Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds

and hospital phones.’ Eventually, all three labels settled in close vicinity to each other in Detroit’s Eastern Market district.
    With their cottage industry independence and their futuristic sound achieved using low-level technology, the Belleville Three fit the model of ‘the Techno Rebels’ proposed by Alvin Toffler in his The Third Wave . Rejecting Luddite strategies, these renegades embraced technology as a means of empowerment and resistance against the very corporate plutocracy that invented and mass-produced these new machines. And so Juan Atkins described himself as ‘a warrior for the technological revolution’. But songs like ‘Off To Battle’ and ‘Interfear-ance’ were aimed as much at rival cottage-industrialists as at the larger powers. ‘“Off To Battle”,’ says Atkins, was addressed to ‘a lot of new, amateur electronic artists . . . It was a battle cry to ‘keep the standards high.’
    Where Model 500 records were tough, glacial and a little eerie, Derrick May’s music – as Mayday and Rythim Is Rythim – added a plangent, heart-tugging poignancy to the distinctively crisp and dry minimalism of the Detroit sound. On tracks like the elegantly elegaic ‘It Is What It Is’, he pioneered the use of quasi-symphonic string sounds. In one case, they were genuinely symphonic: ‘Strings of Life’ was based on samples gleaned from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. May reworked these orchestral stabs into a sort of cyber-Salsa groove. His own phrase was ‘23rd-Century ballroom music’.
    Atkins and May both attribute the dreaminess of Detroit techno to the desolation of the city, which May describes in terms of a sort of sensory-cultural deprivation. ‘It’s the emptiness in the city that puts the wholeness in the music. It’s like a blind person can smell and touch and can sense things that a person with eyes would never notice. And I tend to think a lot of us here in Detroit have been blind: blinded by what was happening around us. And we sort of took those other senses and enhanced them, and that’s how the music developed.’ Hence the oddly indefinable emotions in May’s tracks like ‘Nude Photo’ and ‘Beyond The Dance’, the weird mix of euphoria and anxiety.
    Having grown up in New York until he moved to the Detroit area in his early teens, Kevin Saunderson was the most disco-influenced of the Belleville Three. His tracks – released under a plethora of aliases, including Reese, Reese and Santonio, Inter City, Keynotes, and E-Dancer – had titles as baldly self-descriptive as the music was stripped down and coldly compulsive: ‘The Sound’, ‘How To Play Our Music’, ‘Forcefield’, ‘Rock To The Beat’, ‘Bassline’, ‘Funky, Funk, Funk’, ‘Let’s, Let’s, Let’s Dance’. Of the three, Saunderson had the sharpest commercial instincts, and the greatest commercial success. But he also produced the darkest avant-funk of the early Detroit era, with Reese’s ‘Just Want Another Chance’.
    Recorded in 1986, the track was inspired by Manhattan’s celebrated proto-house club Paradise Garage, which Saunderson would visit when he returned to New York to see his older brothers. ‘I used to imagine what kind of sound I would like to have coming out of a system like that,’ he remembers, referring to the infamously low-end intensive, tectonic plate-shaking sound-system. ‘It made me vibe that kind of vibe.’ Over a baleful black-hole bassline running at about half the speed of the drum program, Saunderson intones the gutteral monologue of some kind of stalker or love-addict. ‘I just vibed that, started thinking about this cat in a relationship, how this person was deep with this other person, really wanted to be with them, and kind of screwed up.’ The ‘Reese bass’ has since been resurrected and mutated by a number of artists in the nineties, most notably by darkside jungle producers Trace and Ed Rush.
    Displaying the kind of canny, market-conscious