These guys were making music for the future, looking beyond their dystopian landscape but at the same time heavily influenced by it. You can hear the loneliness in many of the tunes, the empty streets and crumbling facades of a dying city. Why they did not incorporate some of this music into the soundtrack of Bladerunner, I will never know, big mistake because it was perfectly suited for it. You will always hear three names when talking about Detroit Techno, and they are Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson also known as the “The Belleville Three” as they all hailed from Belleville Michigan.
These guys released some of the earliest material along with other pioneers of the time like Mad Mike Banks, Jeff Mills, Eddie Fowlkes, Octave One and many others.
As the sound of Detroit migrated overseas, it began to fracture and settled into what we now just call Techno. The sounds of this new future music quickly gained momentum in Europe and only hovered in a disappointing holding pattern in the USA as the sound slowly but surely exploded across the pond.
America was in the middle of embracing Hip Hop and wasn’t quite ready for the sound of the Detroit’s Techno, so many of the early producers traveled out of the country to gig and make a living, many of them moved out of Detroit altogether.
To this day, there remains a definitive “Detroit” Techno sound that will always keep “Detroit” as it’s prefix. It’s silky future scapes, and raw funky percussion is just unmistakable and timeless.
Here are some classic tracks along with some contemporary ones that preserve the sound of the funky future soul we call Detroit Techno.