Music / Business & brands
Mike Banks
· record producer, musician, label and distribution founder
Co-founder of Underground Resistance and Submerge, the militant, independent heart of Detroit's second techno wave, based on East Grand Boulevard.
- Birth name
- Michael Anthony Banks
- Also known as
- "Mad" Mike Banks · Mad Mike · The Martian
- Detroit years
- 1980s–present
- Field
- Music, Business & brands
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
“Mad” Mike Banks is a Detroit musician who played bass and guitar as a session player, including with Parliament-Funkadelic, and worked in the late 1980s with the house collective Members of the House. Around 1989–1990 he and Jeff Mills founded Underground Resistance (UR), soon joined by Robert Hood. UR paired hard, experimental techno with a political message aimed at young Black Detroiters living through the city's economic collapse; members appeared masked, refused interviews and pressed slogans into the vinyl. After Mills and Hood left in 1992, Banks led UR alone, releasing Drexciya, DJ Rolando and Suburban Knight and his own jazz-inflected Galaxy 2 Galaxy project. With Christa Robinson he co-founded Submerge Distribution in 1992 to give Detroit's small labels a shared business. Submerge moved from 2030 Grand River to 3000 East Grand Boulevard in the early 2000s, where it now houses UR, the Somewhere in Detroit record shop and the Exhibit 3000 techno museum.
Highlights
- Co-founded Underground Resistance with Jeff Mills around 1989–1990.
- Co-founded Submerge Distribution in 1992.
- Hi-Tech Jazz (1993) by Galaxy 2 Galaxy became a techno classic.
- Refuses to be photographed in public, part of UR's anonymous ethos.
- His building on East Grand Boulevard hosts Exhibit 3000, called the world's first techno museum.
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 2
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Founded · early 2000s–present
Submerge / Exhibit 3000 / Somewhere in Detroit
Headquarters of Underground Resistance and Submerge in a 1910 brick building; the Exhibit 3000 museum is open by appointment and the record shop on Saturdays.
Worked here · 1990s
Former Submerge / UR headquarters
Demolished · 2002
The original home of Submerge and Underground Resistance; the site is now a vacant parking lot.