Talking techno

On Wednesday 7, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago kicks off its first conference on Detroit techno. Over the course of two days, “Beyond 8 Mile: Exploring the Global Impact of Detroit Techno” takes a look at the global influence of Motor City’s homegrown futurist electronic-music movement through the lenses of documentary film and lecture (the very fine High Tech Soul paired with a talk from the film’s director, Gary Bredow); critical academic study with the presentation of “The Archaeology of Scratch” by Garth Rennie of the University of Windsor; and a panel discussion enlivened with live performances by Kero and Trackmasta Lou. It all ends with a bang-out closing reception at Smartbar on March 8, featuring a live PA from Spain’s Alex Under and Detroit’s Punisher and Overfiend. The whole shebang makes us want to sharpen our No. 2s and scrawl techno rules on our Trapper Keepers.

Art and techno are a natural match, perhaps, but for various reasons, a techno conference is an unusual happening in the birthplace of house music. It is advertised as “the first-ever academic conference dedicated to Detroit’s legendary techno scene,” but the SAIC symposium is part of a new wave of appreciation for Detroit techno in academic circles. Just this fall, Indiana University in Bloomington, held “Roots of Techno: Black DJs & the Detroit Scene,” sponsored by the Archives of African American Music and Culture, with appearances by Detroit jocks Juan Atkins and Theo Parrish. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Detroit techno has had a more lasting influence in Europe, where its purer forms remain intact in the clubs of Belgium or Germany. And abroad, the connections between techno and the fine-art world were cemented years ago. In Europe, Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins and the like are considered the equivalent of modern composers. The Detroit-to-Europe connection has been so strong that many of the Midwest’s top DJs have relocated to Berlin to mine the minimal-dance boom. It’s not so strange, considering Detroit radio DJ Charles “The Electrifying Mojo” Johnson started it all in the mid-’80s with a Eurocentric playlist.

The Chicago conference is sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs with help from SAIC’s student government. But it’s really the brainchild of SAIC graduate student Andrew Lochhead, a native of Windsor, Ontario, who still runs Detroit Underground Records in his downtime. Lochhead has tapped into local techno promoter VOLATL to help line up the talent and get the word out. But Lochhead, “a professional raver for 15 years,” is the one bridging the gaps between the clubbers, art students and academics. He’s done time on tour with techno acts and organized gallery exhibits to accompany the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, that city’s mammoth electronic-music fest. Lochhead’s mission is just as much about connecting the SAIC and the OMA to the city as it is exposing techno under a different light. Though he’s hesitant to “academicize” the music too much, the conference, he says, is an opportunity “to explore Detroit techno as a music that comes out of the late-20th-century African-American diaspora.” He’s noticed ripple effects since University of Chicago’s recent Sun Ra symposium—such as copies of the jazzman’s essential Space Is the Place CD in his artist friends’ cubicles—and he’d like Detroit techno, another chapter in the continuing story of Afro-futurism, to get a similar bump.

“For a lot of people, techno was something that happened in the late ’90s,” Lochhead says. But he says the global genre “can wear many hats,” even swallowing hip-hop rhythms with the work of Berlin’s Modeselektor and Michigan’s Dabrye. As the fest and comps like the Kings of Techno attest, the futurist genre now has its own past—and that’s something worth talking about.