Detroit was the only place techno could have been born: When Motown’s soul-music legacy filtered through the sci-fi imaginations of black teens raised in the shadow of the motor industry, a musical revolution was all but inevitable. In the mid ’80s, three of those kids—Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson—masterminded a sleek, elegant new strain of electro-funk, channelling George Clinton and Kraftwerk into a sound at once futuristic and elegiac. Those sounds became the fuel for a new cottage industry of labels and distributors working in the shadow of the mainstream music industry, imbued with a subversive DIY spirit. (As they say: Detroit hustles harder.) In the hands of the masked collective Underground Resistance, techno became a tool not just of expression but actual resistance. As the city has weathered its share of economic hardships, Detroit techno has only soared higher, sculpting radiant synths and pumping grooves into a sound at once fiercely defiant and unabashedly utopian.