Hi-Tech Dreams, Lo-Tech Reality

“There’ll be dancing / They’re dancing in the street / It’s just an invitation across the nation / A chance for folks to meet / There’ll be laughing, singing and music swinging / Dancing in the street / Philadelphia, PA / Baltimore and D.C. now / Can’t forget the Motor City / All we need is music, sweet music / There’ll be music everywhere / There’ll be swingin’, swayin’ and records playing / And dancing in the street / Oh, it doesn’t matter what you wear / Just as long as you are there / So come on, every guy grab a girl / Everywhere around the world.” – Martha and the Vandellas

“I’ve seen a city, once thriving with Motown and the motor industry, become dreary and quiet as if the past were an illusion. Part of the inner-city is made up of ruins and homeless people, America’s hidden reality. The Music Institute in 1987 drew a boundary between past and future by accepting reality and preparing the future for a generation of brave people. Being close to the 21st century, Detroit has wiped its bygone glories and tried to move towards a new interpretation of the world. It’s electronic music reaches those people trying to dream in life and has been shining ever more year by year. Even if the reality is in fact, like hell, the many shining stars from the city allow us to empathize miles and miles away from the city.” – Tsutomu Noda

As he walks along a graffiti-covered concrete Berlin Wall and past empty lots and demolished buildings, Blake Baxter –“the Prince of Techno”– describes the function of sampling and how it changed over the years, after techno made its way to Europe. Sampling, for Baxter, is a way for frequencies to come together to “honestly compose music” and harmonize a new sound: “Now, everyone samples from Detroit style stuff, or they mimic and copy, and a lot of these artists are making a killing off of it.” Baxter explains that techno began to slip away from its Detroit originators in part because of a gap in access to technology and equipment: “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 our music.” The 1996 documentary Universal Techno, produced by French-German public television service ARTE, features interviews with such major players as the Belleville Three, Aphex Twin, and LFO, in an attempt to historicise techno and rave culture as a form of global collaboration. As one of the oldest artefacts of the dance music phenomenon, Universal Techno documents their first encounters with rave culture and offers a pre-global oral history of techno’s origins in Detroit through detailed discussion of the socio-economic conditions of ’80s Detroit and its influence on key figures of the movement’s interpretative use of music technology.

In the next scene, Jonathan Fleming, author of the 1995 visual history of rave culture in Europe, What Kind of House Party Is This? flips through the pages of a magazine feature on the Belleville Three. As he does so, he gives a succinct, culturally distant portrayal of each of their contributions to techno: “Since these people were being influenced by Kraftwerk, this has become not a culture or a community in Germany, but a life thing. That is why there is such a passion for techno music in Germany as opposed to anywhere else in the world.” The Belleville Three, too, each appear in turn. In a confessional-style scene earlier in the film, Juan Atkins sits in a studio, recounting how he came to produce music at the age of seventeen: “I knew that I wanted to make a record, but that was the extent of my dream at the moment. To have it played and to have people hear it.” He had no idea that the music would travel to Europe and the world. A discussion of Kevin Saunderson’s vocal house project, Inner City – the release that brought techno to the masses – follows. Two of Inner City’s songs, “Big Fun” and “Good Life,” were crossover hits in both the dance and pop markets. Later in the documentary, Saunderson is shown at the Detroit offices of the label Submerge Recordings, pulling and playing his remix of Underground Resistance’s first release, “Living For The Night,” featuring vocalist Yolanda Reynolds – which he called one of his favourite remix jobs. Saunderson explains how The Electrifying Mojo’s midnight show included music that was different from any of the marketable hits programmed during the day: “All of these mixed sounds, which was never heard before until he came on, definitely had a lot to do with the inspiration in Detroit.”

Derrick May, who is referred to earlier in the film as “the crazy man of the group,” talks about his understanding of machinery, electronics, and industry. He explains his transition from DJing to experimenting with electronic instruments, a decision he made after watching Atkins develop a relationship with his machines over the years – in a direct affront to their typically cold, industrial working-class environment. “Machines have no love nor any feeling,” he explains, “and sometimes the people that work for these machines end up having no feeling nor love because they’re working relentless hours, they’re putting in total commitment to something that is giving nothing back.” As a DJ, May developed a philosophy of “making music with music records,” which carried over into his music productions. “We took these same ideas of machinery – not necessarily the synthesiser, but it was more or less the sound of the synthesiser – that we created our own sounds, and all these sounds subconsciously came from the idea of industry.” He takes the Universal Techno camera crew to the Michigan Theatre, an abandoned 4,000-seat French Renaissance-style establishment built in downtown Detroit in 1925 by the infamous sibling architects, Cornelius W. and George L. Rapp. “Inside this building was a theatre,” he recalls, “and they tore out the theatre and they made a car park . . .  I don’t feel sad, I feel angry. Angry at stupid people.” May comments on the arrogant exuberance of American utopian thinking, which inevitably leads to great catastrophe. “In America, nobody cares about these things... People in America tend to let this shit die, let it go with no sort of respect for history,” he complains. Despite being a controversial figure in techno, due to his pointed quips, predatory behaviour toward women, and impassioned improvisational lectures on the arts and all things romantic in the world, May was attuned to the unsustainability of Detroit’s economy and its global export of cars and music: “Being a techno-electronic-futurist, high-tech musician, I totally believe in the future, but I also believe in a historic and well-kept past. I believe that there are some things that are important. Now maybe this is more important like this, because in this atmosphere, you can realise just how much people don’t care, how much they don’t respect – and it can make you realise how much you should respect.”

In another scene of side-scrolling through aged and neglected houses and corner stores in Detroit, the camera draws visual connections with the previous shot of the Berlin Wall. “Detroit, probably as you’ve noticed, is somewhat of a depressed postindustrial city, and I think that the general attitude here with the powers that be, with the government, with the local government is that, you know, industry must die to make way for technology. I think Detroit is a city in North America that’s probably experienced the technological revolution first, and I think that it affects all of the occupants of Detroit, including the artists, the musicians and what have you.” Having coined the term “techno” from his own readings of Alvin Toffler, Atkins reflected that, “The climate has definitely affected us, and I think... we probably wouldn’t have developed this sound in any other city in America other than Detroit, and that’s the major reason why I stay here and I haven’t moved.” He concludes: “There is a certain atmosphere here that you can’t find in any other city that lends to the technological movement.”

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