The 20 greatest Detroit techno tracks – ranked! – The Guardian

As scene legends Cybotron return with their first new music in 28 years, we pick the best of the Motor City’s masterful, mechanical techno music
An underrated gem from an underrated producer from Detroit’s first wave, the list of samples found on Time to Express acts like a primer of key influences on the city’s nascent techno scene: Kraftwerk, Telex, Yazoo, the Art of Noise. The Silo Mix stirs in a hint of freestyle; the Techno mix is harder-edged.
The best starting point with Detroit stalwart Bone might be to watch the amazing footage of him DJing on three decks known as Video Attack 41, then immerse yourself in his lengthy catalogue: the highlights are too many and varied to list but the gripping Cultural Variance – African chanting, jazz keyboards, slamming beat – is a killer.
Despite earning the nickname the Prince of Techno, Blake Baxter feels like another figure slightly overshadowed by his first wave peers. Co-produced by Kevin Saunderson, When We Used To Play is terrific. For all the unremitting propulsion of its lengthy passages of pure rhythm, it carries a strange, affecting melancholy.
An understated figure in Detroit techno’s second wave – he described himself as “famous for not being famous” – Kenny Larkin’s low profile is no reflection on his skills. You can lose yourself completely in the intricate, chattering layers of his debut album’s title track: there’s a distinct hint of jazz lurking somewhere among them.
A B-side that might be the crowning glory of the enigmatic Red Planet series of 12”s, credited to the mysterious “Will Thomas”, they’re assumed to be the work of Underground Resistance. Whoever made Star Dancer, it is incredible: a furious kick drum, a nagging two-note bassline, vast waves of flanged electronics, an immense climax.
Unravelling the discography of Drexciya, AKA James Stinson and Gerald Donald, and their aquatic take on Afrofuturist mythology is quite a task: there isn’t an obvious standout or easy entry point. But Drexciya’s hugely influential reboot of electro is frequently stunning, as on Andrean Sand Dunes: tough beats overlaid with hauntingly beautiful synths.
The late Kelli Hand was Detroit techno’s first lady, a brilliant female producer in a male-dominated world. Her Acacia Classics compilations reveal a rich back catalogue – check out the raw, jacking funk of Come On Now Baby – but Starz is her acknowledged masterpiece: urgent but lush, propulsive but hypnotic.
The pat line about musical collective Underground Resistance is that they’re the Public Enemy of techno: Detroit’s most unyielding exponents of Afrofuturist electronica. But the manifestos and rhetoric wouldn’t mean much if the music wasn’t as good as this: The Final Frontier has a stinging acid line, a beat rooted – as techno itself is – in electro, and lushly atmospheric washes of synth.
On which the former UR member almost singlehandedly creates an entire subgenre: minimal techno has other foundational inputs, but Hood’s album Minimal Nation is its key text. Sleep Cycle boldly cuts its sound to the bone, creating a mesmeric world in which tiny incremental sonic shifts become supercharged with power.
Recorded while Minx’s husband took their daughter shopping, A Walk in the Park is an irresistible, minimal cocktail: driving bass, tropical percussion, jazzy chords. The recent remix by Moodymann (absent elsewhere in this list on the grounds that he’s not a techno producer, more a genre unto himself) is fantastic, too.
The work of Robert Hood and his daughter’ Lyric, Never Grow Old is techno as deep, spiritual soul music, complete with a sample swiped from Aretha Franklin’s legendary gospel album Amazing Grace. The tension between the rawness of her vocal and the insistence of its speedy electronic pulse is incredibly powerful.
Cybotron – Juan Atkins and Richard Davis, the latter a Vietnam vet who changed his name to 3070 – are the cornerstone of Detroit techno, and Clear is their finest moment. Featuring a Kraftwerk sample over an electro beat, with an Afrofuturist mythology attached, it still sounds fantastic 40 years on.
The hugely influential debut of Kevin Saunderson’s growling Reese bass sound, which, from the mid-90s onwards, appeared on countless drum’n’bass, UK garage and dubstep tracks: so many, that hearing it today on a track audibly from the late 80s feels weird, as if the sound fell through a wormhole in time.
Carl Craig’s catalogue is so varied that singling out one track as his greatest is tough. The jazzy drums and shifting electronics of At Les runs it close, but let’s plump for Throw, released under one of his many monikers, that united techno and house DJs and provoked an adoring cover from LCD Soundsystem, an example of his consummate ability to spellbind a dancefloor.
Mills called The Bells “a practical DJ tool”, sweetly underselling the incredible potency of what is effectively his theme, “something I can use to say hello”. It is relentlessly in your face – the ferociously distorted rhythm track – and oddly subtle in the way the acidic melodies rise and fall in intensity.
After Cybotron, Juan Atkins honed his sound to a point of perfection on No UFO’s. It shared Cybotron’s ambivalent view of the future – “they say there is no hope / they say no UFOs” – but toughened up the music, making it blacker, less in thrall to European electronica. The result is so forward thinking, it boggles the mind that it was made in 1985.
A Detroit techno track that crossed boundaries in a regimented dance world, Jaguar was played by Jeff Mills and Paul Oakenfold, and it got so big that it spawned a couple of rip-off European covers. The fuss is still understandable: it is incredibly exciting, building and building to a climax strafed with a synthesised answer to dramatic disco strings.
Underground Resistance’s output can be punishing – militant music from militant artists – but Hi-Tech Jazz (by Galaxy 2 Galaxy, formed by members from the collective) is just beautiful. Idiosyncratically stirring together jazzy sax, electro, techno and house, it exists in a thrilling, enveloping musical universe of its own, and received an unexpected but deserved boost in popularity thanks to the soundtrack of the video game Midnight Club.
An attempt to evoke the optimism that was lost when Martin Luther King was murdered, Strings of Life swiftly became an everlasting global dancefloor anthem. It is so well known, it’s easy to forget what a strange and experimental track it is: daringly bass-free, salsa-influenced, spiked with samples of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Big Fun by Kevin Sanderson’s Inner City seemed an outlier on the epochal 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit: poppier, more straightforwardly melodic, as influenced by Chicago house as by Sanderson’s Detroit peers (“it crossed over,” the producer noted). The same is true of Good Life – its irrepressible paean to dancefloor escapism an attempt to make a modern track that matched the quality of Chic and entirely succeeded – although Detroit’s flavour was still discernible everywhere from the metallic tone of the synths to Inner City’s name. Timeless, ecstatic – befitting a producer nicknamed The Elevator – and unimpeachable, it is a perfect single.
Cybotron’s new EP Maintain the Golden Ratio is released 13 October on Tresor. The track Maintain is out now

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