At the risk of upsetting those flaky people who get upset whenever we write about Detroit – including Derrick May, who pretends he doesn’t read our site – we’re going to start our weekend with another article about Detroit. And the question on our mind today at Ears To The House concerns two subjects which we’ve covered lately.

Those are the Movement Appreciation Party – a bizarre phenomenon that truly requires more digging into – and free festival Tec-Troit. A member of the team pointed out to us yesterday that we somehow managed to miss in our previous report from Thursday – and it’s to do with the timings of both events.

You see, Movement’s Appreciation Party – starring Carl Craig and Stacey Pullen – took place on June 8th between 9pm and 2am. And according to listings submitted to ticketing website Resident Advisor, Tec-Troit started on June 9th at 11am and ran until approximately the end of June 10th…

A curious arrangement which forces all but the most die-hard party goers to effectively choose between one event or the other – although one company which isn’t complaining about this state of affairs is Resident Advisor themselves. Money really does trump everything else to these people, doesn’t it?

So why are the events so close to one another? Is there anything suspicious going on, or is it merely bad timing? One of our regular Detroit sources claims “techno politics” is at work, explaining “Paxahau want everyone to have all the fun with them, because it means they get all the money. I kinda don’t blame them, as they only get one shot a year, but it does feel like everyone else gets squeezed out in the process.”.

A quick look at timings for both events in recent years suggests there might be something in this theory – even going back to the events before the pandemic, they invariably either take place back to back, or in very close proximity to one another. But another one of our regular Detroit sources isn’t quite so sure.

Speaking yesterday, he said “I don’t know about this. I think it’s easy to bash Paxahau and Movement for being so popular, but I’m not won over by this idea that they just don’t like people partying elsewhere. Tec-Troit is more for the local crowd and Movement for the international audience. I guess some of this is just down to the idea that Detroit techno doesn’t like to share. It never has.”.

Expect this one to run and run…