Watching Octave One play live, you can’t help feeling they were born to do this. It’s perhaps even more revealing that the Detroit outfit is a family affair. Its core has always been siblings Lenny and Lawrence Burden, with occasional input from the three other brothers Lynell, Lorne and Lance. Techno, it seems, is in the genes.

It all started for Octave One in 1990 when vocal cut I Believe was picked up by Derrick May’s Transmat label. Before long, the brothers had established their own imprint 430 West, which went on to play a pivotal role in the ‘second wave’ of Motor City techno. However it was elevating house anthem Blackwater that would become Octave One’s watershed moment. Still referenced, remixed and rediscovered, it’s earned the title of ‘classic’.

While their studio output has been nothing short of prolific, the Burdens really come alive onstage. At long last, Octave One is bringing its live rig to Australia thanks to the Richard Maher Agency, playing just one (sold-out) show for Mad Racket in Sydney. As Lawrence Burden tells inthemix down the line from the 430 West office, they’re itching to get down.

Has your philosophy at 430 West stayed pretty consistent over the years?
Pretty much. You always lean towards what you like. For us, we weren’t trying to set up a commercial label. It was just like, hey, we like this artist. Then there’s also our stuff we think will really work on a dancefloor, so we stay consistent with that.

I suppose Octave One got its ‘break’ when I Believe was picked up by Transmat. Do you see 430 West as giving that same kind of opening to other artists?
That’s the way we actually started 430 West. We had met a lot of new artists and we had just done I Believe. We all kind of wanted to have an outlet, a producer-ran label. That was the whole premise behind 430 West – if you look at our early releases we had Eddie ‘Flashin’ Fowlkes, Terrence Parker; it was just a bunch of people we dug. We said, ‘Hey, we have this situation set up, we don’t know if it’ll make two dollars or two cents, but we’d like to put your records out’. And that’s how 430 West got started.

When you release a record like DJ Rolando’s Jaguar, do you have any sense it’s going to go on to be an enduring classic?
Actually with that, we were fortunate. It had already grown to classic status on the UR imprint, and we just came in and Mike wanted to do something different and for us to release the Derrick May remixes. It was confusing at the time, and even more confusing talking about it now. We wanted to do something different and unorthodox. We felt it was going to be a classic, believe it or not, ‘cause we just dug it. It was catchy, it had a deep melody. Strong melody-driven tunes always seem to go into that category of classics.

Released on 430 West in 2000, Blackwater remains the definitive Octave One anthem. With its swirling strings and an emotive vocal from Ann Saunderson, it’s a staple record for Francois K, Laurent Garnier, Luciano, Ben Watt and just about any DJ with an eye for uplift.

I saw you comment on Twitter that you’d like to see The Dirtbombs do Blackwater on their upcoming album of Detroit techno covers. Is it always surprising to see how many lives that track has?
Me and my brother always joke, ‘Man, Blackwater will not die!” It’s like every year it just goes and goes and goes. It’s always staggering to us the number of artists who remake it. I can’t even explain to you. I don’t know, maybe it’s going to make history books somewhere. I mean, we enjoy it and we’re glad people still enjoy hearing it. We have kids running to us like, ‘This song Blackwater!’, as if it was just released. And we’re like, ‘Man, that was released in 1999’ [laughs]. It’s like the Duracell battery.

I suppose it’s warm and uplifting, two things that never really go out of style.
Yeah, people always want to feel good at the end of the day. That’s why we listen to music. No one wants to listen to music to feel down.

Your last album Summers on Jupiter is very focused on the dancefloor. It has real momentum. Was it a conscious effort to revisit your ‘roots’?
We kinda called it our ‘purge session’. It was nothing like what was going on in the marketplace, per se. That was how we got into music; we didn’t care about trends, we just kinda did our thing.

What did you feel was the dominant thing going on in the marketplace then?
Well, then it was minimal that was really starting to show itself. Like, nothing else other than minimal was charting! We were fortunate ‘cause it was us on the chart with minimal above us and minimal below us. If everybody goes to the right, there are still people who enjoy what’s happening on the left. You have to produce what you feel.