I was supposed to meet Terrence Dixon at a house party in Detroit on the eve of this year's Movement festival. The party was a showcase for minimal detroit, a company that Dixon started a few years back, and Anthony "Shake" Shakir was the night's headliner. Downstairs, the DJs played in a basement that could fit 15 people at a stretch. Upstairs, music pumped through small speakers into the backyard, where people mingled around a sizzling BBQ and coolers full of beer. Dixon arrived once the party was well underway. I caught a glimpse of him, his eyes hiding behind dark glasses, but when I went to find him a couple of minutes later he'd already slipped away. He didn't return for the rest of the night.For more than 20 years, Dixon has been a hard man to pin down. He rarely gives interviews. His music, too, is slippery and hard to define. He confounds the accepted norms of techno, creating unorthodox tracks with strange arrangements and kick drums that sometimes whisper instead of thud. His music is not made for DJs (though DJs often play it), nor is it made for home listening. He's earned a reputation as a pure, uncompromising artist.I saw Dixon perform twice over the Movement weekend—once at Tangent Gallery alongside Thomas Fehlmann, and again on Movement's Made In Detroit stage with his band, Population One. At Tangent Gallery I bumped into Brendan M. Gillen, AKA BMG of Interdimensional Transmissions, who's known Dixon for more than two decades. They first crossed paths when Gillen was hosting a show called Crush Collision on WCBN, the University Of Michigan's student-run radio station. Dixon lived on the outer reaches of the broadcast range, and would phone in to request tracks IDs on early Sähkö records."Terrence is a very fast thinker, in the course of a pause in a conversation he can go through five thoughts and seven totally different emotions," Gillen told me. "We all must be so slow to him. Within Detroit techno he is an outsider from the inside. His sound is so raw. He is not trying to conform to make house music, or be about anything other than his high-tech soulful and thoughtful stream-of-consciousness techno."After shelving plans to retire, Dixon has released lots of music these past couple of years. In 2017 alone he's appeared twice on Tresor (including the wonderful Like A Thief In The Night EP) and put out a new solo album on Out-ER called 12,000 Miles Of Twilight . I met Dixon at his home, an ivy-covered building on a leafy street in Detroit's Boston Edison neighbourhood, where he lives with his wife and his seven-year-old boxer dog, Gooch.At first I was making music in a guy named Dave Peoples' studio, and then Claude Young heard me and he put me out on Utensil Records. And then came Mike Banks, and then Juan Atkins. I got to know Claude through a guy named David Oliver Whiteside of DOW Records. Those were his initials: DOW. I knew him and I was making music, and that's the guy that bought my gear, because I didn't have any money.I made a lot of early mistakes in life. I was smart in school, but I was chasing girls. I had kids at a young age—I was 19 when I had my first kid—and it just stopped my life for like, 20 years. So I stayed in the house and did music, because I was taking care of my kids. All my money was going towards my family, so I didn't have a lot left over.I had two pairs of pants, one shirt, no car, you know, the government helped with food. They went to a good school—I remember other parents rolling up in Mercedes. All my money went to the kids. I had to stay in one room for a long time, and make a lot of music.I just made music for myself.Mike Banks taught me everything. I remember that Mike came and found me when I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were out there because there are great school systems. So he came out there and he helped me learn about music. I was originally going to be a part of Interstellar Fugitives. But when it came to creating music, they didn't agree with my take on things.I had my own style is basically what it was.A lot of patience. He had this white cat that used to walk on the keyboard and mess the bassline up, so we had to sit there and, all day, he made us just sit there and watch the cat.Oh, yeah, Juan was important. You know—Juan and I, we never talked about music at first. We didn't meet like that, we met talking about American football. Detroit Lions. And then I was in Mike Banks' studio one day, playing my tracks, and Juan walked in, heard what was playing, and he was like, "Who is that?" And Mike said, "That's Terrence." He was like, "Man, that's hot." And he said, "Come down to my place," and that's how we connected in a musical sense.Detroit is very inspiring. You walk to the store to get some water, and you're gonna see a story. You're gonna see a bum with no money, smiling. You're gonna see somebody singing. You know what? Just hearing police sirens, and people screaming and dogs barking—stuff like that inspires me. Fights, and gunshots every night, stuff like that. I mean, for me anyway. I don't want to sound clichéd and say things about the dirtiest, grimiest parts of the city, that's not it. It's just a spiritual kind of thing, it's more than just the way things look.Detroit, I mean, at that time it was real bad out here. But now it's getting better, you know with the whole... just to have hope, to give the city hope. Just to give Detroit hope, that's all. It was really bad back then. It was so dark, nobody had any money, nobody was smiling, no businesses were open. People were looking on the ground for two cents, and they couldn't even find that.Yeah, it feels better. It feels a lot better. You know, the downtown of Detroit has changed a lot.I can't