story of the music in a way that honors the community that created it is a challenge that we have to work to overcome.
Our history has been twisted up so bad that we're still learning about stuff and we're intelligent. We read, we know stuff, but it's still every day or every week you find out something going like, "What? We didn't know that. " Why? Because it was hidden from us. And so it's very important for me to have what I've learned and know to live on. This is why I love having this conversation with you being documented so be able to talk so nobody can tell that there's too many stories written for black people by white people and they don't know. It's their concept of it. I've seen some stuff in the books going like, "Are you kidding me? " And you can't tell me because I was there and it's going to just be a blatant lie, but it's their perspective and who they decided to ask and they just didn't know any better. As we've heard throughout this series, Detroit's centrality to creating a sustaining techno has not gone away.
There's been so many waves of techno.
That is Andrew Charles Edmond Ace. He is the artist who created the visual installation in techno, the rise of the Choice Machine Music exhibition. Part of Ace's approach is grounded in an understanding of the centrality of Detroit as a space that nurtures a unique sound culture.
Definitely. I've made music while I've been here. It sounds completely different than what I made in Los Angeles. And it's also a feeling. Things are a little bit slower here. People are a little bit more easygoing. People like to have fun, party here, joke and laugh with strangers all the time. That kind of ease of access, even amidst any difficult times, allows for the music to flow. There's plenty of DJs that you can look up that have moved to Berlin or elsewhere like DJ Stingray. The music he makes in Berlin is quite different than the music he made here. And that's also because of growth and many other things, but it's definitely the more brutal architecture. It's like the train's running on time. It's very mechanic and it's very computer focused. Whereas I feel like when he was here, it was more natural and wavy.
Ace's view brings us full circle in a way. He makes an argument that Detroit generates his own particular kind of sound. That sound like geography he recognizes is grounded in communal experiences. And that, according to Reynaldo Anderson, is connected to a particular generation of Black youth.
You could say an other part of Afrofuturism and culture and south is produced by the kids that maybe a generation ago, some of them were called nerds, this, that, and the other. They might've been the C+ student who liked reading comics and was bored in school and who got started playing the early Atari games of pong and some other activities. We had our comic book circle, they didn't call it book club or anything like that. So the culture emerges out of that experience of people back in the 70s and 80s who were waiting to get next week's version of the comic books and you trade comic books, Marvel versus DC and all that. Plus you had the Atari and Sega Genesis stuff. The Afrofuturism heartbeat in an American context comes from those kids that were the ones that had to experience busing, getting up early in the morning, 6:00 in the morning to be somewhere two or three hours later driving across town, waiting in the cold for the bus.
And you don't have that many black teachers and you soldier your way through. And your relief is the comics, music, Saga Genesis, and maybe some community sports you participated in and maybe being by yourself a lot because you were raised dealing with a single parent. And so that is the pulse of it that creates it out of that era of what would later call neoliberalism and the beginning of the breakdown of communities of color. And so this culture comes out of that matrix. And that's why I say Afrofuturism does not come from the academy because it had different context in other countries, but in an American context, that's what it comes out of.
While Techno is arguably the sound of a generation of Black people navigating the concerns of a particular moment, what those Black people saw and what they did had value for people around the world. Conversations they started have not stopped. Detroit artists continue to create and their example continues to drive a global conversation. As we come to the end of Rise, Detroit's Machine Music, I want to reflect on the journey we've taken together through sound, history, and speculative features. This project began with a simple but powerful idea that the story of techno is about more than music. It's a cultural artifact, a sonic testimony born of place, race, and imagination. It's a story of Detroit, it's labor, legacy, and vision. It is a story about black youth who dare to imagine their future beyond the boundaries set by others.
At its heart, rise is a story about black speculative practice or just simply afrofuturism. The techno sound we explore is not just about drums and bass. It is resistance, rebirth, and redefinition, emerging from the de- industrialization and the possibilities of automation. It channels the anxieties and aspirations of a generation that lived through transformation. These were young people shaped by the echoes of Motown, presence of factories, and the cadence of the machine, and they built something new. They built techno. Throughout these episodes, we heard from voices that made this song geography real, from DJ's human ability of machines, to scholars who see and techno the blueprint of better black futures. We traveled back to the dance floors of Detroit's Underground, where sounds card out spaces liberation and belonging. We followed the beat from the city's working class roots to the global stage, tracing networks of sound, the challenges and notions of who holds the future.
We've also confirmed how techno, the Spideist Black Origins, has often been divorced from the Black Place that created. Part of our goal with this exhibition and this podcast is reclaiming that history, not just to tell it, but to feel it through the voices that know the impact of that story. Techno isn't a footnote in music history. It's a foundational narrative. It's a story about how Detroit gave rise to a cultural rhythm that has in many ways reshaped the world. This podcast and the exhibition that inspired it are both acts of recovery. We remember the pioneers and we honor the community of innovators who build a cultural experimentation with nothing but drum machines, turntables and vision. And we also challenge listeners to rethink the technological narratives that so often exclude Black people and Black culture.
So as we fade out, I want you to remember something. Techno is not just a genre, it's geography and a memory. It is machine music, yes, but it's also liberation music. In every beat, it whispers of possible worlds, worlds where Black imagination lead, worlds where history hums with baselines at future forms and loops. Thank you for listening and learning with us.
If you want to know more about the MSU Museum exhibition, Techno, Rising Detroit Machine Music, find the MSU Museum on the web at wwwmuseum.msu.edu. This podcast is presented by WKAR in collaboration with the MSU Museum.
