Techno duo ageing gracefully in a youth-oriented genre

AT the Movement Festival in Detroit, electronic and dance music fans were reminded once again how techno music has its seeds in the cultural dialogue between Detroit and Berlin. And that few individual conversations have been as central to the aesthetic and philosophical evolution of that genre as the one that the American Juan Atkins and the German Moritz von Oswald have been intermittently holding since the late 1980s.

The pair of musicians held court on the festival's main stage, then stayed in the late-night mix, performing bass-heavy DJ sets at after-parties that would …