Arts&Life music
Techno
Rebecca Goldberg
Torchbearer Rebecca Goldberg talks techno and about the release of her latest album. REISA SHANAMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
A
touring DJ and active music producer 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 vividly 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 realized 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
PHOTOS COURTESY OF REBECCA GOLDBERG
UNITED PHOTO WORKS
32 |
SEPTEMBER 10 • 2020
