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Reported features on the people making Detroit what it is.
Laura Killingbeck's 1,000-mile bike ride across Michigan ends in Detroit, documenting a hidden form of domestic violence
Laura Killingbeck is two weeks into a 1,000-mile bicycle ride across Michigan in partnership with orsa credit union to document economic abuse, ending July 20 in Detroit.
A Detroit veteran came home and built something empowering for the kids
Damon Williams spent 21 years in the Air Force, returned to East English Village, and launched Outside the Box, a youth hub connecting Detroit teenagers with city resources and community partners.
From tire piles to beautification contracts: Audra Carson's long road to Izzie Global
Audra Carson spent 30 years as a corporate business analyst before founding De-Tread in 2009 to address Detroit's tire dumping problem. She now runs Izzie Global, a waste management and beautification company named after her mother.
JerJuan Howard opens the Howard Family Bookstore at Puritan and Lesure
JerJuan Howard, 28, spent a year and a half converting a vacant west side building into a bookstore, event space, and 3D printing lab rooted in the Puritan Avenue corridor.
Danny Brown is always onto the next thing
Detroit rapper Danny Brown returns to Movement for his fourth appearance, bringing 15-plus years of catalog to the Waterfront stage and a new dance track that's become the city's spring anthem.
Carole Harris comes back to where she started
The first solo show Carole Harris ever had was at Gallery 7, the Detroit space Charles McGee ran from 1969 to 1979 to give Black Detroit artists somewhere to exhibit.
Five Wayne State alumni open Rahha inside the Hannan Center
Rahha translates loosely from Arabic as comfort, peace of mind, the feeling of finally putting something down. The five founders chose it deliberately.
Tamela Todd built Sip-N-Read after waiting six years on the right space
Tamela Todd opened Sip-N-Read on a Wednesday afternoon in late August.
Sterling Toles and the hybrid Detroit hip-hop / electronic vein
Sterling Toles has been making music in Detroit for more than two decades. Most of it sits where the city's hip-hop, jazz, and electronic traditions overlap, and most of it has been heard outside the city before it gets a Detroit listen.
DJ Holographic and the new wave of Detroit DJs
Ariel Corley has been DJing in Detroit as DJ Holographic for most of the last decade. She is one of the names that the next-wave question lands on first, and the touring schedule explains why.
Lauren Ellis won Hatch Detroit. now she has to build the bakery.
Lauren Ellis pitched a French viennoiserie bakery on a Wednesday night at the Wayne State University Industry Innovation Center, in front of judges and a public that had cast 21,000 votes.
Father Dukes headlined Movement
Father Dukes played a Movement 2025 stage on May 24. She came out of Seraphine Collective's beatmatch brunches two years earlier.
HiTech had the year
HiTech released HONEYPAQQ Vol. 1 on May 23, 2025, and spent the rest of the year doing everything else. Coachella. Berghain. Primavera. Roskilde.
Inside Paxahau: how Detroit's festival institution programs Movement
Paxahau Event Production has produced Movement since 2006. The company started in 1998 as a Detroit promotion crew and has run the festival under five different mayors.
Hart Plaza, Detroit's electronic music ground zero
Hart Plaza opened to the public in 1975. Isamu Noguchi designed it. Fourteen acres of plaza, fountains, sculpture, and amphitheater set on the Detroit River across from Windsor.
DJ Minx: Detroit house's matriarchy
Jennifer Witcher founded Women on Wax Recordings in 1996. Twenty-nine years later DJ Minx is one of the most established Detroit house DJs touring, and the only one of her cohort who built a label specifically to amplify women in dance music.
Mister Joshooa played Panorama Bar
Mister Joshooa played his first Panorama Bar set on April 26, 2025, as part of a Klubnacht lineup.
Old Miami: where Detroit's underground still drinks after the show
Old Miami has been a veterans bar in the Cass Corridor since the 1970s. The back patio has been one of Detroit techno's quiet anchors for nearly as long.
Inside the North End record shop keeping Detroit techno's vinyl archive alive
Somewhere in Detroit, the retail counter inside the Submerge building, has run on appointments and word of mouth for two decades. The crates are the city's vinyl spine.
At 88, Janet Webster Jones is bookselling royalty
Donya Craddock, who runs Dock Bookshop in Fort Worth, called Janet Webster Jones the queen from a stage at Winter Institute 2025. The room agreed.
Lincoln Factory's first year of programming, told through the calendar
Lincoln Factory opened in September 2024 inside the old Lincoln Motor Factory. Seven months in, the room has run roughly 40 nights of programming. Most of them sold out.
Kyle Hall: the Detroit prodigy who never left the city
Kyle Hall founded Wild Oats Records in 2009 when he was seventeen. Sixteen years later he is still in Detroit, still releasing records, and one of the most consistent house and techno producers the city has produced since.
Kerri Chandler's recurring Detroit work
Kerri Chandler is from East Orange, New Jersey. He has played Detroit house rooms with enough consistency over three decades that the city treats him as something close to family.
La Fonda Street and Encarnación open as a coffee-and-cantina pair in West Village
Robert Encarnación was a Bank of America small-business banker in Miami before he moved to Detroit. He came up for a weekend in April 2019. By the end of June he had moved.
Roar Brewing turns Nain Rouge into the city's first black-owned brewery
Evan Fay learned to like craft beer in Wyoming. He was Air Force, and he kept driving down to Fort Collins because the breweries there worked like community centers.
Theo Parrish at Sound Signature: 28 years of Detroit deep house
Theo Parrish founded Sound Signature in 1997. The Detroit deep house label has run for 28 years on a consistent aesthetic, a tight catalog, and a refusal to release at major-label pace.
