For the past twenty years, Brian Gillespie has sat behind the decks serving up an educated selection of deep, melodic techno, funk and obscure jazz alongside his signature ghetto-tech blend to the Detroit scene. As part of the deejay duo Starski & Clutch (Gillespie as Starski, DJ and producer Todd Osborn as Clutch), has expanded his brand to a fresh audience after an eclectic set on the Red Bull Music Academy stage last Sunday afternoon. But as a representative for the Red Bull Music Academy in Detroit, many don’t realize that the same determination Gillespie puts into searching for records, he also piles into “helping give young, local talent the resources to [experience] the same exposure in a year that would normally take five, 10, 15 years.” Beginning in Berlin in 1998, The Red Bull Music Academy is built to cater to and foster budding talent. While burgeoning musicians, deejays, singers and producers attend, waves of established and often legendary artists come to visit and educate — think ?uestlove, Madlib, Melvin van Peebles, Chuck D, Carl Craig, Caribou and many more. Held at a mixture of exotic locations around the globe, the Red Bull Music Academy is an opportunity for young talent to get lost within their craft, to hone their skills live and begin building a name through one of the most accomplished music programs to date. But the reach doesn’t end there.

For the past three years, the Red Bull Music Academy stage has made significant moves to bring unique, vibrant and sometimes challenging acts to Detroit’s signature electronic festival. The Red Bull Music Academy stage has welcomed progressive acts ahead of their time, such as the first-class dub-step of Bassnectar (before he was selling out 3,000-plus capacity venues across North America) to the mash-up mastery of Girl Talk (before people knew he was an engineer turned deejay) and Flying Lotus (a product of the 2006 Red Bull Music Academy held in Australia). Don’t forget the wide variety of acts ChinaShop was proud to cover at both Movement 2009 and, of course, this year. In the end, the Red Bull Music Academy stage is simply taking a page out of the electronic music genre itself — constantly challenging the idea of “what is” and “what isn’t” electronic music as musicians redefine their craft and technology pushes forward. This year, the Red Bull Music Academy stage welcomed two more innovative artists from two very different worlds — the early dub-step pioneer Martyn of Holland and the classical pianist turned groundbreaking electronic wunderkind Francesco Tristano.

Red Bull Music Academy

Martyn forged his way into deejaying through the club scene in Holland in the late ‘90s. His passion for the nightlife and the music that fueled it continued to grow until he heard a void that needed to be filled. “There was a very hard drum and bass sound, and then there was a melodic one … but there wasn’t a middle ground,” recalls Martyn, a pair of large aviator glasses resting over his eyes. “After a while, I got fed up looking for it, so … I decided to find that middle ground in my own music.” Martyn would go on to forge rudimentary beginnings of dub-step (think echo-heavy, grime-esque house recorded inside of a cavern similar to what British-based Burial does today). Today, Martyn denies much of a bridge between what he was doing then and what dub-step has transformed into today. “In the last year, dub-step has changed radically. It’s almost a completely different form of music.” Regardless, Martyn’s knack for freakishly cohesive mixes and early innovations to the genre has landed him the title of “pioneer” via critical bloggers, journalists and artists alike — a title he hardly wears like a badge. “It’s just what other people make of it, you know?” he explains. “At the end of the day, you just do what you think is right. Whether that’s pioneering or not, that’s up for other people to decide. For me, it’s all about a personal expression and constantly reinventing myself.”

Pianist and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Tristano has been tagged with similar labels. From an early age, Tristano would improvise freely on the piano for hours at a time. “You could have called that classical, you could have called that jazz — I was playing many moods,” recalls Tristano. Tristano would go on to study at the Julliard School, moving on with a Bachelor and Masters of Music before studying at various conservatories across Europe. In 2004, Tristano won the International Piano Competition for Twentieth-Century Music in Orléans — not your typical Movement fare. But it was his discovered love for electronic music and his way of deconstructing and rebuilding the sounds of his new found favorite sounds that would set him apart. “The more I listened to techno,” says Tristano, “the more it had an impact on the way I was playing the piano and how I was composing. Basically, I wanted to sound like a very minimal language, to have lots of rhythm and expanding on the idea of the piano being a machine … that does much more beyond the keys.” By reaching inside the piano and manipulating the various components — playing with the strings through variations of hammering and muting — Tristano would “remix” Detroit techno classics like Derrick May’s “Strings of Life” and go on to collaborate with Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald at last year’s 2010 Red Bull Music Academy in London. While Tristano’s talents reach far beyond his classical upbringing, the Barcelona-based pianist shares the same rebellious attitude towards a world of music around him that continues to force labels and define genres. “Boundaries only exist if you apply them to yourself,” continues Tristano. “The point is that I play piano. I play classical recitals where I’ll play some contemporary stuff and maybe I’ll throw in some techno standards, but [I’ll] play it on the piano so the classical audience has a chance to discover it in another form. But isn’t that what remixing is all about? To present music in another form?”

Both Martyn and Tristano represent the progressive, often rebellious, break down the box and build it again attitude of the Red Bull Music Academy and it’s subsequent stage. For the past three years, the Red Bull Music Academy stage has invited artists to perform that are ready to push the boundaries of electronic music to the next level.

Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper with photos by Dustin Downing