Underground Resistance / US / RE 2024 / 12"
It’s hard to overstate the importance of ‘The Final Frontier’ in shaping modern electronic music. First released in 1992 by the unapologetically political Detroit collective, Underground Resistance, it remains an essential classic in the story of Techno. Underground Resistance’s stated objective was to “[electrify] the inner city with hi-tech, sci-fi thoughts and dreams”; to offer working-class Black Americans, through music, a vision of a bright future through community action. Final Frontier was the first of many tracks which underlined this mission in bold type.
The great Afrofuturist tradition of imagining Black emancipation through space travel is upfront; both in the Star Trek-referencing title, as well as in the music itself, which sounds like the perfect re-scoring to the “Stargate” scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, nearly 30 years after it was first unleashed, there is not a serious techno fan who does not consider this to belong on the highest echelon of electronic music’s Pantheon.