Detroit Techno

Much like the Detroit-bred hip-hop of Eminem, the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May), and Midwestern mavericks like Plastikman sound the way the city looks and feels. Meaning drum machine/analog synth duets that are as mechanical and menacing as an assembly line ("Digital Tsunami," "Echo Location," "Everything's Alright") and effervescent electro that sounds as if it's been beamed from another millennium amid bombed-out buildings and revolutionary robots ("Clear," "Bang"). Since this scene was a revolution in and of itself, our Next Steps have got some more explaining to do.

The strangest thing about our Detroit Techno Essentials isn't so much how odd the synth lines are; it's the fact that most of them stem from the '80s and seem like they were sampled from a galaxy far, far away. This obsession with the future — including sonic textures that belong in sci-fi films — inadvertently helped push music forward, too, making producers realize that songs as abstract and alien-sounding as "Deathstar," "Night Drive (Thru-Babylon)," and "Life Cycle" were to be embraced, not feared. The game doesn't get any easier in our Deep Cuts, either.

Take a look at the titles for a second — "The Warning," "Alien Radio (Version 1)," "Nightvision," err…"Fuk" — because they're exactly what these tracks are broadcasting. Meaning, a paranoid android society not all that far removed from our own, where the machines have taken over and the only choice we have is to mime their movements with music and dance the pain away. Which won't be a problem once the hissing hi-hats, pulsating synths, sucker-punch beats, and snappy bass lines kick in.

Jeff Mills, a leader of Detroit techno's second-wave in the late '80s/early '90s, once called the genre a "complete mistake — like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator." Ah, but what a beautiful (and, at times, beautifully ugly) mistake it was, jolting the music industry with tracks that sounded so now they demanded to be heard, from finger-on-the-pulse pirate radio stations to the insides of superclubs that looked more like bomb shelters from the outside. All the while, one ingenious idea (techno, a colder, darker variation of Chicago's nearby house scene) splintered into several subgenres, including the glacial beats of minimal techno (Plastikman) and X-rated ghettotech jams (Detroit Grand Pubahs, Disco D, DJ Assault).