Belleville is a small town roughly thirty miles west of Detroit. In the late 1970s three teenagers there (Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson) became friends, shared records, and began making music from equipment that Atkins, the eldest, had learned first. They are usually called the Belleville Three, a label applied retrospectively and one they have treated with varying degrees of patience.
Cybotron
Atkins met Rick Davis, a Vietnam veteran with a synthesiser collection and a dense personal cosmology, at Washtenaw Community College. As Cybotron they released Alleys of Your Mind in 1981 on their own Deep Space label. It sold several thousand copies locally, largely on the strength of Electrifying Mojo airplay.
Cybotron's Clear (1983) is the record that travelled. Released through Fantasy, it was picked up by hip-hop DJs, and its influence on electro is direct and traceable. The group's album Enter arrived the same year and included a track called Techno City. The word, in this context, was borrowed from Alvin Toffler, whose 1980 book The Third Wave described a coming class of "techno rebels" who would seize the tools of the information economy rather than reject them. Atkins has consistently pointed to Toffler as the source.
Atkins and Davis parted ways over direction. Atkins founded Metroplex in 1985 and, as Model 500, released No UFO's, a record that sounds, more than forty years on, like a genre arriving fully formed.
Transmat and KMS
Derrick May followed with Transmat in 1986. Recording as Rhythim Is Rhythim, he released Nude Photo and then, in 1987, Strings of Life, a track with no bassline, built from a chopped piano figure and a string stab, that became the closest thing the music has to a standard. May has described his own work as "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator", which remains the most useful single sentence anyone has written about early Detroit techno.
Kevin Saunderson founded KMS in 1987 and took the most commercially successful route of the three. As Inner City, with vocalist Paris Grey, he released Big Fun and Good Life in 1988. Both were substantial pop hits in Britain and Europe. This mattered. It gave the wider scene an economic base and a bridgehead into the UK charts at exactly the moment the music needed one.
Eddie Fowlkes, whose Goodbye Kiss came out on Metroplex in 1986, is frequently and reasonably described as a fourth member of the founding group.
The name
Through 1987 the music had no settled name. It was often filed under Chicago's house, with which it shared distribution, tempo and audience but not much else. House came out of disco and gospel, techno out of electro and European synthesiser records.
In 1988 the British A&R man Neil Rushton assembled a compilation for Virgin's 10 Records imprint, working with Derrick May. The working title was The House Sound of Detroit. Atkins objected, and offered the word he had already been using. The record was released as Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.
That is the naming moment, and it is worth being precise about what it was. A marketing decision, made in Britain, that ratified a word a Detroit producer had been using for years. The music existed for seven years before the compilation. What 1988 provided was a category, a British release schedule, and an audience that was, at that exact moment, primed to receive it.
The Music Institute
Detroit's own scene was smaller than its export reputation suggests. Its emblematic venue, the Music Institute at 1315 Broadway, operated for barely a year across 1988 and 1989. It served no alcohol, closed late, and was resident-driven, with Derrick May, Alton Miller and Chez Damier among them. It closed almost as soon as it had established itself.
By then the music's centre of gravity had already begun to move across the Atlantic, to a country in the middle of something that looked much less like a club scene and much more like a social event.