When the doors opened to the Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM) in Frankfurt’s Hauptwache square, last year, it seemed that club music was finally getting its due. MOMEM was billed as the world’s first museum to celebrate techno, finally giving the genre an official home in Germany, the country where the pulsing untz of kick drums and snares found a foothold in the global music scene. “There are museums for a lot of other kinds of music,” Alex Azary, a techno pioneer and MOMEM’s director, said in a video produced by a German music outlet and released shortly after Azary secured a space for the museum. “But there’s nothing like that at all for the field of electronic music, techno, house, club culture.”
That claim would come as news to the founders of Underground Resistance, the Detroit-based music label behind the techno museum known as Exhibit 3000. Situated on Detroit’s Grand Boulevard, the modest space has been open since 2002; it is owned by the techno pioneer Mike (Mad) Banks and managed by Banks and the d.j. and producer John Collins. The collaborators, who are now in their fifties and sixties, started the museum so that the story of techno’s Detroit origins wouldn’t get lost or erased as the genre’s popularity grew.
The situation escalated when Peter Feldmann, then the mayor of Frankfurt, sent an invitation for MOMEM’s opening party welcoming guests “in the middle of Frankfurt, where techno has its origin.” The accumulated snubs set off a conflagration in the fiercely protective techno community: female:pressure, a global consortium of women, nonbinary, and trans electronic-music artists, wrote an open letter condemning what they saw as the patriarchal whitewashing of a genre created by nonwhite and queer artists. “Should the claim be a pure marketing measure,” the letter stated, “it inadmissibly exploits the cultures of people with histories of migration and oppression by marginalizing their achievements.”
For the members of Underground Resistance, MOMEM also represented something else: the continued neglect of techno—and Detroit—in the U.S. The Frankfurt museum was the result of years of lobbying from some of Germany’s most notable d.j.s and musicians. Azary was able to secure a five-hundred-thousand-euro loan and a free lease for the space from the city of Frankfurt, a signal that the German state had put its weight behind a night-life industry that is a vital part of the tourist economy. State support for the arts doesn’t look quite the same on this side of the Atlantic. The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts has actually grown since 2016 by nearly sixty million dollars, to two hundred and seven million dollars in 2023, but that number is dwarfed by the German cultural ministry’s budget of €2.3 billion. Germany also provided millions of euros in direct support for artists who were affected by the pandemic.
The anemic funding of the arts in America means that the institutions memorializing the country’s cultural exports look like scale models. It took sixty-one years for the New Orleans Jazz Museum to receive a federal grant, and, with all apologies to the National Jazz Museum, its unassuming Harlem home doesn’t quite match the genre’s influence. The Motown Museum—situated only about a mile from Exhibit 3000, in Detroit—is composed of Berry Gordy’s two-story former house and original studio, a cute callback to the hitmaker’s humble beginnings but hardly the kind of cathedral that you’d expect from one of America’s epochal cultural engines. (A fifty-five-million-dollar upgrade is in the works, funded by donations and private grants.) A long-awaited hip-hop museum in the Bronx is scheduled to open its doors in 2024, more than fifty years after the genre got its start. Instead of waiting around for a benefactor or wrangling funding from City Hall, the guys from Underground Resistance turned the building that houses their studio into a rudimentary museum. “We started Exhibit 3000 to tell the accurate history of techno, and because we didn’t want to be written out of it,” Collins told me. “We know Detroit is first.”
For all its ostensible simplicity, techno is a genre with a complicated history that can mutate and shift depending on whom you’re talking to. Most people agree that Detroit is the cradle of what we know as techno today: the four-on-the-floor beat driven by a kick drum on the quarter notes and a snare or high hat on the second, fourth, or eighth notes. The genre is infinitely variable because of that template, like a car assembly line being modified to fit new models and tastes.
Though it can be hard to hear, techno’s sound evolved from the glittery riffs of disco and the virtuosic basslines and keyboard play in funk. Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” uses four-on-the-floor; so does the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Chic’s “Le Freak.” But it wasn’t as if Detroit d.j.s went straight from dancing under disco balls to programming mechanized beats in a single evolutionary leap. The connective tissue came courtesy of Chicago d.j.s such as Frankie Knuckles, who, in the early nineteen-eighties, started taking apart disco to cobble together a new sound of looped beats and pulsing bass. The music was such a hit at a Chicago gay club called the Warehouse—where Knuckles was a resident d.j.—that people started calling it “house music.”
