Detroit in the late 1980s is broke, hollowed out by factory closures and still marked by the 1967 race riots, and out of that city comes techno. Director Gary Bredow tracks the genre back to three high school friends, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, whose basement experiments with synthesizers and drum machines turned into a sound with no real precedent. Interviews with the three founders sit alongside Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, and Eddie Fowlkes, who talk through the underground parties, the abrasive tones and heavy basslines, and the personal fallouts and rivalries that came with building a genre from nothing. The film treats techno's Detroit origin as inseparable from the city's decline, arguing the music could only have been made by people responding to exactly that environment. It follows the sound's move from local basement parties to international clubs, tracing how a handful of producers working in isolation ended up shaping electronic music worldwide.