Techno Tales

Explores important tracks from the histories of techno, trance, acid house, and associated genres.

Episodes

Episode 25 –A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray

July 14, 2025 • 23 mins

It’s 1988 in Manchester, England, and a budding electronic music producer called Gerald Simpson is about to drop off a cassette recording to Piccadilly Radio station of one of his regular acid house jams. Simpson’s hope is that people will hear his work on Stu Allen’s Sunday show which features local demo recordings. When this recording is played on air, among the radio audience is local dj, rapper, and A & R staffer for Rham! ...

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Episode 24 –Shake - Mood Swing

June 14, 2025 • 22 mins

It’s the early 1990s, and Anthony Shakir, a local Detroit dj, engineer, and producer, is passing the time at Juan Atkins’ Metroplex studio, where he has worked in various roles over the years. On this occasion that he is in the building at the intersection of Grashit Ave and Riopelle Street, another budding local producer, Claude Young, visits the studio looking for promotional copies of Metroplex releases to play on his radio show...

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Episode 23 –Octave One - Terraforming

May 15, 2025 • 18 mins

It’s 1990, and brothers Lenny and Lawrence Burden live in an apartment near a section of Gratiot Ave, Detroit, that is populated by local techno artists. The site has earned the title of Techno Boulevard, in fact, thanks to the buzz of electronic music activity that has infiltrated the area, home as it has become to three of the most important record labels in techno’s early history, Kevin Saunderson’s KMS, Derrick May’s Transmat, ...

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Episode 6 –Reese & Santonio - The Sound

December 14, 2023 • 23 mins

It’s 1982, and like many of his peers, Eastern Michigan University football player Kevin Saunderson has dreams of playing in the NFL, regularly talking about how committed he is to achieving this goal. Unlike most football players though, he also has an aptitude for music production. These music interests of Saunderson's soon develop into such a serious pursuit, that they take his attention away from football almost entirely. While...

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Episode 5 –X-Ray - Let's Go

November 15, 2023 • 20 mins

It’s a Friday evening in Detroit in the mid 1980s, and the Midnight Funk Association, a show hosted by the dj The Electrifying Mojo, is filling the local airwaves. The show is regularly a source of new music for its audience, and during this episode Mojo announces that he is about to play a recently released track called Let’s Go, by a little-known Detroit producer called X-Ray. As its pulsing beat flows into the interiors of bedro...

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Episode 4 –Rhythim Is Rhythim - Strings Of Life

October 15, 2023 • 26 mins

It’s late 1989, and there’s been a lot of recent buzz in Detroit concerning one of its downtown clubs. The Music Institute has been open for a little over a year, boasts an impressive membership count, and is regularly crammed with attendees. Around Detroit it has become known as the place to go if you want to dance until the sun rises. Yet after its next party, the club will be closing permanently. The closing set for this final e...

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Episode 3 –Juan Atkins - Techno Music

September 14, 2023 • 16 mins

During the later years of the 1980s, the term “techno” starts to be used by more fans and artists around Detroit in reference to this relatively new genre of music. It is however with the release of a specific compilation album, which includes Juan Atkins’s song titled “Techno Music”, that audiences in other parts of the United States, and on the other side of the world, become familiarised with the practice of referring to this mu...

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Episode 2 –Model 500 - No UFO's

August 14, 2023 • 16 mins

It’s 1985, and Juan Atkins has parted ways with his partner in Cybotron, a music group that in the decades to come will be synonymous with the origins of Detroit techno. This split between the pair is due to creative differences, with Atkins the more committed of the duo to maintaining a futuristic, electronic tone in his music. Atkins has since been producing tracks alone under various pseudonyms, as he experiments with the identi...

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Episode 1 –Cybotron - Alleys Of Your Mind

July 15, 2023 • 17 mins

It’s the late 1970s in Belleville, a quiet suburb of Detroit about half an hour’s drive from the city centre. Detroit is located on the northern perimeter of the United States, so close to the border in fact that you can see Canada on the other side of the river that runs alongside the city. Detroit is a metropolis on the margins. At the local high school in Belleville there is a student, Juan Atkins, whose passions revolve around ...

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