BEAT CRAZY
New documentary about Detroit techno premiering at Tribeca Festival
After graduating from Mumford High School in 1987, Kristian R. Hill’s studies took him to number of places, including the New School for Social Research in Manhattan where he studied urban policy.
“I thought I was going to come back to Detroit to be the mayor,” Hill says now.
That didn’t happen, but Hill has still wound up serving the city — from behind the lens of a camera.
On Saturday, June 11, Hill and his Los Angeles-based Washington Hill Pictures — a partnership with fellow Detroit native Jennifer Washington — premieres its first feature-length documentary, “God Said Give ’Em Drum Machines,” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. It will be available online via the Tribeca At Home series on Monday, June 13. Hill and Washington spent 12 years making the film, an incisive and insightful origin story about Detroit’s globally influential electronic music scene, highlighting the work of groundbreakers such as Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Eddie Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, Santonio Echols, Jeff Mills, and Windsor’s Richie Hawtin, among others.
During its 90 minutes “God Said…” digs deep into the artists and their music, spotlighting the key songs and events as well as the sociology behind its creation and evolution and the consequences of its unexpected and perhaps even unintended worldwide success. Mostly, however, Hill and Washington wanted to put some flesh on the synthetic technology behind the sounds.
“There had been some documentaries about Detroit, but nobody, to me, had looked at it from a human standpoint,” explains Hill, 53, who conducted in-depth interviews with the principals. “What found out early once we started interviewing all these guys is that sometimes there was a PTSD that we couldn’t get beyond or understand. We had to take time to see where these things came from.
“We wanted to paint a human picture of the music, where it comes from and the men — some of them are forgotten — who they were and how they played a role in helping to create this genre we now call techno.”
Hill himself was no stranger to electronic music, and music in general, when he started the project. A teenage DJ himself, he grew up near Juan Atkins’ grandmother and knew the techno pioneer from a young age. He served as an editor on the 2009 documentary “Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense,” and directed a shortform documentary, “Electric Roots: The Detroit
Sound Project” in 2014, chronicling the work of Hawtin and others in South Africa. Hill was also an editor on last year’s “Hip Hop Uncovered” miniseries on FX.
Hill and Washington met each other at a party during 2010, when he was visiting to help care for his ailing mother and she was attending her high school reunion. Washington had just visited Submerge Records’ Exhibit 3000 “and learned the real tale of how techno music began in Detroit…We started this conversation about the importance of this story” and the following year the two filmmakers began holding interviews at the Movement festival.
Funded primarily by a Kickstarter campaign until Los Angeles-based XTR studio came in as a partner during 2019, “God Said…” — whose title comes from a comment by Detroit DJ Mike Huckaby — took the pair around the world, to the U.K., Amsterdam and South Africa as well as Chicago and New York.
“I started out making, like, a little, happy film about the story of techno and how it got out to the world. Now I feel like I ended up making ‘Apocalypse Now’,” Hill says. He and Washington did, in fact, find a more epic tale than they expected, the story of a scene that went well beyond the celebrated Belleville Three — Atkins, May and Saunderson — and jutted in a variety of other directions in terms of music and personal
relationships.
“People like Eddie Fowlkes had immediate pushback to that particular narrative,” Hill recalls. “Eddie introduced me to (Saunderson), then to Santonio, Blake, Mike James…all these people who painted a different picture of what I thought the story of techno was and how it got to the world.” In addition to key, but underground, figures such as Richard “3070” Davis — who cofounded Cybotron with Atkins, “God Said…” also incorporates valuable perspectives from non-artists such as British record executive Neil Rushton, who oversaw the ear-opening 1988 compilation “Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit,” and photographer Norman “Normski” Anderson, who came to Detroit in 1988 to photograph the first-wave techno artists for Britain’s Record Mirror magazine.
“There’s so many people who go into making up this music — that’s what Eddie’s intention was when he introduced me to these other people; ‘It wasn’t just them. It was us.’ Once I saw there was an ‘us,’ it allowed me to open up what I thought I knew and just be more, I guess, interested in what other people had to say in addition to Juan, Derrick and Kevin.”
Hill was putting finishing touches on “God Said…” as late as a week before its arrival at Tribeca, and he and Washington are hoping to show it in Detroit later this summer.
The pair is also hoping to make a sequel to document Detroit techno’s second wave and beyond. They’re also, of course, hoping that “God Said…” will both remind and in some cases awaken Detroiters to a music and culture that was being created without the same level of fanfare as a Motown, Bob Seger, Eminem or other mainstream stars.
“(Techno) is one of Detroit’s natural assets,” Hill says, “in a sense that every weekend you have Detroiters who are DJs and producers flying around the world, on the front line as our ambassadors, carrying the sound around the world. I think it’s one of those exports that we’re just now seeing the power of.
“Hopefully down the line the city can celebrate it a little more — like Nashville does with country music or how New Orleans does it with jazz and Minneapolis is doing it right now with Prince. It’s great music and a great story, and it belongs to (Detroit).”