Hello Bodies and Souls in Time and Space! The hysteria in the last 12 months around "Jaguar" was not the result of just a lucky shot of just a Detroit producer. No, it was a major kick-off of what some people call the revival of Detroit Techno.
If you'd have asked Dutch clubbers, ravers and critics 2 or 3 years ago about Detroit Techno, they probarbly would have said that that is a type of techno from the past. And frankly, it was a bit quiet on the front. But in 1999 things started to change. Frontmen like Carl Craig, Lawrence Burden and Jeff Mills surprised us either with their own new productions or with supporting other producers on their labels. Also Transmat seemed to be born again. This pleasant infection continued in 2000, but now the DJ-part started to go along with it. In Holland we didn't have that much visits of Detroit DJ's in years: "first-hour-people" like Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May and Stacey Pullen but also Richie Hawtin, Robert Hood, Alton Miller and Blake Baxter more than once attacked our parties, clubs and festivals and all that together live performances of Carl Craig, Aril Brikha (!!) and others. And of course in May of this year there was the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, which was enjoyed by hundreds of thousends techno-fans who found their way to Motor City. You may ask yourselve: Where does all this inspiration come from?.... While some of the guys involved (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, DerrickMay) are succesful for more than a decade and still are running strong, Jeff Mills is more productive than ever, and the cracks in the eggs of the new genereration producers are getting bigger and bigger. Of course there is one major connection: the city of Detroit. There seems to be no area in the whole world where soul, spirit, music, underground, and technological elements can be so well packed in one product than in the Detroit area....We don't call that a hype, we call that a vision. My support/contribution to all this can be found at www.xs4all.nl/~sanren In the "Audio"-section you can check out my latest mix, called "General Motions (model 1)" with some very interesting recent releases from the Fragile label and pieces of Jeff Mills' Metropolis. I hope you enjoy it! DJ Laurenz Amsterdam
