Two things happened to techno in the 1990s that look opposed and were not. In Detroit, a second generation reclaimed the music as explicitly political. Across Detroit, Berlin and Cologne, producers began removing elements from it until very little was left. Both were responses to the same problem. The music had become popular, and popularity had made it vague.
Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance was founded in Detroit around 1989–1990 by Jeff Mills and "Mad" Mike Banks, joined shortly after by Robert Hood. It operated as a collective with the visual language of a militant organisation. Balaclavas, no press photographs, sleeve notes written as communiqués, and a refusal to sign to major labels that was practised rather than announced.
The stance was not a pose. UR's argument was that a Black American music had been exported, renamed, and monetised largely by others, and that owning the means of production, meaning the label, the pressing and the distribution, was the only defence. Records like Riot, Punisher and, as X-101, Sonic Destroyer were harder and faster than anything from the first Detroit generation. Jaguar (1999) was the closest they came to a crossover hit, and they handled it on their own terms.
UR is why any serious account of techno has to keep the politics in. Remove it and you are describing the equipment.
Jeff Mills
Mills left UR around 1992 and founded Axis. His work from that point is the purest expression of techno as a discipline. Sparse, fast, built from very few elements, and inseparable from a performance practice of three turntables, a Roland TR-909 running live, records mixed in and out within thirty seconds.
The Bells (1997) is the track most people know. His DJ sets are the actual argument.
Minimal Nation
Robert Hood's Minimal Nation, released in 1994, is the record that names a genre and largely completes it in one go. Hood's method was subtractive. Strip the track to a kick, a hi-hat, one bassline figure and one processed stab, then let the tension come from what has been withheld rather than from what is added. He founded M-Plant the same year.
Hood was explicit that this was a soul music played with very few parts, not an exercise in restraint for its own sake, a distinction the many producers who copied the surface of Minimal Nation did not always retain.
Windsor, Cologne, and the other minimal
Across the river from Detroit in Windsor, Ontario, Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva had founded Plus 8 in 1990. Hawtin's Plastikman records, Sheet One (1993), Musik (1994), and the almost beatless Consumed (1998), pushed the 303 into long, hallucinatory forms.
In Cologne, Wolfgang Voigt and the circle that became Kompakt developed a different reduction. Softer, more melodic, built on tiny looped fragments of other records. This lineage, later labelled microhouse, would dominate the following decade.
Carl Craig and the second Detroit wave
Carl Craig, who had assisted Derrick May, founded Planet E in 1991 and pursued the opposite of minimalism. His records are jazz-literate, harmonically dense, and willing to use live musicians. Bug in the Bassbin, released in 1992 as Innerzone Orchestra, was picked up by London DJs and is routinely cited as a direct influence on the emergence of drum and bass.
Craig would go on to curate the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2000, which brought the music back to Hart Plaza, free, in the city that made it. A reasonable place to mark the end of the decade.