Kevin Saunderson: from Detroit to Rage with rave in his heart
Plus Jorg Kuning, Mark Pritchard and more
The news that Kevin Saunderson is returning in May with the first e-Dancer album in quarter of a century made my heart leap. That he will be accompanied by his son Dantiez all the more so.
Saunderson is - obviously but it bears repeating - one of the famed Belleville Three who invented Detroit techno back in the 1980s. That’s the story, anyway. The reality of Detroit techno’s creation is complicated and Eddie Fowlkes, for one, has problems with the Belleville Three narrative. But no one would deny that Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and D*rrick May were hugely important in forging the Detroit sound.
Of these three, Saunderson is the artist who spread his musical wings most widely. His Inner City project (with Paris Grey) brought a disco / R&B feel to techno - a legacy of Saunderson’s visits to New York’s Paradise Garage - and enjoyed vast global success. Inner City topped the Billboard dance chart five times in the late 80s / early 90s and I remember seeing them on Top of the Pops in the UK, as singles like Big Fun, Good Life and Do You Love What You Feel hit the top 20.
Maybe it was because of this, but Saunderson’s music always felt like it had a stronger connection to the UK than that of his peers. His debut single, 1986’s Triangle of Love (as Kreem) had the distinct air of New Order’s Blue Monday, for example, and Saunderson would remix the Manchester band’s Round & Round in 1989.
More importantly, on his 1988 track Just Want Another Chance, Saunderson (operating as Reese) invented what would later be known as the Reese bass, the tough but harmonically rich and weirdly billowing bass line that would go on to be one of the key sounds in jungle. (Mixmag has an excellent write up on the creation and subsequent spread of the Reese bass, which would be used by everyone from Ray Keith to Alex, erm, Reece.)
“I experienced coming to the UK from early '88, I stayed the whole summer of '88, then I kept coming back,” Saunderson told UK rave legends Fabio and Grooverider in a recent interview for Mixmag. “While I was over there, I wanted to see what was going on. I wanted to go out and check out the vibes or maybe I'd go to the record shop and they're playing this music, I'm like 'Damn, where'd this come from?’.
Jungle, in particular, had an impact. “When I started hearing jungle I started saying, 'This is funky, this is groovy, it's fast but you can still dance to it’,” Saunderson said. “I was intrigued to find out who was playing this music. The first time I remember you guys [Fabio and Grooverider] definitely was at Rage. I was just like, these brothers is killing it! This shit is bad!”
As Reese, Saunderson released some wonderful underground cuts while Inner City climbed the charts. These include the hip house-y You’re Mine in 1989, the wonderfully brooding Rock to the Beat (by Reese and Santonio), the tough, spartan grooves of Bounce Your Body To The Box (Reese and Santonio again) and the slippery funk of 1991’s Bassline.
These songs sounded like a reflection of - and influence on - what was happening in the UK at the time, as rave culture took off and subsequently curdled into something darker, euphoria wearing off and crude reality making its presence known. The bass lines are tough and the atmospheres often heavy; breakbeats come sneaking in to Saunderson’s work and the BPMs gallop away.
“You know that I was inspired off drum & bass a little, and more so breaks in the UK,” Saunderson told Fabio and Grooverider for Mixmag. “'Let me throw some breaks in here and try to do some different shit and make it a little tough.’”
You can hear this in some of Inner City’s later music. The band’s third album, 1992’s Paradise, contains the astoundingly good hoover bass / breakbeat / soul vocal track Let It Reign, which sounds like it has come to us from Detroit, via a dodgy warehouse in Coventry.
Saunderson’s most rave friendly music, however, was released under his short-lived Tronikhouse nom de plume. Tronikhouse debuted in 1991 with the Hardcore Techno EP, home to the fantastically dark, hoover bass and breaks roller Up Tempo, a tune Grooverider calls “early jungle” and which he later remixed. Spark Plug, which followed in 1992, is a chattering rave frenzy; and Tronikhouse’s Straight Outta Hell was an anthem at Fabio and Grooverider’s seminal Rage club night, where jungle was basically codified.
But e-Dancer - with its not exactly subtle artist name - wasn’t far behind in the rave stakes. E-Dancer also debuted in 1991, with the astonishingly gnarled Speaker Punishing and the overdriven nervous flutter of Pump the Move, a pure rave song that sounds destined to soundtrack those moments when you feel just a little too close to the edge.
It’s worth explaining here what I mean by rave music. Lots of different types of music was played in raves, from Public Enemy to Mr. Fingers, and if you look up your typical rave playlist you will find most of this. One definition of rave music would simply be “music that was played in raves”. And, on a general level, that works fine.
