As Jeff Risk, Detroit producer/artist/DJ, found out, never delete your junk mail before you see what’s in it. Because sometimes, buried amidst the spam, the porn and the diet drug solicitations, there’s an email in there that might change your life.

Risk, whose taste in music is as impressive as his ten tattoos, cut his teeth listening to everything from Liz Copeland on the Detroit radio to punk rock, hardcore and death metal. Then he fell in love with drum ‘n’ bass and became a DJ. But while he loves to DJ, he’s not the guy who sends out demos and is intent on elbowing his way up the food chain. Instead, he thought his reach would be no farther than his friends.

But while working at Record Time, one of Detroit’s great record stores, he came across an application for the Red Bull Music Academy. He had already been listening to the compilations and the podcasts, and meant to apply but didn’t.  The next year, he came across another application.

It was due in three days, on Cinco de Mayo. He had been living in a Mexican neighborhood in Detroit and was eager to take part in the celebration, but for the next three days, with sounds of revelry seeping into the windows, he worked on the application. After his girlfriend read it and deemed him a shoo-in, he ran off to the post office, beating the deadline by 15 minutes.

After several months went by without an answer, Risk forgot about it. But when he finally got around to cleaning out his junkmail inbox some weeks later, he saw the email he had been waiting for. He didn’t know when it came, or if he had the courage to  open it. When he finally did and realized he had been accepted, he went into shock. “I kept rereading it, wondering if it was real or if I read it right.”

Sure enough it was and suddenly he found himself in a beautiful hotel room in Barcelona, thrust into an international group of musicians all as talented, energized and eager as him. After a tour of the studios they’d be working in, which  surpassed his expectations, Risk found out that the first lecturer was going to be Melvin Van Peeples, the director of the revolutionary 1970 film, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song.

No one else knew who Van Peeples was, but Risk, who had seen the film at a film festival in Windsor, and was a huge fan. So there he was, sitting in Barcelona next to Melvin Van Peeples, just like that. “I couldn’t believe things were so casual and that I was right there next to him, eating grilled pineapple, talking about what it was like to make incendiary art.”

It was a hard act to follow, but things at the program continued to get better. “I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into the academy, thinking it would just be great to be in the studio. But it was much more than that. I got hope, first of all, that people would listen to my stuff. That’s a big deal, especially for someone who hadn’t had that before.

“But maybe even more important, I got a network of friends all over the world who inspire me to keep doing it.” Since his return to Detroit and the real world, in fact,  he’s been working with another Red Bull Music Academy colleague from Columbia on an industrial noise project. They plan on taking it across the world, touring cities where their friends from the program live.

In the meantime, he’s happy to be back in Detroit, a place that has always inspired him. “It’s harsh and brutal but there’s a lot of open space creatively and physically too. It’s a blank canvas. Yes, there are a lot of cynical people here, but there’s also a lot of immigrants who come here hoping it will change for the better.”

In an odd way, history may be on their side. “People are so focused on the fate of the auto industry that they forget Detroit was a major city before the auto industry, with art, culture, museums and industry. That infrastructure for manufacturing is still here waiting for whatever comes next,” he says.

If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on industrial noise.

Words by Neil Feineman, photos by Dustin Downing