The New Yorker:

A shiny museum dedicated to the music genre has opened in Frankfurt, Germany, and many techno pioneers feel that Black and queer artists in Detroit have been overlooked.

By T. M. Brown 

When the doors opened to the Museum of Modern Electronic Music (momem) in Frankfurt’s Hauptwache square, last year, it seemed that club music was finally getting its due. momem was billed as the world’s first museum to celebrate techno, finally giving the genre an official home in Germany, the country where the pulsing untz of kick drums and snares found a foothold in the global music scene. “There are museums for a lot of other kinds of music,” Alex Azary, a techno pioneer and momem’s director, said in a video produced by a German music outlet and released shortly after Azary secured a space for the museum. “But there’s nothing like that at all for the field of electronic music, techno, house, club culture.”

That claim would come as news to the founders of Underground Resistance, the Detroit-based music label behind the techno museum known as Exhibit 3000. Situated on Detroit’s Grand Boulevard, the modest space has been open since 2002; it is owned by the techno pioneer Mike (Mad) Banks and managed by Banks and the d.j. and producer John Collins. The collaborators, who are now in their fifties and sixties, started the museum so that the story of techno’s Detroit origins wouldn’t get lost or erased as the genre’s popularity grew.

The situation escalated when Peter Feldmann, then the mayor of Frankfurt, sent an invitation for momem’s opening party welcoming guests “in the middle of Frankfurt, where techno has its origin.” The accumulated snubs set off a conflagration in the fiercely protective techno community: female:pressure, a global consortium of women, nonbinary, and trans electronic-music artists, wrote an open letter condemning what they saw as the patriarchal whitewashing of a genre created by nonwhite and queer artists. “Should the claim be a pure marketing measure,” the letter stated, “it inadmissibly exploits the cultures of people with histories of migration and oppression by marginalizing their achievements.”

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