Mike Banks (Mad Mike)

Mike Banks, known as Mad Mike, is a Detroit producer and former Parliament-Funkadelic session bassist who co-founded Underground Resistance in 1989 with Jeff Mills, later joined by Robert Hood. UR reframed techno as militant, anti-corporate insurgency, releasing tracks under stark aliases with no press photos and refusing major-label overtures. After Mills and Hood departed in 1992, Banks steered the label alone, releasing Drexciya and X-101 while building Submerge, its distribution arm, with Christa Robinson. Banks remains fiercely private, avoiding photographs and interviews, treating Underground Resistance as an ongoing statement against industrial decline and cultural erasure.