Detroit techno's early industrial edge came from techno and industrial club scenes physically cross-pollinating their audiences

Mills recounts that late-1980s Detroit had a strong industrial scene that began mixing with techno at the club level: techno DJs like Derrick May would play industrial clubs, so industrial crowds followed them into techno and vice versa. Because the two audiences and DJs overlapped physically, the two formats grew ‘very, very close’ and the music reflected the fusion — Mills’s own pre-UR work (the Final Cut album) explicitly fused his techno background with a collaborator’s industrial/ministry sensibility. The lesson is that a genre’s sound is partly a residue of which scenes shared rooms and dancers, not just abstract influence.

Examples

Derrick May playing an industrial club; the Final Cut album fusing techno and industrial into a ‘very European’ sound.

Assessment

Explain the concrete mechanism (shared clubs/crossing audiences) by which Detroit techno acquired an industrial edge, per Mills; name one record that resulted.