32 | SEPTEMBER 10 • 2020
Arts&Life
music
Techno
Torchbearer
Rebecca Goldberg talks techno and about
the release of her latest album.
REISA SHANAMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
A
touring DJ and active music pro-
ducer who has worked at Detroit
Threads record store and was
featured in the 2016 French documentary
Music on the Road, it’
s easy to see Rebecca
Goldberg as a torchbearer of Detroit techno.
“I have devoted myself to it. It’
s not just
the music, but the culture of it,
” she said. “It’
s
very much a culture, and I think I’
m a good
representative of that.
”
Goldberg grew up in Bloomfield
Township in the ’
80s and ’
90s, where her
mother played piano and accordion and
sang. Her father, more interested in the
technological side of music, kept a consistent
collection of vintage radios and stereos at
home.
“You don’
t realize until much later, but
looking back it makes perfect sense,
” she
said about the way these two aspects of her
childhood have shaped her own approach to
music.
In addition to the sounds her parents
exposed her to, including disco, Phil Collins,
The Doors and Madonna, Goldberg viv-
idly recalls hearing the DJ mixes of Stacey
“Hotwaxx” Hale and live recordings from
Club X pumping through Detroit’
s airwaves.
“Stacey was playing freestyle music, and I
had never heard anything like that before,
”
she said. “The club music was techno, trance,
stuff that my parents didn’
t have in their
CD collection, and I wasn’
t hearing on the
school bus on the way home,
” she laughed.
Though she attended the University of
Michigan to study American culture and got
a job after graduating, it was not her passion
to work in that environment.
“I didn’
t know if there was a way I could
make music and create a career for myself. It
took a few years to hone that in. Once I real-
ized that could be my livelihood, I definitely
went all in,
” she said.
She began producing her own music, took
a job at famed local record store Detroit
Threads, and got booked to DJ Detroit
nightclubs like TV Lounge and the Works.
And after growing up listening to Hale,
Goldberg and her hero wound up being
booked to DJ many of the same events over
the years. Hale later gifted Goldberg her
first piece of music production equipment:
an MPC. This combination drum machine
and sampler that allows its user to upload
sounds and manipulate them the same way
a percussionist would “changed everything,
”
she said.
Having once rode 10 airplanes and
six trains in a single week while touring,
Goldberg calls the effects of COVID-19 on
continued on page 34
UNITED PHOTO WORKS
PHOTOS COURTESY OF REBECCA GOLDBERG
Rebecca
Goldberg