Techno Was Invented by Three Teenagers in a Detroit Suburb

Walk into a dance club almost anywhere on Earth — Berlin, Tokyo, London — and the pulsing electronic music you hear can trace its family tree back to a few high schoolers in a small town outside Detroit.

The town is Belleville, Michigan, about 30 miles from the city. In the early 1980s, three friends from Belleville High School — Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, now known as the “Belleville Three” — started making strange, futuristic music in their basements. They blended the funk of Parliament with the cold electronics of European groups like Kraftwerk, layered over drum machines and synthesizers. Derrick May once joked that the sound was like George Clinton and Kraftwerk “caught in an elevator” with only a sequencer for company.

They got their start in part thanks to a Detroit radio legend, “The Electrifying Mojo,” whose late-night show played the eclectic mix that inspired them. Soon their basement tracks were filling Detroit dance floors. Juan Atkins is generally credited with naming the new genre “techno,” a word chosen in 1988 to set the Detroit sound apart from Chicago’s house music.

From there it spread across the ocean and exploded, especially in Europe, growing into one of the biggest forces in global dance music. But its roots are pure Michigan — three young men, mostly working out of bedrooms and basements, channeling the rhythm of a hard, industrial city into something brand new.

Detroit has never forgotten it. Every year the city throws one of the world’s major electronic music festivals on its riverfront, a hometown celebration of a sound Michigan gave the world.