JJ and Anthony Curis, in TIME
TIME named Little Village one of the World's Greatest Places of 2025.
DJ Stingray and the steady Detroit DJ work
Sherard Ingram has been the steady DJ in Detroit electro and techno since the late 1990s. The DJ Stingray work is what he has done in the years since Drexciya stopped touring.
Spot Lite: where Detroit's house and techno scenes meet
Roula David opened Spot Lite on the east side in 2018. Bar, gallery, record shop, music room. The format has held.
Marble Bar: the New Center room that became a Detroit techno destination
Marble Bar opened on Holden Street in 2015. Ten years later it is one of the rooms touring DJs ask to play first.
Omar-S: Detroit's most prolific solo techno project
Alex O. Smith has been releasing as Omar-S on his own FXHE Recordings since the early 2000s. The catalog is among the most prolific in active Detroit techno, and Smith does it almost entirely solo.
Yvonne Byrd opened Minnie's Detroit on Trumbull, the fourth Detroit bar she's owned
Yvonne Byrd has run a bar in Detroit since 2008. Vondie's on the River was the first, named after her childhood nickname. It ran until 2012, when the lease wasn't renewed.
TV Lounge: Detroit techno's living room on Grand River
TV Lounge has been programming techno and house on Grand River Avenue since the early 2000s. Mister Joshooa has been running it for over 20 years.
Stacey Pullen and the Detroit techno middle generation
Stacey Pullen has been touring as a Detroit techno DJ for more than thirty years. The middle-generation status is partly a function of when he started and partly a function of staying in the city.
Transmat: Derrick May's lasting Detroit imprint
Derrick May founded Transmat in 1986. The catalog is small, the influence is not.
Robert Hood and the minimal Detroit techno tradition
Robert Hood co-founded Underground Resistance with Jeff Mills and Mike Banks. He left in 1994 to start M-Plant and put out Minimal Nation, the record that named a subgenre.
Metroplex Records: Juan Atkins's foundation
Juan Atkins founded Metroplex in 1985 out of his mother's house. The catalog is the foundation document for a genre.
Planet E Communications: Carl Craig's Detroit institution
Carl Craig founded Planet E Communications in 1991. The label has run continuously since, which in Detroit techno is its own kind of accomplishment.
Rebel Nell moves to Eastern Market and the materials follow
Amy Peterson found her first piece of jewelry-making material under the Gratiot bridge in 2013.
Encarnacion and La Fonda Street open in West Village
Robert Encarnacion opened La Fonda Street in June 2024 and the Encarnacion coffee shop next to it as a soft opening that November.
Book Suey runs as a co-op, in a building that used to be a bank
The corner of Joseph Campau and Caniff has had several lives. The 1920s building started as a bank, with stately limestone and ornamental tile that the present tenants kept intact.
Moodymann: the Detroit producer who keeps the underground underground
Kenny Dixon Jr. has been releasing as Moodymann since the early 1990s. The Detroit house producer has done it through one label, his own KDJ, and a refusal to leave the city or the catalog.
Filipino comfort food in a New Center bakery, finally
Jonathan Peregrino spent fifteen years in corporate America before quitting to bake.
Rosette Market puts a bodega in the Perennial Corktown lobby
The Perennial Corktown apartment building at 1611 Michigan Avenue opened in late 2023 with two retail tenants on the ground floor.
Submerge: Underground Resistance's headquarters and Detroit's techno archive
Mike Banks established Submerge in 1992 as a distribution hub for Detroit's independent dance labels. The building at 3000 East Grand Boulevard now holds the closest thing the city has to a living techno archive.
Sepia coffee project lands a North End shop after a long detour
Martell Mason got into coffee through trade dynamics, not espresso.
Jeff Mills: the second-by-second precision of a Detroit master
Jeff Mills has been DJing professionally since the early 1980s. The Detroit techno producer's catalog runs across more than three decades and roughly 60 releases on Axis Records, the label he founded in 1992.
Michigan Central's new residency pays Detroit artists $30,000 to make things
The Michigan Central x Newlab Creative Residency launches its inaugural cohort this fall. Six artists. $30,000 each.
Detroit's record store map: Submerge, People's, Hello, and what's left
Detroit lost most of its record stores in the 2000s. The handful that survived run the city's vinyl economy and the techno-pilgrimage circuit at the same time.
Mike Huckaby's lasting Detroit house legacy
Mike Huckaby died in April 2020 of COVID-19 complications. Four years later the Detroit house producer's records are still circulating, his teaching is still cited by Detroit DJs, and the catalog he left has not aged.
Paramita Sound earned national bar honors and Andrey Douthard kept the menu the same
When USA Today named its first 27 Bars of the Year in July 2024, the only Michigan entry was Paramita Sound, the Black-owned wine bar and record shop on Broadway.
The Music Institute and the room where Detroit techno became a scene
The Music Institute opened on Broadway in late 1988 and closed in late 1989. Less than 18 months. Long enough.
Stacey Hotwaxx Hale: the Detroit DJ who never stopped working
Stacey Hale has been DJing in Detroit since the 1970s. The 'Godmother of House' framing is not a marketing line; it is what people in the city have called her for decades.
Erika linenfelser turned her North End yard into Foxglove and a custom four-point sound system
Erika Linenfelser's house is at 257 Leicester Court, in the North End.
Charles McGee opens the shepherd
The Shepherd's first show is a Charles McGee retrospective. It is appropriate.
Tiffany Cartwright wins Hatch Detroit, twelve years into the program's run
Tiffany Cartwright was the first finalist to take the stage on May 9 at the Wayne State University Industry Innovation Center.
