K. Hand – On A Journey

On A Journey is the seminal debut album from Kelli Hand aka K. Hand, who was recognized as the First Lady of Techno by the Detroit city council in 2017. One of the most important female figures in the scene, Hand came up in a “boys club” era of electronic music, was one of the first female techno producers in Detroit, and the first to start her own label — Acacia Records. Released on Berlin’s Stud!o K7 (which was responsible for the iconic DJ-Kicks mix series), On A Journey is an acid-tinged voyage through percussive drum machine grooves, breakbeats, disco samples, vocoders, and ethereal synth soundscapes. Hand’s sound can perhaps be compared to second-wave artists like Carl Craig or the proto-IDM of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations, but she was fully a trailblazer in her own right. “The key is to pull out a sound that’s genuine and your own,” she explained. “I don’t care about other people’s sound, I just come up with what I think sounds good.”