Knuckles has said that he was partly influenced by the infamous “Disco Demolition Night,” which was held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, in 1979, and featured thousands of disco records being destroyed in a bonfire in center field. The whole thing was a stunt promoted by the Chicago radio d.j. Steve Dahl—in the minds of rock purists like Dahl, disco was too gay and too Black. Knuckles and his collaborators ran toward those critiques with joy.
House music quickly spread east from Chicago to Detroit. Only a few hundred miles separate the cities, and young people would go back and forth to party and hit club nights, collecting D.I.Y. mixtapes as sonic souvenirs. The tempos hadn’t changed much between house and disco—the 1986 track “Can You Feel It?,” from the influential house d.j. Mr. Fingers, has nearly the same beats per minute as “Le Freak”—but the Chicago scene had created something ecstatic by layering repetitive riffs and vocals over Roland drum-machine beats.
Three Michigan kids named Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson heard the future of music in house. The trio are considered the godfathers of techno and are affectionately referred to as the Belleville Three, named after the lakeside town where they went to high school. (Their friend and collaborator Eddie Fowlkes, a Detroit native who was also highly influential in the development of techno, is sometimes called the Belleville Fourth.) They were heavily influenced by the free-form radio stylings of the Detroit d.j. the Electrifying Mojo, who was spinning everything from Prince to J. Geils Band to Parliament-Funkadelic during his nocturnal shows. Crucially, Mojo was also playing records from the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk, whose ghostly machine music, along with the ecstatic grooves coming out of Chicago, gave the Belleville Three a blueprint for their own spare sound.
Ironically, the members of Kraftwerk were themselves deeply influenced by Motown and soul artists like James Brown. But, instead of emulating the raw American sound, they stripped everything down to an icy, chrome-plated core. It was distinctly German, a feat of musical engineering from experimentally inclined musicians. But it still lit something inside the artists putting together their first sets in Detroit. The d.j. Carl Craig once famously described Kraftwerk as “so stiff, they were funky.”
Kraftwerk wasn’t a solitary phenomenon. Europe was incubating its own nascent electronic-dance-music scene in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, as d.j.s from places like the English Midlands and Belgium started playing with new toys with alien names: Roland TR-808, Korg Poly-61, Akai MPC60. Microgenres started sprouting as musical pollen spread across the continent: new beat, synth pop, electronic body music. The velocity of musical exchange was slower back then, and a d.j.’s only exposure to obscure new sounds was often through specialized distributors or an international trip. The artists that broke through—Kraftwerk in Germany, Farley (Jackmaster) Funk in Chicago—ended up wielding exceptional influence on how sounds developed. But many of the scenes were tinkering in their own geographic workshops, letting their surroundings dictate what was created, like wind shaping a cliff.
For Atkins, May, and Saunderson, techno was their own metal-machine music, an echo of the abandoned buildings that once housed the dynamos of the future. The earliest techno is haunting, as if the shuttered Chrysler and Ford factories had turned back on and someone hit Record. As white flight in Detroit swelled from a trickle to a deluge, in the seventies and eighties, the city became majority Black for the first time. “It was a city in decline, but it was also a time where we saw Black people in powerful positions in a way that the generation before us did not see,” Jamon Jordan, Detroit’s official city historian, told me. “The mayor was Black, the school superintendent was Black, the police chief was Black. Seeing that was important.” Detroit’s main radio stations had Black d.j.s and, in something of a rarity, Black ownership. Afrofuturism was an important strain of early techno. Artists like James Stinson and Gerald Donald crafted narratives out of the post-industrial Detroit backdrop. Their group Drexciya imagined the music being created by an aquatic, Afrofuturist civilization populated by the children of slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The music of Drexciya bubbles and bursts, the ecstatic sounds of a Black Atlantis thousands of years in the future.
