By Lee DeVito
Detroit’s Movement Electronic Music Festival is a rare instance of the mainstream embracing what is otherwise still a relatively underground aspect of the city’s musical legacy. It’s an occasion on which thousands of visitors, from the city’s suburbs to the world over, flock to Hart Plaza to celebrate an entire genre of music that can be traced back to a handful of Detroiters tinkering with making electronic music in the 1980s.
At Movement, it’s not uncommon to hear DJs pay respect to Detroit’s contributions to electronic music by dropping tracks like Cybotron’s “Clear”—regarded as the first techno record—into their sets. As celebrated and accomplished as DJs like Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Eddie Fowlkes may be, they’re not quite household names to your casual millennial raver; yet at Movement, they’re reserved prominent slots alongside mass-appeal electronic acts like Skrillex, Fatboy Slim and Moby.
During the rest of the year you might catch some of those early Detroit DJs playing far more low-key events in Detroit’s smattering of electronic clubs. But while Mecca comparisons are a cliché, it’s hard not to evoke it in the way that many music fans, artists and DJs look to Detroit during Memorial Day weekend.
This May, as organizers were gearing up for the festival, members of the local media gathered for a more low-key appreciation of techno, centered around a man from Berlin who has been making waves in the media for his vision for the city.
The luncheon—hosted by a transatlantic group called the Detroit-Berlin Connection—is held at Selden Standard, a new, upscale restaurant located in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. Once known as a seedy sector of town, the Corridor has seen rapid development and gentrification in recent years, which perhaps makes it the perfect venue for this latest presentation from the man from Berlin.
That would be one Dimitri Hegemann, known internationally for founding the Berlin nightclub and record label Tresor shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Selden Standard’s private dining room, Hegemann explains how, thanks to Tresor embracing the sounds that were coming out of Detroit’s electronic music scene, Detroit techno became part of the soundtrack that ushered in a new era of freedom and creative energy in Berlin.
A projector flips through a slideshow, showing images of Berlin’s transformation. There are shots of Tresor, a club originally built in the vaults of a former department store, which has since relocated to a former power plant. We see a hulking brewery that was turned into an art gallery and an upscale gastropub. And we see photo after photo of young people—riding bikes, networking, launching businesses, creating art.
What brings Hegemann to Detroit is the abandoned Fisher Body 21 Plant, a nearly hundred-year-old Albert Kahn-designed former auto plant that is today a hulking, dangerous-looking post-industrial ruin. It’s one of those sights that has a peculiar tendency to become invisible to lifelong Detroiters, another unfortunate and seemingly unchangeable aspect of the city’s landscape.
But to Hegemann, that building could house a nightclub. Or a hostel. Or artist studios. It is the poster child for his dreams of bringing the creative energy of Berlin—originally inspired by Detroit techno in the first place—back home.
Though Hegemann has not yet acquired the building, after watching the slideshow, it’s hard not to imagine Detroit transformed into a similar post-industrial creative hub. And that’s why Hegemann and the Detroit-Berlin Connection have invited members of Detroit’s government to tour Berlin in August to meet members of the local government and see what is possible.
“Detroit representatives will have the chance to see how Detroit techno music ignited collaborative efforts in restructuring and bettering Berlin,” reads one of the slides. “Furthermore, they will see that similar projects can be materialized in Detroit, with its own creative skill and mindset.”
Left unspoken during Hegemann’s media tour, however, is an acknowledgement that no matter how similar Detroit of 2015 may resemble Berlin of 1991, very different forces have shaped the cities. Berlin was the victim of fascism, air-raids and the Cold War; Detroit, meanwhile, poses its own unique set of challenges in the form of decades of institutional racism, white flight and corporate disinvestment.
The luncheon ends and all invitees are given media packets from VisitBerlin, the city’s tourism board. Part of the packet includes a lenticular “hologram” postcard, which oscillates between a black-and-white photo of the Berlin Wall coming down in 1990, and the same scene showing a clean city street lined with trees and pedestrians today. It’s hard not to imagine what a similar postcard for Detroit could look like, if Hegemann has his way.
