Detroit Techno Research Articles

Black Vibrations: Techno as Queer Insurrectionist Sonics

This conversation is excerpted from a panel which followed Black Vibrations, a performance by DeForrest Brown Jr. and madison moore at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU (ICA at VCU, Richmond, Virginia) on 25 March 2022. Black Vibrations was the first of the ICA’s Test Pattern series, inspired by the legacy of visionary public-access TV programs and alternative video movements in the US. The series invites artists to turn the ICA auditorium into an experimental production studio for week-long residencies, during which they collaborate with members of the local community to create a live performance and internet broadcast. Black Vibrations considered the history of Detroit techno, and the potential of ‘vibrational technologies’ as an instrument and a weapon. madison moore presented a DJ set as a performative lecture, while Deforrest Brown Jr. performed live using tablets and other haptic technology, building upon his work as a cultural theorist and his musical output under the moniker Speaker Music. The performance transformed the ICA’s auditorium into a club environment, complete with subwoofers, dancefloor, hazers, and flashing lights. Video projections pulled from the archives of the Detroit Historical Society – b-roll of assembly lines, auto trades shows, and early ‘80s computer classes – as well as late-night footage from WGPR Detroit, America’s first Black-owned TV station, which helped to launch techno with the popular programs The Scene and The New Dance Show. Following the performance, DeForrest and madison were joined by scholar Alexander Ghedi Weheliye for a discussion about techno: its Black and working class origins, its connection to Queer dance music innovators, and the connection between protest and the dancefloor.

A Hauntology of Clandestine Transmissions: Spectres of Gender and Race in Electronic Music

Electronic music is often presented as originating with the Futurists, John Cage, Robert Moog, Kraftwerk and the Detroit techno scene, yet such descriptions elide the role of women in the history of electronic and experimental music and, importantly, occlude contributions from non-western and non-white musicians. This clandestine history is further obscured by the fact that although there are as many women artists working within electronic and experimental music as there are men, men continue to dominate related events and festivals. In this article, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology—a portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’—to frame such practices of historiography. For Derrida, hauntology marks not a belief in ghosts but, rather, an ethical injunction to preserve otherness, even while such otherness may not be wholly comprehensible to us. The aim of this article is thus twofold: first, to provide a contextualisation of hauntology; and second, to produce a spectrography of electronic and experimental music, of occluded histories and their haunting presence/absence coordinates, in order that we might remember—sit with—the forgotten h(er)istories while all the time acknowledging that these tellings are themselves necessarily partial.

White Label

White Label

A Conversation with Cover Artist Abu Qadim Haqq

Abu Qadim Haqq (b. 1968)—also known as Haqq and the Ancient—is an artist best known for his long-time artistic stewardship over the visual aesthetic of the original wave of Detroit techno. Born and...

Harnessed the Storm—Rereading Drexciya with The Black Atlantic

ABSTRACT In this short article I attempt to expand upon Kodwo Eshun’s reading of Afrofuturist Detroit techno duo Drexciya. Developing Eshun’s connection between Drexciya’s underwater mythology and Paul Gilroy’s 1993 monograph The Black Atlantic, I consider the implications that the Drexciyan oeuvre has for questions of racialized traumatic experience, intercultural identification, and hybridized global cultural imaginaries. I argue that the Drexciyan sonic-fiction, broadly conceived, allows us to understand the productive potential that intercultural identifications allow for self-expression and also the opportunity to understand these outside our own limited local, national, and cultural boundaries.

Tracing the lines of an electronic tattoo

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Melbourne, this article investigates the local techno scene and attempts to establish techno-cultural connections with its roots in Detroit. From a theoretical perspective based on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Kodwo Eshun, three aspects of techno parties are explored, each shaped by the intertwined factors of music, drug and environment. The first discussion considers the hidden and ephemeral fluctuation of the dance floor vibe within the context of an underground scene, which is juxtaposed with the ‘undetectible’ (Eshun 1998: 120) transmissions of early Detroit techno. The two remaining analyses assess the covert operation of techno through the analogy of electronic tattooing, applied first on the human and then on the urban body. The pulsating tattoo lines emerge from technological appropriations that dismantle and reconfigure urban reality, developing the complexities of the Baudrillardian virtual.

