Dance Producer K-Hand, "The First Lady Of Detroit," Dead At 56

Kelli Hand, the house and techno producer known as K-Hand, died Tuesday, as reported by numerous outlets including the Detroit Metro Times. No cause of death has been announced. Hand was 56.

Hand was born and raised in Detroit. In the late 1980s she began frequently traveling to New York’s famed dance club Paradise Garage, which led to DJing back home in Michigan. “After frequenting Paradise Garage so many times I wanted to buy the records because I loved the music,” she told the Metro Times in 2015. “So the next step was, I got to play these records in order to hear them,” she said. “That led to purchasing a couple turntables, which also led me to DJing in my own bedroom and to do a residence at Zipper’s Nightclub.”

Hand founded her own record label Acacia Records in 1990 and began releasing singles and EPs. Members of the acclaimed Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance visited her home during the making of deut EP Think About It. As explained by The Guardian, her early work spanned “jackin’ house, ghettotech, and the pounding minimalism of Detroit techno.” Within a few years she developed a fan base in Europe, and by the mid-’90s, she became the first Detroit artist to release music for a pair of wildly influential electronic dance labels, UK-based Warp Records and Berlin’s Studio !K7, which put out her 1995 debut album On A Journey. She has since worked with an array of labels including Nina Kravitz’s трип.

K-Hand continued steadily releasing music all the way up through last month’s Acacia-released Sounds EP, all the while advocating for a warm, analog approach that cut against modern trends in dance music. Over the years she became known as “the first lady of Detroit techno,” a nickname that was taken to the next level in 2017 when Detroit’s city council officially recognized her as “the first lady of Detroit.” Listen to some of her music below.