ORIGINATORSThe Belleville Three
The Belleville Three are three American musicians, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, who are credited with inventing the Detroit techno genre in Belleville, USA. Kevin Saunderson was born in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of nine he moved to Michigan, where he attended Belleville High School in Belleville, a town some 30 miles from Detroit, in the more rural area near its suburbs. In school he befriended Derrick May and Juan Atkins, both of whom had been born in Detroit but later moved to Belleville. The three were among the few black students in their high school, and Saunderson later commented, "we three kind of gelled right away." The setting affected how they experienced music. "We perceived the music differently than you would if you encountered it in dance clubs. We'd sit back with the lights off and listen to records by Bootsy Collins and Yellow Magic Orchestra. “We never took it as just entertainment, we took it as a serious philosophy," recalled May. Belleville was located near several automobile factories, which provided well-paying jobs to a racially integrated workforce. "Everybody was equal," Atkins explained in an interview. "So what happened is that you’ve got this environment with kids that come up somewhat snobby, ‘cos hey, their parents are making money working at Ford or GM or Chrysler, been elevated to a foreman, maybe even a white-collar job." European acts like Kraftwerk were popular among middle-class black youth. The three teenage friends bonded while listening to an eclectic mix of music: Kraftwerk, Parliament, Prince, the B-52s. The electronic and funk sounds that influenced the Belleville Three came primarily from a 5-hour late-night radio show called The Midnight Funk Association, broadcast in Detroit by DJ Charles "The Electrifying Mojo" Johnson on WGPR. Juan Atkins was inspired to buy a synthesizer after hearing Parliament. Atkins was also the first in the group to take up turntables, teaching May and Saunderson how to DJ.Under the name Deep Space Soundworks, Atkins and May began to DJ on Detroit's party circuit. By 1981, Johnson was playing the record mixes recorded by the Belleville Three, who were also branching out to work with other musicians. The trio traveled to Chicago to investigate the house music scene there, particularly Chicago DJs Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles. The trio began to formulate the synthesis of this dance music with the mechanical sounds of groups like Kraftwerk, in a way that reflected post-industrialist Detroit. An obsession with the future and its machines is reflected in much of their music, because, according to Atkins, Detroit is the most advanced in the transition away from industrialism.
