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

