Detroit Techno

The Paczki Principle

A blend of oriental spices and flowers
If you like a jade scent, you'll love this!

Hit any trendy Euro locale and tell them you're from Detroit, and relish the awe with which they treat you then. Like so much about our city, techno is largely ignored in the U.S. but respected, reviewed, revered, and danced to by denizens from Amsterdam to Zagreb.

Like Motown, techno is an almost entirely Detroit-grown music phenomenon. Its roots lie in 1970s avant-garde electronic musicmakers Kraftwerk, and also owe a small bit of early '80s debt to a Chicago dance-club trend that remixed old disco tunes into mind-bending tracks. But it was three friends who came together at their Belleville high school - Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson - who emerged as the pioneering force that changed the sound of modern music. The trio began as teenaged DJs, then each started making records on their own using turntables, synthesizers, and primitive remixing systems. Their spacey, instrumental new sounds caught on with scenemakers in Europe and Japan, and spawned a dizzying list of subgenres, from trance to drum 'n bass.

In the late 1980s, May, Atkins, and Saunderson were involved in the much-missed Music Institute downtown, a showcase for the techno and house sound, and the triumvirate also lent a helping hand to the careers of a number of other pioneers of the genre, among them Richie Hawtin and Carl Craig. Today Detroit-based labels like May's Transmat Records and Craig's Planet E keep the sound of the future pumping from our streets. Both were instrumental in the creation of what was first known as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival at its 2000 inception. Movement celebrates its fifth year on Memorial Day weekend of 2004, with an estimated one million visitors - many from abroad-converging on Hart Plaza and assorted area venues to experience the world's largest outdoor free techno music festival.

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Movement - Detroit's Electronic Music Festival