How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
Early Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins as Model 500 (Channel One, Borderland, Cybertron, Belleville Three), Metroplex Records, electro sound influenced by Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, and Space Disco (Meco, French band Space). The sound goes back to the 1970s in Europe but Detroit techno gives it an austere, minimalist, endlessly unspooling, shifting, hypnotic retro-space groove rust belt motor city signature. Neo-Noir sounds of the 20th century.
Early edition Belleville Three: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May. Detroit techno produced Chicago House. Ja'nine Barker vocal is ghostly, gothic, even pitiful, overwhelmed by the galloping electro pump and a swirling, strobing chatter of hypnotizing beat accents. Echoes of New Order's "Blue Monday" morph into Kraftwerk Afrofuturism. TGIDF.
Third Generation Disco: David Mancuso to Frankie Knuckles to Derrick May or Rhythm is Rhythm. Invented spacey electro disco sound with collaborating DJ record nerd friends, The Belleville Three, from Detroit; innovating off Kraftwerk's electronic and ambient take on disco. They called their DJ soundsystem business Deep Space Soundworks. "Beyond the Dance" feels trance-y, even possibly psychedelic, a dash of ambient Brian Eno, chill-out dance music (before that became a tired brand) with this relentless buoyancy that hits that endless groove hooky repetition bell again but in a completely different register here: techno grooves, snappy castanets, crude electronics, a droning pinball machine, zen healing melodic cheap synth tones, pulsating, radiating outward like gamma rays. Where four or five minutes in you want the groove to go on forever: Serene, slow building, surging space disco Detroiters called Techno. Now, 2024, only its ambient splendor remains. And I am surprised this hasn't been endlessly looped in some Muzak space, elevator music, or grocery shopping to Rhythm is Rhythm.
TGIDF