To my mind, though, there is another, more specific definition of rave music. I think of rave music as what came just before breakbeat hardcore. It had breakbeats, often mixed up with a four-to-the-floor kick drums, big bass lines and huge synth riffs à la CLS - Can You Feel It. The result was dark-ish but not uncommercial: think The Prodigy’s Charly, Altern8’s Infiltrate 202, T99’s Anasthasia, Awesome3’s Don’t Go and e-Dancer’s classic Velocity Funk. The music is almost hardcore but not quite. It’s rave music. Which would become breakbeat hardcore. Which would beceme hardcore. Which would become jungle. And so on.
Rave music is also very British. T99 are Belgian, admittedly, but the vast majority of music I think of as “rave” comes from the UK. American tunes featured heavily at raves, of course, but in terms of actual rave music, only Todd Terry (as CLS), Lenny Dee, Frankie Bones and Kevin Saunderson really fit in.
This is one of the many reasons why I love Kevin Saunderson. The history of electronic music is long and complicated and no one is denying the influence of German, Japan, France, Italy and many other places. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s it felt like it was the Trans-Atlantic, US / UK exchange that was driving both the popularisation and the evolution of dance music, as records from Black producers in the US were picked up by DJs and artists in the UK, adapted and sent back out. This, admittedly, is a narrative we like in the UK, as it chimes with the experiences of 1960s bands like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But, in this case, it seems to work.
The big difference between the Trans-Atlantic musical exchange in the 1960s, compared to that of the 1980s / early 90s, was what happened when the music left the UK. In the 60s, The Beatles and the Stones had a huge impact in the US, which kept the pass-the-parcel of influences rushing along. In the 1980s and early 90s, it felt like British electronic music had little influence on US producers and almost none at all on the mainstream American public.
When American producers and DJs did pick up on British music, it was normally the tunes that sounded most like their own work, as with the popularity of X-Press 2 in the New York house scene. Jungle, that most British of sounds, were never that big in the US and The Prodigy only made their American breakthrough after strapping on a host of punk and rock influences with The Fat of the Land. The music of Larry Heard and Juan Atkins, to name but two artists, was huge in UK rave culture but you couldn’t hear any influence of rave on their own work. (And, yes, Juan Atkins did collaborate with 4-Hero on their Jacob's Optical Stairway album in 1996. But that was years later.)
Kevin Saunderson, as he mentions above, was listening to what was happening in the UK in the late 80s / early 90s, his ears open to how British producers were moulding his sound into bold new directions. And e-Dancer was were many of his raviest tracks landed. Velocity Funk is a rave track; Warp is a rave track; Pump the Move is a rave track; Grab The Beat is a rave track; and so on.
At the same time, e-Dancer was also the name that Saunderson used for his odder, deeper productions, such as the classic World of Deep, Heavenly (and in particularly the divine Juan Atkins remix) and Banjo. Speaking to DJ Mag about e-Dancer in 2021 Saunderson said that the name allowed him to “dig in, dig deep and get my internal musical emotions out into the instruments and make music that’s made to be played in the darkest, deepest clubs”.
This is why I am so excited that e-Dancer are back - properly back - after all these years, with their self-titled new album set to drop on May 21.
That Saunderson has his son Dantiez along with him, joining in a line of Detroit techno filial connections that includes Robert and Lyric Hood’s Floorplan and Juan Atkins’ work with his daughter Milan Ariel, is even better.
Maybe you have to be a parent to really get this; maybe I am just a sentimental fool; but I adore seeing the electronic music baton being passed from generation to generation.
Three cheers for the e-Dancer legend, then. As for the actual new e-Dancer album, it’s not bad. Much like the 2020 Inner City album We All Move Together (on which Dantiez also features) it has its moments - notably on the single Melodica, with its low, strafing and almost Reese-y bass - when it feels like an e-Dancer album in 2025 should feel, all pumped up and powerful, but still unsettling and slightly weird.
There’s nothing on the new album to rival Velocity Funk or Pump the Move but e-Dancer doesn’t disgrace the legend, either. In New Order terms, the new e-Dancer album is more Get Ready than Music Complete. But it never dips to the level of Lost Sirens and for that we should feel grateful. Hell, we should be grateful just to share the same musical earth as Kevin Saunderson. Dance music, as I have said far too many times, doesn’t do a good enough job in remembering its pioneers. And that is a big problem.
As Saunderson himself said in a recent editorial for Blackout Mixmag: “Black History Month is a time to educate and celebrate, not just for Black people, but for everyone. The history of our music - Techno - started in Detroit, built on innovation, resilience and creativity. It’s important to acknowledge where it came from, who pioneered it, and how it continues to influence the world. This is more than just music; it’s culture, history, and a movement that deserves recognition.”
PS I’ve put together a Kevin Saunderson / e-Dancer playlist on Apple Music.
PPS I once interviewed Kevin Saunderson for the Line Noise podcast. You can hear that here.
