Know your EDM history: Chicago house and Detroit techno
written by Josephine Kingery
Synthesized sounds now pulse tirelessly through all kinds of American radio, movies, television and advertising. As $40 Blkmrkt Membership tickets and packed venues at the BEMF might attest, there is a booming market in the US for club culture and the electronic dance music that characterizes it. Yet, many Americans are unfamiliar with their dance music history. Behind this increasingly popular and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon lies the oft-unrecognized roots and history of this musical style: Chicago house and Detroit techno.
Before it all, there was disco. This largely gay and largely minority subculture rose out of New York City and traveled to Chicago with the help of Robert Williams, a famed NYC party promoter. Williams saw an opportunity in the sleepy and segregated city, a way to wake the nightlife scene up. He rented out a loft space in the city’s South Side, and hired New York DJ Frankie Knuckles as the resident musical director. Williams brought in sound systems that Chicagoans had never before experienced. Here, The Warehouse (club) was born.
Knuckles created the culture of the house record by bringing his unique production style to the club. Taking older disco cuts, Knuckles rearranged, extended and rearranged them again using a reel-to-reel machine. While this was no revolutionary practice in the DJ world at the time, Knuckles was self-taught and this technique was truly fresh to the Warehouse patrons– a primarily black and gay demographic. The crowd went for the sound immediately, and proceeded to demand those particular versions from record stores. The shops found themselves helpless to this kind of request; the distinct record stylings of Frankie Knuckles could only be heard at “The House.”
While House music initially referred to the aural atmosphere achieved by playing disco, italodisco and soul records together, this mixture came into it’s own with the introduction of drum machines and synthesizers. A DJ named Ron Hardy filled Knuckle’s shoes, after he left The Warehouse to start his own club (The Powerplant). Here, Hardy set the egalitarian tone of the house scene. It didn’t matter who you were or what you were wearing, because by the end of the night, everyone would be drenched in sweat. At this point, house music evolved to become more minimal than its disco roots, relying more on synthesizers and drum machines than simply mixing, beefing up and remixing.
Five hours to the East, a similar cultural wave swelled. In the early 1980’s, techno was born in response to the hard life of post-Industrial Detroit, as a means of both escape and reactionary expression. The “father” of the genre is Juan Atkins, a man equipped with drum machines, synthesizers and a vision of what life in the future was all about. Indeed, the name techno is a word he adopted from Futurist writer Alvin Toffler.
Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson are known as The Belleville Three, the founders of Techno. As friends at Belleville Junior High, they were first exposed to synthesizer-driven bands like Kraftwerk, Telex and the B-52s by two local radio DJs, Ken Collier and the Electrifying Mojo. Atkins kicked off the techno trend by releasing records with Richard Davis (aka 3070) as Cybotron, with May and Saunderson soon following suit. In 1981, the Belleville Three went on to found Deep Space Soundworks, a music collective geared towards providing a forum for their music. Later, a club called the Music Institute became the hub of the underground scene. Detroit’s equivalent of the Powerplant, this was the place to hear techno; a place where the sound system did the music proud.
Detroit techno and Chicago house can be considered sister genres, for both share the common trait of a 4/4 beat structure, accented by claps and snares on the second and fourth beats. Early artists from both genres could escape their rough environments through music and dancing. Surely, the integration of new, inexpensive equipment like synthesizers, samplers, sequencers and drum machines is another shared trait. The two diverge in their conceptual roots. House music could be characterized as organic and pleasure-centric. Techno, however, went in a brainier direction. The music developed a dialogue with the environment that created it; with decaying Detroit as a muse, the resulting sound is minimal, soulful and melancholy.
Since these earlier days, the electronic music genre has gone the way of specialized sub-genres, a trend started in conjunction with the Internet’s reformation of the music industry. Whole generations of people are coming of age with a computer at their fingertips. This might help to explain both the increasing surge of electronic music artists, as well as the youthful demographic that seeks out their music. As album sales become obsolete to a musician’s ability to live off of his craft, these artists are increasingly dependent on playing shows to make a living. Ultimately, the clubs and shows where House and Techno once solidified their presence are again, in present day, where the lifeblood of the electronic dance music scene is there to be found.
