Of the Belleville Three, the cadre of early
Detroit producers who tested the limits of spirit within electronic dance music
and changed the integrity of the form forever, Derrick May's reputation as an
originator remained intact despite more than a decade of recording inactivity.
While Juan Atkins is rightly looked at as the godfather of techno, with a
recording career beginning in the electro scene of the early '80s and
encompassing some of the most inspired tracks in the history of dance music;
and Kevin Saunderson is the Detroit producer with the biggest mainstream
success through his work with vocalist Paris Grey as Inner City, May's position
as an auteur eroded slightly during the 1990s due to a largely inexplicable
lack of activity. As far as influence counts as part of the equation, however,
May recorded the techno tracks which top dance producers point to as the most
original and influential. The classic Derrick May sound is a clever balance
between streamlined percussion-heavy cascades of sound with string samples and
a warmth gained from time spent in Chicago, enraptured by the grooves of
essential DJs like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles. May's Transmat Records label
was the home of his best material, cuts like "Nude Photo,"
"Strings of Life," "Kaos" and "It Is What It Is,"
most produced from 1987 to 1989 as Rhythim Is Rhythim. And though his release
schedule all but halted during the 1990s, he continued DJing around the world
and honed Transmat into one of the most respected techno labels in the world. Derrick May was born in Detroit in 1963, a
single child raised largely by his mother. At the age of 13, he began attending
school in the suburb of Belleville; there he met Juan Atkins and the two began
trading mix-tapes, Atkins providing May's entry into the world of Parliament,
Kraftwerk and Gary Numan. When his mother moved to Chicago, May stayed in
Detroit with another friend, Kevin Saunderson, to finish school. By 1981,
Atkins had taught May and Saunderson the essence of DJing as well, and the trio
formed Deep Space Soundworks, a collective existing to present their favorite
music at parties and clubs. May and Atkins also began working with a local DJ
named the Electrifyin' Mojo — the man who first introduced Atkins to Kraftwerk
and early synth-pop — by creating elaborate megamixes for use on Mojo's radio
show. After high-school graduation May
attended university on a football scholarship. He soon tired of the academic
life though, and returned to Detroit, where he worked in an arcade. During his
frequent trips to Chicago to visit his mother, he had gotten hooked up with
Chicago's familial house scene, then in its infancy. May was fascinated by the
warmth and community feeling engendered at spots like the Power Plant and the
Music Box, where DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy used elaborate turntable
set-ups and reel-to-reel machines to create mastermixes which re-invoked the
spirit of disco even while pushing music forward. May brought Saunderson to the
clubs several times as well, and stayed in Chicago for up to a year. When he
again returned to Detroit, the need for a club to call his own caused May and
the Deep Space family to found the Music Institute. It soon became the hub of
Detroit's ever-growing underground musical family, a place where May, Atkins
and Saunderson DJed along with cohorts Eddie "Flashin" Fowlkes and
Blake Baxter. The club invigorated a badly fractured sense of community for
many residents, and changed the lives of second-wave technocrats like Carl
Craig, Stacey Pullen, Kenny Larkin and Richie Hawtin.
Though May owned a Roland TR-909 synthesizer,
he had done little actual recording by the early '80s. When Juan Atkins hit the
big time in 1981 with the local success of his group Cybotron, it influenced
May to begin recording seriously. He debuted on wax with "Let's Go"
(the third release on Atkins' Metroplex Records) and then founded his own
Transmat label, a Metroplex subsidiary named after Atkins' track "Night
Drive (Time, Space, Transmat)." May introduced Rhythim Is Rhythim, his
most important guise, with the Transmat single "Nude Photo." The
producer soon followed up with more future classics of the genre:
"Freestyle," "Strings of Life," "It Is What It
Is" and "Kaos." Of those
first singles, "Strings of Life" hit Britain in an especially big way
during the country's 1987-88 house explosion, and May became one of the first
American techno artists to tour England. He was also recruited heavily as a
remixer, for pop bands — eager to gain credit in clubland — as well as straight
dance acts. A series of setbacks around the turn of the decade appeared to sour
May's fortunes, though. The fertile British rave scene, which had grown in
strength from 1986 to 1990, was overwhelmed by music growing ever more frenetic
in order to compete with increasing drug intake. Quite soon, most of the
successes in British dance music were native hardcore or rave-pop groups
(Altern-8, Sunscreem, the Prodigy) while much of clubland forgot its American
inspirations in favor of chart-bound novelty tracks. In 1991, May looked ready to return in a big
way; at one point, he considered forming a Kraftwerk-styled techno super-group
named Intelex with Atkins and Saunderson. Though negotiations to sign with
Trevor Horn's ZTT Records looked promising, the deal eventually fell through,
and May later declined several invitations by major labels. In fact, he quit
making music for the most part by late 1991 (despite consistent rumors to the
contrary), though he did work with ambient pioneer Steve Hillage on tracks for
the debut album of Hillage's System 7 project. May continued to DJ around the
world, and maintained his standing in the eyes of many top-flight producers.
His Transmat label continued to find a home for many of the finest techno
singles ever compiled, including tracks by Stacey Pullen's Silent Phase, Juan
Atkins' Model 500, Joey Beltram, K-Alexi, Carl Craig's Psyche and Kenny
Larkin's Dark Comedy. Finally, in 1995, Sony Japan compiled his most innovative
tracks onto the single-disc retrospective Innovator, and May contributed a song
to the soundtrack for Sony's video game Ghost in the Shell
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