Some listening
Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke - This Conversation is Missing You
Thom Yorke has been so ubiquitous of late - with, ahem, everything but Radiohead - that we sometimes overlook what a joy a good Thom Yorke vocal is. Yorke’s voice is a very malleable tool, too, which works with The Smile’s prog jazz equally as well as it does when aligned to Mark Pritchard’s race-y, electro-rock beat and angelic chords on This Conversation is Missing You. I was going to call Yorke’s voice “pliable” but that’s not quite right, as it implies something formless and even a bit weak; and the vocal here is a sort of melancholy strident.
Circuit des Yeux’s Truth feels like it comes from a similar place to This Conversation is Missing You, a processed electronic beat, weirdly perky bass line, one-note guitar and gothic echo meeting Haley Fohr’s incredible voice. Truth is very intense, hugely hypnotic and actually quite danceable, the kind of song that, if you came across it on the right dance floor at the right time - perhaps at a Goth club after a bad week at work and too much garlic vodka - would prove transcendental. Truth has drama for days.
Etienne de Crécy - Rising Soul (feat. Damon Albarn)
…. and if Pritchard can do Yorke, then De Crécy can definitely do Albarn. Rising Soul actually sounds more Damon Albarn than De Crécy - or at least de Crécy as we know him - with the Blur singer laying his characteristic Essex croon over a delicious combination of trip hop beat, sun-warped chords, a picked acoustic guitar and dulcet horns, like the most amiable Gorillaz song you could ever hope to encounter. And that’s a compliment, obviously. (Although a Super Discount-style house mix would be no bad thing at all, if you’re listening eDc.)
Mount Kimbie - Boxing (feat. King Krule) (DJ Python remix)
Perhaps my favourite thing about DJ Python’s work is how gentle it all is, as if the New York producer is summoning up his beats while a baby sleeps on next door. On his remix of Boxing, he even makes King Krule’s sandpaper and glue voice sound like the product of a gilded dream, on a production that could have come off a The Field album circa 2007, all tender loops and aquatic rush. It’s indie dance week on Line Noise, apparently.
Jorg Kuning is one of the far-too-small group of producers who realises that a really silly noise is fun - but a whole bunch of them, artfully arranged, is perfect. Skudde, which comes from the London artist’s new Elvers Pass EP, starts off like an electro Bug in the Bass Bin and ends up like a very imprudent take on Kraftwerk, the track powered along by a collection of oddball sounds and uncanny valleys that are delightful in their folly.
Arooj Aftab - Raat Ki Rani (Khruangbin remix)
If you’ve been watching the new series of The White Lotus - and you really should - then Khruangbin might be on your mind, the group’s early excursions into Thai rock revivalism getting a gentle hammering on the show’s soundtrack. That won’t prepare you for the group’s remix of Arooj Aftab’s Raat Ki Rani, however, with the Texas trio turning the gorgeously nocturnal original into a work of very 90s-sounding nu-jack house, a transformation that is as brilliant as it is unexpected.
Yusuf / Cat Stevens - King of Trees (Live in Japan, 1974)
Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ Saturnight: Live From Tokyo, originally released in Japan in 1974, gets a worldwide debut on May 2, with this entirely charming live version of King of Trees being the first digital taster. This song goes out to a Line Noise subscriber who, I am told, reads the whole newsletter despite not knowing any of the music on it. Now is the day, I hope.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise - Krautrock special with Wolfgang Seidel
This week on the Line Noise podcast, it is a Krautrock special as we speak to Wolfgang Seidel, the former drummer in Eruption, a group founded by (former Tangerine Dream and Kluster member) Conrad Schnitzler, that was once described as “a thinktank for the then explosive Krautrock scene”. Seidel is also the author of a new book: Krautrock Eruption – An Introduction To German Electronic Music 1970-1980, which I thoroughly recommend. Obviously, we spoke about Krautrock, its influences today, about alternative histories, Kraftwerk, capitalism and more
Peter Perrett once of The Only Ones, is now a fantastic solo artist, whose new album The Cleansing is the best of his career, full of depth, wisdom and gallows humour. We spoke in Barcelona before his recent gig. If the audio quality is a little suspect on my side, it is because I was wearing a mask - Peter has a lot of health problems and wasn’t feeling the best that day. Besides, who cares what I sound like? We talked about everything from being a parent to Do Not Resuscitate notices. And I really hope you enjoy it.
The playlists
Play is the beginning of knowledge, according to George Dorsey. To which I can only reply, yes but playlists are the very peak of knowing. So here are my two: my best new music of 2025 playlist. And my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.
What a fantastic read, thank you for this! I really love the UK rave connections you mapped out here, I had no idea! Cheers Ben
Great read. Saunderson had a cool show on NTS recently talking through his formative tracks and the eras that shaped him. I don’t have a deep knowledge of Detroit techno so absolutely lapped it up.