Drexciya was one of several early techno acts signed to Underground Resistance, which Mike (Mad) Banks and Jeff Mills founded in 1989, after spending years in the Detroit music scene and developing a taste for techno thanks to the Belleville Three. The formation of U.R. marked an evolutionary jump for Detroit techno, as the musical, political, and economic threads that had been knotted together since the genre’s beginning started to gain influence. In 1991, Banks also created Submerge Distribution, an entity that helped bring the sound of Detroit techno to d.j. booths and listeners around the world. Eventually, Submerge became such a vital spiritual nexus of the techno scene that the founders decided to make it a physical one as well. They called it Exhibit 3000, named after Submerge’s address at 3000 East Grand Boulevard.
I visited the museum in December, and decided to start my drive where East Grand curls southwest, wrapping around General Motors’ new electric-vehicle factory. The boulevard unfurls like a conveyor belt across the north side of Detroit and is dotted with landmarks from the city’s storied past. G.M.’s headquarters sat three blocks west of Exhibit 3000 until 2000; Henry Ford’s first Model T factory was on Piquette Avenue, two blocks to the museum’s southeast. There are no signs welcoming prospective visitors to Exhibit 3000. You make an appointment, show up to the red-brick box of a building, and knock on the blue door leading to the headquarters of Underground Resistance. John Collins answered the door, wearing glasses and a black mock-neck sweater. He cuts a professorial figure, and spent the first few minutes of our conversation sussing out whether I was there to listen or presume.
The museum itself is the size of a small gallery and takes up the first floor of Underground Resistance’s headquarters. There’s a set of recording studios upstairs, and artists filed in and out during my visit. On one side of the room is a chronological telling of techno’s origins, starting with its philosophical underpinnings: a picture of a smiling Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor; record jackets from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic; photos of Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy in their “Star Trek” costumes. (The show’s futurist utopia—and Nichols’s groundbreaking role as Lieutenant Uhura—figure heavily into techno’s ethos.) Banks, one of Underground Resistance’s founders, emerged from a backroom where he was watching a World Cup match with friends and greeted me warmly upon arrival. When I met him, he was wearing what I came to recognize as something of a uniform in Detroit: work boots and weathered Carhartt overalls softened by years working on construction sites.
As Collins and Banks took me around the room, I noticed how the exhibits started to form a fuller schematic of Detroit’s music community. There was a dusty copy of “Techno Rebels,” the journalist Dan Sicko’s comprehensive history of the genre; collected records from artists that had been distributed and promoted by Submerge over the years; a blue Michigan vanity plate emblazoned with “TECHNO”; and several pieces of work from Detroit artists, including the painting “Detroit Babylon,” by Ron Zakrin. In the art work, two nuclear reactors sit in the gray distance like alien hourglasses, an image that would appear to be an homage to the 1966 partial meltdown at the Fermi 1 reactor, memorialized in Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s song “We Almost Lost Detroit.” In Zakrin’s work, the reactors are powered by a pair of Roland 808s. Machines are a large part of the display at Exhibit 3000. Behind a glass window at the back of the museum is an antique cutting lathe used to produce master vinyl. An entire section is dominated by a display of vintage drum machines and synths—Korg PolySix, Roland TR-727—that gave techno its driving thump, creating a trophy wall of technology, each piece with its provenance and significance.
There’s even a case of Hot Wheels-size miniature cars and a picture of a glossy eggplant-purple Pontiac, a sign of the cultural inheritance that you take on just by being born in Detroit. Banks sidled up to me as I was looking at the photograph. “I was too young to go to Vietnam, so I went around the neighborhood when kids were getting drafted and asked the older guys if I could have their car if they got fucked up other there.” He had a couple of takers, and still sounded surprised that anyone said yes. Banks is a natural comedian and storyteller, but he went from ebullient to sombre telling this story. The purple muscle car belonged to a neighbor who died in combat, he said. He bought the car from the kid’s parents, and kept it in mint condition for decades.
Collins led me over to a case on a wall near the center of the room. It’s simply labelled “The Future,” and the display is filled with baby photos and school portraits from the extended Underground Resistance family. It’s more altar than exhibit, a hopeful vigil for music’s impact on Detroit and the community that it wants to continue fostering. A typed message, hoisted by a small alligator clip, lays down Underground Resistance’s mission like a challenge:
Alex Azary waited for me underneath an awning across from MOMEM. It was a gunmetal-gray December day in Frankfurt, and, by the time I met him in the midafternoon, the minimal light was already fading into a monochromatic dusk. He wore a chunky knit beanie and large duffel coat, sniffling because he was just getting over a bad cold.
