The Belleville Three Who Invented Detroit Techno

Derrick May once described the music he helped invent as a beautiful accident, as if George Clinton and Kraftwerk had been trapped in an elevator with only a sequencer for company. It is still the perfect image for techno: Black American funk fused to cold European machines. And it did not begin in the heart of Detroit, but in a quiet suburb called Belleville, where three teenage friends decided that dance music could be a serious philosophy.

The story starts about 29 miles southwest of downtown Detroit, in Belleville, a town where Black middle-class families had settled on the strength of steady auto-industry jobs. At Belleville High School in the late 1970s, three teenagers became inseparable: Juan Atkins, born in 1962, Derrick May, born in 1963, and Kevin Saunderson, born in Brooklyn in 1964 and brought to Michigan as a boy. Atkins was the oldest and the catalyst, the first to buy turntables and the first to make music, and he taught the other two how to DJ. Together they are remembered today as the Belleville Three.

What fed them was the radio. The DJ Charles Johnson, better known as The Electrifying Mojo, ran a sprawling late-night show that poured Kraftwerk, Parliament-Funkadelic, Giorgio Moroder, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Prince and the B-52s into a single restless flow. That refusal to separate European synth-pop from Black American funk became the DNA of the sound they would build. As May later put it, the suburban quiet changed how they listened: they never treated the music as mere entertainment, but as a serious philosophy.

Two influences pulled hardest. From Germany came Kraftwerk, with their cool, precise romance of man and machine. From George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic came Afrofuturist funk, the Mothership and a bottomless groove; Atkins has said that hearing Parliament is what pushed him to buy his first synthesizer.

The third influence was a book. In a high-school futures class, Atkins read the writer Alvin Toffler, whose 1980 bestseller The Third Wave imagined a coming era of techno rebels who would bend technology to human ends. Atkins took the word straight from those pages. He later told Rolling Stone that the connection was direct, that Toffler was describing a move from an industrial society to a technological one, and that calling the music techno simply felt logical. Toffler even supplied the name of his label, Metroplex, drawn from the idea of a metropolitan complex.

In the early 1980s, while studying at Washtenaw Community College, Atkins met a Vietnam veteran and synth obsessive named Rick Davis, and the two formed Cybotron. Their debut single, Alleys of Your Mind, arrived in 1981 on their own Deep Space label; together with its follow-ups, including the electro landmark Clear in 1983, it caught the ear of the California label Fantasy Records, which signed the duo and released an album.

When creative differences pulled Cybotron apart, Atkins founded Metroplex in 1985 and, recording as Model 500, released No UFO's. Stripped down and machine-driven, it is now widely cited as one of the first true techno records, made at home with a Roland TR-909, a Korg MS-10 and a Sequential Circuits drum machine. Carried to Chicago and championed by the house DJs there, it became the record that first drew British labels across the Atlantic.

If Atkins poured the foundation, Derrick May designed the cathedral. Recording as Rhythim Is Rhythim on his Transmat label, an offshoot of Metroplex, he released Nude Photo and then, in 1987, the track that would define the genre: Strings of Life. Built from a friend's piano part, sped up, chopped into loops and wrapped in synthetic strings, it was named by the Chicago house pioneer Frankie Knuckles after May handed him a demo.

The record detonated in Britain during the 1987 and 1988 house boom, and Knuckles remembered the sheer power and energy that people drew from it. May, characteristically, has been almost dismissive of its fame, calling it the one that was most special to everyone else.

Kevin Saunderson was the most commercially minded of the three. He founded KMS Records and in 1987 formed Inner City with the Chicago vocalist Paris Grey. Their two 1988 singles, Big Fun and Good Life, became worldwide crossover hits. Big Fun topped the US dance club chart and reached the UK top ten; Good Life climbed to number four in Britain at the start of 1989. Across their run, Inner City led the US dance chart five times and scored a string of UK top-40 hits.

The irony is that Big Fun was almost left off the very compilation that would name the genre. Instead it became the breakout. Saunderson's ambition was simple, and he said it plainly: he wanted everybody in the world to know their music.

The decisive moment came in 1988. Neil Rushton, a British DJ and label boss then scouting for Virgin's 10 Records, had grown fascinated by the Detroit sound after UK DJs traced records like No UFO's from Chicago back to their source. He reached Derrick May, reportedly by calling the phone number printed on a Transmat release, and together with the Belleville Three he set out to compile a showcase album.

Its working title was The House Sound of Detroit. But the trio resisted being branded a regional offshoot of Chicago house, and the late addition of an Atkins track forced a rethink. They chose a word they were already using, one that Cybotron had stamped on a record called Techno City years earlier. The resulting compilation, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, put the term into the British vocabulary for good, even though it sold only modestly at first.

While the Belleville Three drew the map, a second wave pushed techno into the stratosphere. Around the turn of the 1990s, Underground Resistance fused the music with militant, anti-commercial politics; Carl Craig brought a jazz-schooled sophistication through his Planet E label; and Jeff Mills and Robert Hood sketched the blueprint for minimal techno.

Its most devoted audience, though, was abroad. In newly reunified Berlin, the club and label Tresor became a stronghold, building a celebrated Detroit-to-Berlin axis; its founder later said that reunification happened on the dance floor, to the sound of Detroit techno. Back home, recognition came slowly. The first Detroit Electronic Music Festival arrived only in 2000, eventually growing into the event now known as Movement, with both May and Saunderson taking turns at the helm. Techno had conquered Europe before its own city threw it a party.

• Techno was invented in early-to-mid-1980s Detroit by the Belleville Three: Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson.
• It fused Kraftwerk's machine-pop, George Clinton's funk and Alvin Toffler's futurism into a new high-tech soul.
• Three records mark the arc: Atkins' No UFO's (1985), May's Strings of Life (1987) and Saunderson's Good Life (1988).
• The 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit named and exported the genre.
• Techno took its deepest root abroad, especially in Berlin, before Detroit honored it with the festival now called Movement.