The Jan Diaries — Meeting Mad Mike Banks

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 2 October 2018

In the autumn of 2018 Jan Kinčl went to Berlin for the twentieth anniversary of the Red Bull Music Academy and wrote a column for Red Bull Croatia about what he found there. This entry came out of an accident. Walking down the stairs after a mastering lecture he recognised a voice he had only ever heard in a handful of radio interviews, turned around, and found Mike Banks standing behind him.

What the piece covers

Mike Banks — Mad Mike — started Underground Resistance in Detroit in 1989 with Jeff Mills, and for twenty-two years kept himself almost entirely away from cameras. The column sets out who UR were and why they mattered: a label built as a movement, formed against the politics and the economics of 1980s America, whose records became part of the DNA of techno. Then it drops the history and stays with the encounter.

What followed was two hours in the Funkhaus canteen with Banks, the Detroit DJ and producer John Collins, and Kevin Saunderson, who joined partway through. The conversation ran across the early years of Detroit techno, a long-running dispute over authorship, the difficulty of going back into the studio after a run of hits, and the book Saunderson was writing at the time. The account keeps returning to how ordinary Banks turned out to be — a man who coaches a primary-school baseball team, races cars on the street, and talks about his own catalogue with less self-regard than most beginners talk about theirs.

The part that stayed

The thread that tightened as the afternoon went on had nothing musical about it: family, friends, community — the reason Banks never left Detroit when so many of his peers did. He described putting the whole of UR’s distribution arm on hold when his sister, who had run its mail orders for twenty-five years, fell ill. On the fractures between people on the Detroit scene he was brief: “In the end we all come together.”

The column closes on honesty as the one criterion for music Jan is willing to call objective, and on why the unpolished records coming out of area code 313 are the ones he keeps going back to.

Read the full piece

The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Nine minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Susret s Mad Mike Banksom → redbull.com