Stacey Pullen and the second wave that stayed on the road

Stacey Pullen has been a working Detroit techno DJ for more than thirty years, and the shape of his career says something about how the music actually traveled. He is usually filed under the second wave of Detroit techno, the layer that came up directly under the city's founders and then spent decades carrying the sound across two continents while the biggest names moved on to other things.

Pullen grew up in Detroit and learned the craft close to the source. He has said he was a regular at the Music Institute before he knew anyone in the scene, going down on Friday and Saturday nights, and he credits Derrick May as a direct mentor, with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson as the other founding figures he came up under. In a Billboard interview he described first hearing May's "Nude Photo," as Rhythim Is Rhythim, as a turning point: "I remember hearing this crazy-sounding synthesized bass line that was so complex and syncopated it was unreal," he told Billboard.

His early records arrived under a stack of aliases. He released as Bango on a Transmat subsidiary in the early 1990s, and also worked as Silent Phase, Kosmik Messenger, and X-Stacy. In 1993 a planned month in Amsterdam with May stretched into more than a year of touring Europe every weekend. He pulled the catalog under his own name with the album "Today Is the Tomorrow You Were Promised Yesterday," released in 2001 on Science, the Virgin imprint, per the album's discography listings.

The label that defines him is his own. He founded Blackflag Recordings in 1998, opening it with the EP "Sweat" under the alias Black Odyssey, according to his Resident Advisor biography. The imprint did not run uninterrupted, though, and that is the part of the story most people miss. Through a licensing deal tied to a major-label contract with Virgin, Pullen lost the rights to both his own name and the Blackflag label for years, and did not regain them until 2012. He has framed that stretch plainly. "I concentrated on DJing as an outlet for my frustrations," he told Billboard. "Touring is good to do that, you're in a different city every day, being able to touch the people."

That is the throughline. The studio output paused, but the DJ work never did. Pullen built a career on the international circuit, the rooms and festivals where a Detroit producer arrives, plays, and leaves. He has logged years of residencies in Europe and a steady run of festival dates, and he returned to the studio side once he had his name back, relaunching Blackflag with a roster that reached beyond Detroit to artists from Miami, Spain, and Colombia. "I'm doing something different from other Detroit labels," he told Billboard. "Most of the Detroit labels that people know only release Detroit music."

At home, Movement remains the anchor. Pullen played the festival's Movement Stage on Saturday, May 25, 2024, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., per the published set times. His appearances there are close to an annual fixture, and his work has stayed visible on Detroit imprints, including a 2018 entry in Carl Craig's Planet E catalog.

The useful way to think about Pullen is not as a founder and not as a festival-headliner star, but as the connective tissue between them. The founders get the origin story and the second-wave headliners get the arena bookings. Pullen is part of the layer that kept the music on the road through the lean years, including his own, which is why he is still touring on it now.