Borderlands: Dub Techno’s Hauntological Politics of Acoustic Ecology

This article explores the aesthetic, social and economic relationships between dub techno and urban space. Sketching out the neoliberal economic transition from the post-war economy to a post-Fordist society, this article lingers on dub/techno trends from four cities: Kingston, London, Detroit and Berlin. An archaeology of dub techno is reconstructed into four parts, each highlighting an affective relation, or “sound map”, between music and neoliberal economic production. Starting with the hauntological melancholia of London-based Burial’s music, this article traces the history and sonic networks of the dub techno diaspora, from Detroit techno’s city of urban decay to Berlin’s divided city. Finally, dub techno is narrated through a “borderland” mapped sonically between Detroit and Berlin, suggesting a futuristic politics of dub techno’s acoustic ecology.

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture

Detroit techno is typically historicized as having grown out of the late 1970s and early 1980s middle-class, consumerist, and aspirational high school social party scene, giving the impression that Detroit techno artists created forward-thinking music as a means to acquire subcultural capital and (re)produce their identities. In this essay, this position is nuanced for a more complex understanding of techno’s relation to the quotidian phenomenological encounter with the dystopian setting of Detroit. Concomitantly, predominant theorizations of affect within the humanities, which emphasize the utopian, hopeful dimensions of affect’s inherent productivity, are supplemented for an understanding of productive energy revolving around affects of dystopia and on a certain hopelessness which scholars, in the years ahead, will increasingly have to negotiate. Keywords : techno, Detroit, dystopia, affect, aesthetic, desire, subculture

Techno, Frankenstein and copyright

AbstractThis essay argues that the widespread but not widely recognised adaptation of Frankenstein in contemporary dance music problematises the ‘technological’ constitution of modern copyright law as an instrument wielded by corporations to exert increasing control over cultural production. The argument first surveys recent accounts of intellectual property law’s responses to sound recording technologies, then historicises the modern discourse of technology, which subtends such responses, as a fetish of industrial capitalism conditioned by Frankenstein. The increasing ubiquity of cinematic Frankenstein adaptations in the latter two decades of the twentieth century outlines the popular cultural milieu in which Detroit techno developed its futuristic aesthetic, and which provided subsequent dance music producers with samples that contributed to techno’s popularisation. These cultural and economic contexts intersect in an exemplary case study: the copyright infringement dispute in 1999 and 2000 between Detroit’s Underground Resistance (UR) techno label and the transnational majors Sony and BMG.

The story of orch5, or, the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine

perhaps the first digital sample to become well known within popular music was actually a piece of western art music, the fragment of stravinsky's firebird captured within the fairlight computer musical instrument, the first digital ‘sampler’, as ‘orch5’. this loud orchestral attack was made famous by bronx dj afrika bambaataa, who incorporated the sound into his seminal 1982 dance track, ‘planet rock’. analysis of kraftwerk's ‘trans europe express’, also sampled for ‘planet rock’, provides an interpretive context for bambaataa's use of orch5, as well as the hundreds of songs that deliberately sought to copy its sound. kraftwerk's concerns about the decadence of european culture and art music were not fully shared by users of orch5 in new york city; its sound first became part of an ongoing afro-futurist musical project, and by 1985 was fully naturalised within the hip-hop world, no more ‘classical’ than the sound of scratching vinyl. to trace the early popular history of orch5's distinctive effect, so crucial for early hip-hop, electro, and detroit techno, is to begin to tell the post-canonic story of western art music.

Post-soul futurama: African American cultural politics and early Detroit techno

Techno is a globally successful genre of electronic dance music that can trace its origins to Detroit in the early 1980s, but it has been generally overlooked in academic, historical and critical analyses of 1980s African American music in the United States. This study will consider the cultural context of early techno, its relationship to European electronic music, the birth of the ‘techno’ genre in the UK, the founding myths and histories of techno, and its potential for helping us understand transformations in African American cultural politics in the ‘postsoul’ era.

Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Edited by Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines. New York: New York University Press, 2001. viii, 205 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $18.50 (paper).

Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Edited by Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines. New York: New York University Press, 2001. viii, 205 pp. 18.50 (paper). - Volume 60 Issue 4

Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities

Earl Grey Back to My Roots As the title implies, this is a personal ride through some of Earl Grey's musical influences. Grey takes jazzy, early morning, Detroit techno and filters it through the least amount of drum and bass essentials needed. It may take a little to come down to this pure high after a night of Ed Rush, but it's worth the descent. Techno producer Dave Angel's B-side mix is my favorite because of its uplifting synths and aquatic house feel. When's the last time, you heard those adjectives used to describe jungle? —Roker —A record review originally printed in Urb, a magazine that covers electronic/dance music