‘People Still Love Hearing the Classics’: Kevin Saunderson on the Return of e-Dancer

In 2023, the producer Kevin Saunderson wandered into the home studio he shares with his son Dantiez in Detroit. What he heard blasting from the speakers seemed familiar. “I said, ‘Man, that sounds like me!’” Saunderson recalls with a laugh. “[Dantiez] used some of my bass sounds.”

As one of three men widely credited with inventing Detroit techno, Saunderson is used to encountering artists who have borrowed scraps of his style. But this time, he got a chance to put his own twist on another producer’s unwitting homage.

“We’re always around each other,” Saunderson says of Dantiez. “We’ve already been doing Inner City [another group] together, and he sounds like me in some ways. So I thought, why don’t we just do an album together?” That release, e-Dancer, which takes its name from one of Saunderson’s projects in the 1990s, is due out June 13. 

The two men spoke to Billboard over Zoom from their Detroit home: Dantiez, laid back, lounged on a couch in one part of the house, while the elder Saunderson spoke passionately in another room about the genre he helped create. He has embraced the role of elder statesman and techno historian in recent years, doing frequent interviews about the style’s origins and even guest editing a series for Mixmag. “I’ve been in it since the beginning — I’m the beginning of this movement in many ways,” he explains. “I’ve seen a lot, and I want to be a driving force trying to educate people to our music.” 

Over more than three decades, Saunderson’s discography has ranged from vocal dance-pop classics — Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Big Fun” — to the scrappy, scraping techno on e-Dancer’s canonical album, 1998’s Heavenly. “If you opened the techno songbook, Kevin Saunderson may have the most diverse — and in some ways, most prescient — discography of all,” Sam Valenti, founder of the label Ghostly International, wrote in January. “In any other country,” Valenti added, “he’d be given every tribute and lifetime achievement award imaginable.” 

The producer DJ Spinna put it more simply in a recent Instagram comment: “Just Want Another Chance” — the song in which Saunderson invented the “Reese Bass” sound that he heard Dantiez using in the studio — “changed my damn life!!”

e-Dancer started as a retort to a dance world that often polices its borders, wary of the potential for dilution that accompanies mainstream success. Inner City’s first two singles traveled far beyond Detroit and even the wider, if still insular, world of dance-heads, becoming top 10 hits in the U.K. (“Good Life” also cracked the Hot 100 in the U.S.) “I had all that success with Inner City, and all the Detroit guys were joking with me — ‘You’re commercial, now we can’t play “Big Fun” in the club,’” Saunderson explains. “It ain’t underground enough.” e-Dancer was meant to demonstrate that Saunderson still “had that other sound” in his arsenal.

He put out the first e-Dancer single in 1991; the title was “Speaker Punishing,” suggesting this wasn’t easygoing ear-candy. The follow-up, “Pump the Move,” put harsh chattering electronics front and center — softening them slightly with a cushy synthesizer line — while the B-side was squirrely and agitated, with the strafing energy of acid house. Heavenly collected tracks from these singles along with more songs from the mid-1990s.

In the last decade, Saunderson has decided to revisit some of his early successes. Nearly 20 years after Heavenly, he gently retouched the songs on Heavenly Revisited (2017), and followed that with Re:Generate (2021), which gave producers like Adam Beyer, Robert Hood and Special Request a chance to rework tracks from the original album. In 2019, Saunderson also relaunched Inner City, enlisting Dantiez — now a dance music producer in his own right — to join the new version of the group with Steffanie Christi’an handling vocals in place of original singer Paris Grey.

Father and son have established a working routine that Saunderson summarizes as “he starts it, and usually I finish it.” “Even though we live together,” adds Dantiez, who also puts out music on his own and with his brother, “it’s hard to actually get us both in the studio at the same time.” 

Between start and finish, though, tracks undergo endless tweaks. “I usually go through six, seven, eight versions of a song before it even makes it to [Saunderson],” Dantiez says. 

And even with the album due out shortly, they continue to iterate. The early advance copy sent to Billboard had a hard-driving, string-soaked vocal cut titled “Symbolical,” but Saunderson said he would likely pull out the drums before e-Dancer came out, making the song “real ambient, just the violin and her voice.” A previous version of the album-closer “Escape” — which pairs revving synths with a mean, ankle-level bass line — featured a male vocal, but it was later removed.

The Dantiez track that reminded Saunderson of his own work is “Emotions,” the second song on e-Dancer, which lays out the album’s throughline: A bass, frayed around the edges, that skulks and snarls under many of the tracks, seemingly spoiling for a fight. That buzzsaw sound reappears on “Dancer,” with wordless vocals wafting above it, “Frequency,” where the synths stutter and screech like rusted car brakes, and “Reece Punch,” which pairs it with pounding four-note piano runs. Dantiez once said that the key to a killer club track is “a big kick and a great bassline,” and he stayed true to that principle on e-Dancer.

Since Saunderson’s output has been so “prescient,” as Valenti put it, he remains at ease even as techno continues to evolve around him. The style has gone through “so many different phases,” Saunderson says. “Tech house became very popular. I was always in between [genres] — I could do something very techno or really house. I never said I was doing tech house at the time, but it’s really an in-between version of house and techno [like what I was doing].”

Lately Saunderson has noticed that in the U.S., “the trend seems like everything has gotten faster.” It can be “a little complicated” following up a set from a DJ who is racing along at 150 beats per minute, but he’s seen that before too — as Saunderson posted on Instagram recently, he’s been “playing hard ‘n fast long before TikTok techno was a thing.” When playing out new tracks in his sets, he has found that “Melodica,” “Emotions,” “Dancer,” and “Frequency” have elicited the strongest response from club goers. 

Following the release of e-Dancer, Saunderson and Dantiez will take their act on the road, performing at Loveland and MUTEK Montreal. They also have a party in Detroit, The Hood Needs House, that they are hoping to bring to other cities. On top of that, Saunderson maintains a busy solo DJ schedule, including a recent party at Detroit’s Movement Festival. At the event, he described recently as “techno Christmas,” he celebrated his KMS Records label and also featured his two sons — Damarii along with Dantiez — in the lineup.

“I find a way to play a few classics each set so people get a good education,” Saunderson says. “Some people may not know who the hell I am. But they hear me, and they get kind of blown away.”