Black American music, built from cheap discontinued Japanese drum machines and European synthesiser records, in a city whose industry was collapsing.
Techno was made in Detroit in the early 1980s, named on a British compilation in 1988, and rebuilt in Berlin after the Wall came down. These six pages follow it from the machines that made it possible to the argument, still running, about who it belongs to.
Before techno had a name, its raw material was assembled in Düsseldorf, Munich, Tokyo and New York: the drum machine, the sequencer, and the idea that a machine could keep time better than a band.
Three friends from the suburbs of Detroit built a music out of imported European electronics and local radio, and in 1988 a British compilation gave it a name.
Detroit records met British acid house and Belgian new beat, and what had been a studio music became a mass movement held in fields, warehouses and, eventually, courtrooms.
A city with a hole in the middle of it and no functioning licensing regime turned abandoned East Berlin real estate into the most consequential club scene in Europe.
Detroit's next generation reclaimed the music as political, and at the same time producers on both sides of the Atlantic began stripping it down to almost nothing.
Cheap software, the collapse of vinyl economics, the rise of Berghain, and a festival circuit that turned a warehouse music into a global industry.