MOMEM sits in a sunken plaza below Hauptwache square, as if someone decided that a major city needed a conversation pit right in its center. On my visit, the Christmas market was in full swing, with tourists and locals biting into snappy bratwurst and sipping glühwein from ceramic mugs, wisps of steam making the entire scene look like a holiday postcard. You have to be looking for MOMEM in order to find it, and I got turned around several times before I found the correct staircase. The only other people in the plaza were a group of men in stone-colored jackets, talking quietly and smoking.
The space was most recently occupied by the Frankfurt Children’s Museum; Azary’s team knocked down the walls and painted everything black, to give it the feel of an underground club. In the weeks before I arrived, MOMEM had hosted an exhibit on the Frankfurt d.j. Sven Väth, and visitors were able to spin records from his personal collection. I visited after the exhibition had ended, so the space had the empty feeling of an office in between tenants. I asked Azary whether he considered MOMEM a museum in the traditional sense. “I want this space to be a cultural institution for club music,” he answered. “I want this to be a place for young people to come and gather and be inspired and learn about the past, present, and future of club culture and electronic music.” I started to wonder if I was getting caught up in semantics. Museums summon up a defined template, and tradition asks that they be equal parts reliquaries and schools, whether they’re on the grand scale of the Louvre or the more modest dimensions of MOMEM or Exhibit 3000. They also require a tight curatorial definition of what’s housed inside them, so that visitors can understand how concepts flow and collide with one another. Musical genres aren’t as defined as museum exhibits, of course. The boundaries are porous and argued over.
Azary had stumbled into one of those arguments before MOMEM’s doors even opened, as critiques from groups such as female:pressure rolled in. He told me that he didn’t consider the space a “techno” museum, saying that the media had used that descriptor as a shorthand for all electronic music and created an unfortunate lexical controversy. A headline in the Times read, “With New Museum, Officials Give Techno the Stamp of Approval,” and the influential electronic music outlet FACT announced that “Frankfurt is getting a techno museum.” “This is a museum for all kinds of electronic music: ambient, techno, house, drum and bass—all of it,” Azary says. He also claims that Peter Feldmann’s comments during the museum’s opening were a frustrating surprise, and that the former mayor had hurt MOMEM’s prospects of more government support by drawing negative attention.
Azary wouldn’t even call techno its own phenomenon. His definition of the genre is so wide as to include early Depeche Mode and Richie Hawtin. For Azary, techno is a vibe, not a sound. “I don’t think you can call something like techno an invention, though I understand why the guys in Detroit have to hold on to to that definition,” he said. “You have to differentiate yourself.” Even if Azary was attempting to avoid a pileup of negative press, the damage had been done, and had created a rift widened by the racial dynamics at play. (MOMEM’s board of directors and executive staff are primarily white; Submerge’s leadership is all Black.) John Collins told me about a recent interview in Australia at which the moderator introduced him to the audience as the curator of America’s first techno museum. “I had to interrupt her and say, ‘the world’s first techno museum.’ ”
There was also the problem of geography. Frankfurt was a vital hub of electronic music in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, but had waned in importance to the scene over the years. The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, shifted the axis of Germany’s electronic-music sphere a few hundred miles northeast, to the newly unified capital. Clubs started popping up in East Berlin’s abandoned buildings, sometimes only existing for a few nights before disappearing forever. In 1991, Dimitri Hegemann opened Tresor in the basement vault of an unused department store in Mitte, on Berlin’s former east side. The club was hot and dark, and its low ceilings created a claustrophobic ecstasy soundtracked by house and techno. “Berlin always was an island, and all these ideas we had were born in the night,” Hegemann told me.
Hegemann invited Underground Resistance to play Tresor the same year that he opened the club.
Jeff Mills put in a marathon performance that night, his face covered by a black balaclava even in the stifling heat of Tresor’s basement digs. The Berlin techno scene had been slowly developing as records from Detroit made their way across the Atlantic and impresarios like Hegemann cultivated a fledgling community. The audience at Tresor was buzzing. Underground Resistance performed with their faces covered, in order to focus the audience’s attention on the music rather than the d.j. It didn’t matter. The crowd was held in rapture to Mills’s dexterity on the turntables, as if they were watching a new language being invented in real time.
