Production of Place uses techno, and its adjacent electronic music, such as house and disco, to examine the evolution of Black musical forms. Spanning the transatlantic slave trade, Harlem Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and Jamaican sound systems, the narrative expresses how techno, house, and disco created a sense of place for minority communities.
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The book identity uses bright colors and geometric shapes to create rhythm, movement, and dynamism. It translates the compositional characteristics of the music onto the printed matter.
The technical, open-stitch binding reflects the industrial warehouses and factories where the raves occurred.
From the secret songs of the Underground Railroad to the discrete Chicago warehouse raves, “underground music” has always been rooted within Black culture.
Different colors progressively appear per chapter to parallel the structure of techno music, where different sounds slowly come together. Gray tones are primarily the background color, representing the industrial and urban centers that gave rise to the 1980s electronic music scene.
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As Black electronic music is rooted in the transformation of urban landscapes, socioeconomic circumstances greatly impacted the push for these musical innovations and freedom of expression. Particularly in 1980's Detroit, deindustrialization and white flight greatly influenced techno music.
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Production of Place's ethos is to reclaim disco, house, and techno music as an outcome of Black musical production and distinguish it from the modern day, European electronic music.
