Juan Atkins, one of the founding figures of Detroit techno and a major influence on dance music more widely, has died at the age of 64. His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news to Resident Advisor, saying Atkins was found unresponsive in a hotel room in Mexico City before a performance there. He was pronounced dead after being taken to hospital.
Atkins created a gleaming, mechanistic form of electronic music, first as part of the duo Cybotron and later under the alias Model 500. His work could command a dancefloor while also evoking science-fiction fantasies. He was the first person to use the term “techno” in connection with this hard electronic style, helping to pre-empt a genre that became one of the pillars of dance culture.
Born in Detroit in 1962, Atkins later moved with his family to the rural Michigan suburb of Belleville. There he met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, two junior high schoolmates with whom he formed the Belleville Three, a trio of like-minded musicians at the vanguard of electronic music. While still in high school, Atkins formed Cybotron with Richard Davis, using increasingly affordable hardware such as the Roland TR-808 drum machine and the Korg MS-10 synthesizer. He later said a class called future studies, about the transition from an industrial society to a technological society, informed his approach to making music.
Cybotron, equally in thrall to Kraftwerk and Jimi Hendrix, produced propulsive yet psychedelic tracks such as Cosmic Cars and Clear, which became dancefloor staples. The duo split in 1985 as Davis moved toward rock music. Atkins went solo as Model 500, creating foundational dance tracks including No UFO’s and The Chase. That year he also founded his own label, Metroplex, to release his work; over the years it also put out material by artists including Anthony Shakir and DJ Bone.
Throughout the 1980s and beyond, Atkins evoked techno-utopian visions as well as more troubling and politicised ones. He described his lyrics as social statements intended to make listeners think about something beyond dancing and falling in love. By the early 1990s, the techno scene he helped inspire had flourished, and later in the decade he further refined his sound with the uptempo project Infiniti.
The 2000s were less productive in terms of releases, but Atkins formed the duo Borderland with another techno icon, Moritz Von Oswald, releasing two albums in 2013 and 2016. In 2023 he reformed Cybotron, releasing new music and performing live. By that point his influence had extended far beyond techno, with dozens of artists sampling Clear alone. Missy Elliott used it as the backbone of her track Lose Control, which reached No 3 on the US Billboard chart in 2005.
Kevin Saunderson was among those paying tribute to Atkins, calling him “a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included.”
Sources: The Guardian World.