Detroit techno was born just as Motor City began to die. That was when, in the 1980s, three black teenagers from the suburb of Belleville — Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson — set out to make something new: music that merged human and machine.

More conceptually ambitious than other emergent styles like hip-hop, house, and garage, techno found eager audiences in the Europe of the late 1980s — which made the Belleville Three, along with a second wave of Detroit artists, into international sensations. The originators succeeded in creating a home for danceable but avant-garde electronic music — but in Berlin, not in Michigan. Today “techno” is likely to conjure up pill-popping European festival DJs instead of the black innovators operating from the heart of industrial collapse. As Detroit’s biggest musical artist, Eminem, would famously put it in 2002’s “Without Me,” “Nobody listens to techno!”

For artist and music producer DeForrest Brown Jr, “an honest revision of techno’s history would follow a trail of themes like white extractive capitalism, white flight and re-urbanization and the economics of cultural theft.” His 2022 book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, expands on this. It’s a startlingly ambitious gathering of materials — interviews, reading lists, discographies, concepts. The result is itself akin to a DJ mix, where the act of juxtaposition is the grounds for exploring hidden resonances. The opening pages make Brown’s agenda clear: to sever techno’s association with European clubs and to recast it as a component of African American cultural and political struggle — “a technologically optimized form of soul music.”