Detroit techno turns out for Anthony Shake Shakir

Detroit's techno community gathered at Tangent Gallery on March 1, 2025, for a benefit supporting Anthony "Shake" Shakir, one of the city's founding-generation producers. Shakir is in long-term care for multiple sclerosis, and the event was organized to help cover the cost of that care and improve his day-to-day life.

The benefit was put together by Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit label and party run by Brendan Gillen and Erika Sherman. It ran from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. across two rooms. The lineup pulled in friends, peers, and collaborators from across the scene, including Claude Young, Daniel Bell, DJ Stingray 313, Eddie Fowlkes, Jay Denham, Keith Tucker, DJ Etta, Ectomorph, Erika, BMG, and Shawn Rudiman. Shakir himself was in attendance.

"I think it's really important to celebrate people while they're still here with us, and not just to do it after they're gone," organizer Brendan Gillen told Resident Advisor.

Shakir's place in Detroit music is deep but underrecognized. He got his start as a teenager on The Electrifying Mojo's radio show and became a fixture of the scene in the 1980s, working in A&R and management at Juan Atkins' Metroplex label, the imprint at the center of the city's first techno wave. He is often credited as one of the first Detroit producers to fold breakbeats into the sound, and his catalog has long been treated by collectors and DJs as essential listening rather than a footnote.

For those who could not make it to Tangent, the organizers also launched a GoFundMe campaign and kept it open in the weeks around the show so the fund could keep growing past the night itself. The benefit fit a familiar Detroit pattern, a scene that organizes its own mutual aid when one of its founders needs the help.

Shakir's recordings remain available through labels including Rush Hour and his own Frictional Recordings.