describe it. It's just like they took everybody that was living down there in the bad times, pushed them out and new people came in, rich people, and they fixed it up, and that's it. They just pushed everybody out, people who were here for 20 years, in the bad times.Exactly. The kick drums are just for tempo. The bassline—I put that in the forefront 'cause that's the most important thing in the music to me. Not the boom, boom, boom, but more the music—the music's in the forefront and the kick is in the background. I always make the bassline first and then the drums second.To be honest, my style of minimalism comes from having less gear to work with. I'm not trying to make minimal music—it just comes out that way. I call my music Detroit techno. Living in a city with a really low population, no businesses, one house on the entire block, no jobs... everything about Detroit is minimal.Jazz was not an influence for my music, but Jimi Hendrix, Teddy Pendergrass, The O'Jays, Santana, Frank Zappa, Leo Anibaldi, early Sähkö, Juan Atkins, Chick Corea and The Electrifying Mojo were. I found out about Sun Ra from Mike Huckaby like five years ago. I needed it. Jazz is a huge part of my life now for listening only.I don't know why I do it like that. I don't know. I can't tell you. I don't know why I do it the way that I do it.Kraftwerk, when I was 12 years old. That's right. My grandmother liked Kraftwerk. Yeah, she used to play, and she used to sit on the porch all the time listening to it. I remember the back of the cover, that's what really got me. I used to love it so much. My aunty owned the Kraftwerk record. She used to go roller-skating, and she used to take her own records and give it to the DJ to roller-skate to. But I didn't want to go because I couldn't skate. But you would hear a Kraftwerk song anywhere in the hood. Anywhere. You might even hear it right now, driving around here, to this day.I guess so. I don't know, because I'm not a musician. I don't know about music, I just know what sounds good to me. And I'm satisfied with it, and I'm happy that some people like it. I had no training at all. And I've never read an owner's manual for a piece of hardware. I'll read enough so I know how to get started and then I take it from there.My story is always too big for an EP. I can't do it. So I've always got too many tracks. Sometimes I give away tracks for free, just so I can do an album. I just can't do it in an EP, man. It's too hard.It's for Tresor. I'm trying to get on the dance floor with this project. So far we've got three ambient tracks, and the rest are more dance floor-focused. We did ten tracks in four days, in the High Bias studios, working seven hours a day. We've got a lot of editing to do, but it's sounding good. There are a lot of good parts, and a lot of bad parts.This was the first time we'd met. But I had nothing to worry about with Thomas—he knows.The Juno-106, the SH-101, yeah, this, I like this thing []. And then there's the 303s and the MC-303 Groovebox.Yeah, well, what happened there, this is the honest truth, I was really depressed. Juan Atkins helped me to come back—but not totally come back, because I'm not totally back doing music, but I've got a lot of music that's saved up. I've got older stuff that I made new again. But I was just tired of making music, I was tired of everything, tired of the industry. That's all.Well, Myspace saved my life.Because my career was about to be over, and Myspace really picked it up, I swear it did. It was amazing, because I started getting friends, like Mike Huckaby, he said you gotta get Myspace, people are looking for you. You've gotta get it. I said OK, and we sat upstairs in my studio, he signed me up, that morning I looked and I had eight friends. I was like, what? And that's what happened, man. People started calling like, "You wanna do a gig? You wanna do a record?'It depends on what kind of space I'm in. If it's a bar, I'm no good in a bar. My stuff is no good in a bar. Before 2 AM, it's no good. But, if I'm DJing, it's techno basically, some minimal, some house music, too. So, Kerri Chandler into Robert Hood into Andy Stott.A bag of records in a case, an old-fashioned case. It's actually Juan Atkins' case that he gave me, and people always laugh. They're like, "You've got that big old case," I'm like, "Man, Juan Atkins gave me this case. I fixed it up, too."Oh man, that's a huge question. I respect every artist that can go on stage, go in a studio and DJ and all that stuff, and do it at a high level. That's amazing. I'm not there yet. I'm there maybe in my productions, but the other two, it's tough. Because my stuff always sounds different loud, like really super loud—like wow, something's wrong. I mean, it depends on what venue. It sometimes sounds good, and then sometimes I go somewhere and it doesn't sound right.I hope I don't offend anybody, but I'm not one to be on stage. That's not my goal, to make this music just to go on stage and be in photos and stuff, and magazines... this music was better when you didn't know the people's faces. That's when I loved it. I didn't know—who is this person? That was the best.I haven't had a job in 20 years, my whole musical career. I tried a job, working for a moving company, and then I was so tired when I got home I had to go to sleep, I couldn't work. And I couldn't be creative. So I'd rather be just living comfortably, I don't need the hundreds of thousands of dollars and BMWs. I'm content, I've got my garden out the back—my wife just got me into gardening.It's a real bright future. I'm building a company, minimal detroit . It's a music and events platform with a community focus. I've been busy. I've got stuff coming out. I'm gonna keep on going.