It wouldn’t be the last time Mills held the Tresor audience in rapture. There’s a lone picture from another all-night party at the venue hanging in a glass case at Exhibit 3000. Mills, who is Black, is presiding over a crowd of white club kids drenched in sweat. The photo is washed in a flashbulb glare, because someone snapped it when a malfunctioning strobe light slowed its cadence to a lazy blink. “They had never seen someone d.j. that well for that long. And we were, like, ‘We’re from Detroit, this is just how we do things,’ ” Mike Banks told me.
The prolonged session in 1991 at Tresor changed the trajectory of techno forever. The genre had slowly been making inroads in Manchester and Sheffield in the U.K., but Detroit and Berlin seemed to share an ethos. Each city had been hollowed out and reshaped by communities abandoned by their government. The abandoned buildings and deserted department stores also represented blank spaces for d.j.s and producers to play music for willing ears. The Detroit techno community had had been cultivating those progressively minded crowds for years—Mills at the club Cheeks, Banks at the Music Institute—and they found a kindred spirit in Hegemann’s subterranean club. You didn’t go to Tresor to listen to what was playing on the radio, you went to hear the future.
According to Banks, Kraftwerk was in the audience that night at Tresor. He spotted the band members and rushed to tell Jeff Mills, who didn’t believe him until he saw Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in the back of the room. Banks said that it was like seeing living legends, the guys who provided the blueprints for their own souped-up sound. He said that Hütter and Schneider were just grateful to be recognized by the next generation of techno whiz kids. “We talked for a second in that narrow, dingy stairwell going to the surface,” Banks said, before switching to a comically bad German accent. “ ‘Thank you for remembering us,’ they said.”
Like most art, musical genres emerge in reaction to other genres. Drawing a single line from techno’s modular minimalism to the funk riffs of the nineteen-sixties might seem impossible—until you realize that the artists in Detroit heard what Kraftwerk was doing and shaped it in their own image, but Kraftwerk just wanted to be like James Brown, who was doing his own homage to Little Richard. It’s turtles all the way down. Those interlocking relationships are part of why it’s difficult to define genres in tight terms, but to deny a genre’s boundaries is to flatten the impact of its creators. The major categories of music—pop, rock, country, hip-hop—exist mainly as commercial and cultural shorthand. But, when you descend into their subcategories, their borders start to sharpen and you start encountering the communities, artists, and fans that created them in the first place. And they are protective.
Electronic-music aficionados are genre-obsessives, and will gladly explain the thin but crucial differences between, say, acid house and trance. Azary’s wide interpretation of techno as a genre flies in the face of a generally accepted definition of an influential sound, and cuts its creators out of the history in the process. Hegemann chalked up MOMEM’s wrong turns to a lack of scholarship, though he believes that Azary’s heart is in the right place. “They made mistakes in the beginning,” he said. “They didn’t talk about the influence of women or the influence of Detroit. They got this shitstorm because they didn’t do serious research.” Techno was cultivated by an underground scene for years before becoming a mainstream club sound, and many of the genre’s progenitors are still performing, drawing large crowds around the world. A museum that pays homage to the pioneers of electronic music makes a lot of sense—but only if it actually gives them credit. Anything else might as well be a dismissal, and goes back to the reason that Underground Resistance created their own museum in the first place.
On my way out of Exhibit 3000, Collins led me to the building’s basement record store. The store’s resident tuxedo cat, D.J. Alley Cat, came to greet me as I started to thumb through the stacks of vinyl, and Collins pointed out signatures scribbled on the room’s walls and ceiling, from visitors who had made the trip to 3000 East Grand Boulevard over the last twenty-one years. The names and notes written in permanent marker seemed like a ward against being written out of their own history. Collins stood behind the store’s counter, looking like a hardened activist who has seen the same clashes come and go for years. “This is about people trying to take away shit that doesn’t belong to them,” he said. “It’s a constant struggle. It’s a constant battle.” ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Underground Resistance and Robert Hood’s early role at the label.
