Derrick May

musician; disc jockey

Personal Information

Born on April 6, 1963, in Detroit, MI.

Career

Worked as a DJ for Deep Space Soundworks, Detroit, MI, early 1980s; released first single, "Let's Go," on Metroplex Records, c. 1983; formed Transmat Records, 1986, and released records under names Rhythim Is Rhythim and Mayday.

Life's Work

Techno pioneer Derrick May belongs to the triumvirate of Detroit disc jockeys widely credited with creating the electronic dance music genre in the 1980s. May, along with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, became celebrities in Europe during the "rave" rage, long before their achievements were recognized in the United States. Thanks to May's efforts, however, Detroit began hosting the world's largest free electronic music festival when the new millennium began. "For so long here, it felt like an endless climb to the top of nowhere," May told Detroit Free Press writer Brian McCollum. "In the early days I had a mission. All the guys did: Keeping this the rawest, purest, most innovative art form we could create. But nobody meant to become an outcast in their own city."

May was born on April 6, 1963, in Detroit, Michigan, and was raised in a single-parent household. During his teens, he lived in a suburb called Belleville, a half-hour from downtown Detroit, and when he was 17 his mother moved to Chicago. Hoping to win an athletic scholarship, he decided to stay behind with his grandfather to finish his senior year. But May was also an ardent music fan, and like his Belleville friends, Atkins and Saunderson, he had started DJ-ing and then making his own music at home via turntables and a newly affordable generation of drum machines. They created new songs by "sampling" a riff or a beat from another recording, and then building aural valleys and crescendos around it with synthesized bass beats or other musical additions. Atkins had formed an ensemble called Cybrotron and was already making records, but May was still primarily a disc jockey, belonging to an Atkins/Saunderson collective called Deep Space Soundworks.

When May went to Chicago to visit his mother, he visited a dance club he had heard of, where DJs spun similar self-doctored tracks. Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy had launched their careers in the discotheque era, but had recently developed a local Chicago following for their long sets at dance clubs, which featured synthesized basslines worked into old disco hits. The style was dubbed "house," and May was stunned by what he saw and heard when he visited a club where Knuckles was playing. In an interview published on the TechnoTourist website, May told John Osselaer that he recalled phoning Atkins back in Detroit and telling him, "'Juan, you are not going to believe this. I've seen the future! ... this is unbelievable. They have nightclubs here; people are dancing to this music. It is beautiful man, you're not going to believe it.'"

May did earn his hoped-for football scholarship, but dropped out after a year and returned to Detroit. He worked in an arcade and concentrated on making music and landing DJ jobs. Atkins's label, Metroplex, put out his first record, "Let's Go," in 1983. It caught on after receiving airplay on a local nighttime radio show with a cult following, hosted by a mysterious, anonymous figure who called himself the Electrifyin' Mojo. The show played seminal German electronic music of the 1970s, such as Kraftwerk, mixed in with more recent tracks from Prince and the punk genre. Soon May began hosting his own show, "Street Beats,"and founded his own label, Transmat, in late 1986.

Subsequent records that May made on Transmat included "Nude Photo," "Kaos," and "Strings of Life." Most were launched under the name Rhythim Is Rhythim or Mayday. The recordings caught on with music aficionados and launched May's career overseas. "Strings of Life" in particular, which featured a Detroit Symphony Orchestra sample, hit U.K. clubs just as the house scene took off in London clubs around 1987. Writing in Glasgow's Sunday Herald, David Stone called the early May tracks "weird, alchemic classics" that "took dance music into unexplored realms, full of shuddering bleeps and impossible syncopations."

For a time May lived in Amsterdam, but returned to Detroit to open the Music Institute, a dance venue, with Atkins and Saunderson,. Its success helped launch a second generation of DJs and music-makers, among them Richie Hawtin, Stacey Pullen, and Carl Craig. House eventually spawned several sub-genres: trance, jungle, and drum-and-bass among them, and May remained a cult figure overseas. For much of the 1990s, he stopped recording and kept to a heavy international touring schedule, often earning as much as $3,000 per night for a few hours of work. To meet demand for May's music, Sony Japan issued a retrospective, Innovator, in 1995. David Proffitt, a journalist for the Arizona Republic, called May "the Muddy Waters of techno," explaining that he "developed a signature style using crisp, percussion-heavy bass lines as the foundation for soaring string samples and warm effects that proved immensely popular and influential in the dance scene."

Around 1997, May began spending more time in Detroit. He remained a virtual unknown in his hometown outside of the insular club scene, and electronic music had still not yet caught on with the general public--although in European record stores, entire bins bore the label "Detroit," containing the work of May, Craig, and others. Of the new U.S. interest in his musical style, May remarked in a Detroit Free Press interview with McCollum, "It's kind of insulting. We're in our 30s. We've been doing this since we were 18 years old. The whole world's been listening, and finally somebody back home wants to pay attention. We've been ambassadors for the city, running around the world, and people back home have no idea." He added, "It comes down to keeping the fact alive that this music originated from a black element. It's a black art form. We are on a mission, and we refuse to be forgotten."

By 2000, techno's potential had finally attracted the attention of the mainstream record industry, and was catching on with youth in several American cities. Assessing the Detroit impact on the scene, Arizona Republic's Proffitt noted that "without the Belleview Three, there would be no Orb songs on car commercials or MTV reports on global club culture, and, most importantly, dancing all night at a sweaty club wouldn't have nearly the same sound." May was an organizing force for the first Focus Detroit Electronic Music Festival, a free Memorial Day weekend event held in downtown Detroit in 2000. The festival showcased dozens of electronic and DJ acts from around the world, and lured 1.5 million attendees, including techno music fans from several countries. Craig, May's former protégé, served as artistic director for the first two years, before internal wrangling forced his resignation. May supported Craig, and worked to rescue the festival from an event-planning firm that wanted to control it, and his camp gained the crucial support of the city's young mayor. The festival was renamed Movement 2003, and May spun at a well-attended set. In the website interview with Osselaer for TechnoTourist, May summed up techno's impact on popular culture: "Techno is the last true evolution of dance music of the twentieth century. ... A lot of people don't realize that and they probably never will."

Works

Selected discography

• Mayday Mix, Open, 1997.
• Innovator, Transmat, 1997.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Arizona Republic, May 27, 1999, p. 35.
• Detroit Free Press, May 30, 1997, p. 1D; September 16, 1998, p. 1A; May 21, 2003, p. 1A.
• Detroit News, May 16, 2001, p. 1A.
• Guardian (London, England), June 19, 1998, p. 20.
• Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), July 2, 2000, p. 4.

On-line

• "Derrick May Interview," TechnoTourist, http://technotourist.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=29 (July 10, 2003).

— Carol Brennan

• Born: April 06, 1963, Detroit, MI
• Active: '80s, '90s
• Genres: Electronica
• Instrument: DJ, Producer
• Representative Albums: "Innovator," "The Mayday Mix," "Mix Up, Vol. 5"
• Representative Songs: "Strings of Life," "Wiggin," "Nude Photo"

Biography

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. [See Also: Rhythim Is Rhythim] ~ John Bush, All Music Guide

Innovator Buy this CD

Innovator [R&S] Buy this CD

Mayday Mix Buy this CD

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