The 11 best Detroit Techno tracks of all time
Detroit Techno
The original techno: machine funk made in Detroit from the mid-eighties on, where Kraftwerk's precision met Motown's sense of melody and a post-industrial city imagined its own future in drum machines.
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Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
Derrick May's piano stabs have no bassline and barely a kick for half their length, and the record still functions as the most reliable emotional detonator in dance music.
Inner City / Good Life
Kevin Saunderson proved techno could be a pop song without surrendering the machine. Paris Grey's vocal is the human argument at the centre of the genre.
DJ Rolando / Underground Resistance / Jaguar
The riff that a major label tried to buy and the Detroit underground refused to sell. Political history aside, it is simply the most physical string line techno has.
Jeff Mills / The Bells
Four elements, no development, total inevitability. Mills built the most recognisable DJ tool in techno out of almost nothing and it has never stopped working.
Robert Hood / Never Grow Old
Minimal techno's founding statement. Hood strips the music to loop and pulse, and finds that the gospel feeling survives the subtraction intact.
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Carl Craig / At Les
Nine minutes of patient, unresolved chord movement. Craig treats techno as long-form composition and produces the genre's most convincing case for itself as art music.
Drexciya / Bubble Metropolis
Electro-techno from an invented underwater mythology. Anonymous, strange and hydraulic — proof that Detroit's imagination ran far past the dancefloor.
Suburban Knight / The Art of Stalking
The most genuinely menacing record Transmat released. James Pennington builds tension out of a single sequence and then declines to resolve it, which is the whole Detroit method reduced to one gesture.
Galaxy 2 Galaxy / Hi-Tech Jazz
Mike Banks names a subgenre with one record. Underground Resistance's militancy pointed at something warm for once, and the horn line is the closest techno has come to a standard.