Kenneth Thomas is one of the most successful DJs coming out of Detroit. He’s had a number one record on Beatport, has won Detroit DJ of the Year in the alternative weekly annual polls and is finishing an eagerly awaited artist album for Perfecto Records. But the only place you’ll find him in at Movement is in the audience. Because Kenneth Thomas doesn’t play techno. Or house. He plays progressive house and trance. And those are fighting words to the Detroit hardcore techno scene.

Luckily, small things like ostracism and ridicule never really bothered Thomas. Instead, displaying the spirit that once made Detroit America’s most exciting city, it just made him work harder. When the local record stores refused to stock, order or sell him the progressive house records he wanted, he found other ways to get them. When no one would give him a stage, he played back rooms and out-of-the-way clubs, building his audience one person, literally, at a time. And when DJs like Sasha and John Digweed rolled into town, often at the derision of the techno community, Kenneth Thomas opened for them.

The embodiment of Detroit’s working class work ethic, Thomas refined his music and was soon a regional star, with loyal fans in every Midwestern city. He even won the grudging respect of the techno community, who let him play back rooms at long-running nights like Snap. And he worked on his own music, which circulated among DJ circles, ending up in the hands of people like Nick Warren, who remixed “The Orange Room,” and Paul Oakenfold, his original hero and now his mentor.

These days, Thomas is a full-time working DJ who could probably live almost anywhere he wants. His label would be particularly happy if he moved to Los Angeles, where Oakenfold and Perfecto are based. But even though other towns are infinitely more suited to his sound, he is staying put in Detroit, where he feels the most energized.

“I feed on the working mentality and DYI ethic of this city,” he told Real Detroit, weekly when he accepted the readers’ Best Electronic Artist award in 2007. “Detroit is an underdog city; I thrive on that. I like being the underdog. So in that sense, what better place to be a ‘trance’ DJ than Detroit?”

Kenneth Thomas can be heard every week on etn.fm at 3 p.m. EST and can be seen at Movement each day, in the audience, having a great time.

Words by Neil Feineman, Photos by Dustin Downing