The Battle Over Technos Origins
I visited the museum in December and decided to start my Grand Orient journey by walking southwest around the new General Motors electric car plant. The road runs like a conveyor belt through Detroit's North Side and is lined with landmarks from the city's historic past. General Motors headquarters were three blocks west of the 3000th Expo until 2000; Henry Ford's first Model T factory was on Pickett Street, two blocks southeast of the museum. There are no signs to welcome potential visitors to Expo 3000. Make an appointment, show up at the building's red brick box and knock on the blue door that leads to the underground resistance center. John Collins answered the door wearing glasses and a black turtleneck. He goes into the character of the professor and spends the first few minutes of our conversation wondering if you were there to listen or to guess.
The museum itself is the size of a small gallery and occupies the first floor of the underground resistance headquarters. There are many recording studios upstairs and artists were coming in and out during my visit. On one side of the room is a chronological history of the origins of techno, beginning with its philosophical underpinnings; a portrait of a smiling Coleman Young Man, Detroit's first black mayor; standard jackets from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic; Portraits of Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek costumes. (The futuristic utopia of the show and Nichols' breakout role as Lieutenant Uhura are integral to the techno ethos.) Banks, one of the founders of the underground resistance, emerged from a room where he and friends went to the watched the World Cup and greeted warmly on arrival: when I met him he was wearing what I understood to be a Detroit uniform; Worn Carhartt boots and overalls softened by years of work on construction sites.
As Collins and Banks led me through the room, I noticed how the exhibits began to form a more complete profile of Detroit's music community. Techno Rebels, a dusty account of journalist Dan Cicco's comprehensive history of the genre; Recordings collected by artists distributed and promoted by Submerge over the years; a Michigan blue vanity plate surrounded by " Techno "; and several works by Detroit artists, including Ron Zakrin's "Detroit Bubble." In the artwork, two nuclear reactors stand in a gray distance like strange hourglasses, an image that appears to be an homage to the 1966 partial meltdown of the Fermi 1 reactor, referenced in Let's Almost Sing by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Detroit lost. At Zakrin's work, the reactors are powered by a pair of Roland 808s. The cars are a big part of the show among the 3,000 exhibitors. Behind a glass window at the back of the museum is an antique lathe used to make the vinyl of the keys. An entire piece is dominated by a performance of instruments, the ancient drums and synthesizers - Korg PolySix, Roland TR-727 - that gave techno its inspiration and created a great wall of techno, each piece with its own originality and meaning.
There are even miniature cars the size of Hot Wheels and a bright eggplant purple Pontiac nameplate, a heritage badge you get if you were born in Detroit. Banks came up to me while I was looking at the picture. "I was too young to go to Vietnam, so when the kids were drafted, I went around and asked the older kids if I could have their car if they fooled someone else there." He's had quite a few and is still surprised that someone said yes. Banks is a comedian and storyteller by nature, but in telling this story he switches from melancholy to melancholy. He said the purple muscle car belonged to a neighbor who died in the war. He bought the car from the boy's parents and kept it in good condition for decades.
Collins led me to the wall near the center of the room. It is simply titled "The Future" and the screen is full of pictures of children and schools of the great clandestine resistance family. It's more altar than performance, an optimistic vigilance to the impact music has on Detroit and the community it seeks to improve. The printed message with a small alligator clip challenged the resistance's secret mission:
Alex Azari waited for me under the umbrella in front of Mamim . It was a gray December day in Frankfurt, and when I met him in the afternoon the minimal light had already faded into a monochromatic twilight. He was wearing a thick knit sweater and an oversized sweater, and he smelled like he had a cold.
MAMEM is located in a sunken square below Hauptväche Square, as if someone decided that a big city needed a place for conversation. During my visit, the Christmas market was in full swing, with tourists and locals eating spicy sausages and sipping mulled wine from ceramic, steamer mugs that looked like tickets to the holidays. You have to look for the mother to find her, and I went back in time and forever before I found the right scale. The only people left in the square were a group of men in stone-colored tunics, chatting softly and smoking.
The Frankfurt Children's Museum recently occupied the space; Azari's team tore down the walls and painted everything black to give it the feel of an underground club. A few weeks before my arrival , MOMEM hosted an exhibition for DJ Sven Weth in Frankfurt , and visitors could pick up recordings from his personal collection. I visited after the end of the fair, so the place was empty and like an office between tenants. I asked Azari if he considered Momem a museum in the traditional sense. He replied, "I want this area to be a cultural institution for club music." "I want it to be a place where young people can come together, be inspired and learn about club culture and the past, present and future of electronic music." I'm starting to wonder if I'm interested in semantics. Museums embody a certain form and traditions require the same size as schools, whether on the grand scale of the Louvre or the more modest scale of MOMEM or Exposition 3000 . A highly structured definition of what it is is needed. They are placed in it so that the audience can understand how ideas flow and clash with each other. Music genres are not necessarily defined as museum exhibits. Borders are porous and contested.
