The Detroit-Berlin Pipeline

DJ Bone — born Jerome Bell — is one of the most uncompromising figures in Detroit techno, which is saying something in a genre that has never been short of uncompromising figures. His label Subject Detroit, which he founded in 2001, has released records that sit at the absolute core of what the genre can do: relentless, functional, deeply felt. His DJ sets, which he has been playing since the early 1990s, are legendary for their intensity and their refusal to pander.

What makes Bone's story particularly interesting is the geography of his career. He is, in every meaningful sense, a Detroit artist — shaped by the city's industrial landscape, its economic devastation, its particular brand of Black American futurism. And yet he has spent much of his career playing in Europe, particularly in Berlin, where his music has found an audience that understands it on its own terms.

The Detroit-Berlin connection is one of the great cultural exchanges of the late twentieth century, and Bone is one of its most articulate witnesses. He was there when Detroit techno first arrived in Berlin in the late 1980s, carried by DJs and producers who were making music that the rest of America had not yet figured out how to hear. He watched as that music became the foundation of an entire culture — clubs, labels, a way of life — that has now outlasted the political circumstances that gave it birth.

We spoke to him before a set at a Detroit warehouse space that has been hosting underground parties for thirty years. He arrived early, spent an hour going through records, and talked for two hours without once checking his phone.

In Conversation