Though it can be hard to hear, techno’s sound evolved from the glittery riffs of disco and the virtuosic basslines and keyboard play in funk. Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” uses four-on-the-floor; so does the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Chic’s “Le Freak.” But it wasn’t as if Detroit d.j.s went straight from dancing under disco balls to programming mechanized beats in a single evolutionary leap. The connective tissue came courtesy of Chicago d.j.s such as Frankie Knuckles, who, in the early nineteen-eighties, started taking apart disco to cobble together a new sound of looped beats and pulsing bass. The music was such a hit at a Chicago gay club called the Warehouse—where Knuckles was a resident d.j.—that people started calling it “house music.”
Knuckles has said that he was partly influenced by the infamous “Disco Demolition Night,” which was held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, in 1979, and featured thousands of disco records being destroyed in a bonfire in center field. The whole thing was a stunt promoted by the Chicago radio d.j. Steve Dahl—in the minds of rock purists like Dahl, disco was too gay and too Black. Knuckles and his collaborators ran toward those critiques with joy.
House music quickly spread east from Chicago to Detroit. Only a few hundred miles separate the cities, and young people would go back and forth to party and hit club nights, collecting D.I.Y. mixtapes as sonic souvenirs. The tempos hadn’t changed much between house and disco—the 1986 track “Can You Feel It?,” from the influential house d.j. Mr. Fingers, has nearly the same beats per minute as “Le Freak”—but the Chicago scene had created something ecstatic by layering repetitive riffs and vocals over Roland drum-machine beats.
Three Michigan kids named Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson heard the future of music in house. The trio are considered the godfathers of techno and are affectionately referred to as the Belleville Three, named after the lakeside town where they went to high school. (Their friend and collaborator Eddie Fowlkes, a Detroit native who was also highly influential in the development of techno, is sometimes called the Belleville Fourth.) They were heavily influenced by the free-form radio stylings of the Detroit d.j. the Electrifying Mojo, who was spinning everything from Prince to J. Geils Band to Parliament-Funkadelic during his nocturnal shows. Crucially, Mojo was also playing records from the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk, whose ghostly machine music, along with the ecstatic grooves coming out of Chicago, gave the Belleville Three a blueprint for their own spare sound.