Juan Atkins, a pioneer of Detroit techno who died on 31 October aged 64, spent his career turning ideas about the future into music. A founding member of The Belleville Three alongside Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, he helped establish the sound and gave the genre its name.
Atkins was the first of the trio to buy a Korg MS-10 synthesiser and taught his friends to DJ. His work with Rik Davis in the duo Cybotron became an early template for techno. After moving from Detroit to nearby Belleville, Michigan, Atkins spent long hours making drum patterns in his bedroom, aware that the music he was creating was unlike anything around him.
His sound drew on the wide range of music he heard as a teenager on Detroit DJ Charles “The Electrifying Mojo” Johnson’s radio programme, including funk, pop and electronic acts. Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra were among his major influences. Atkins combined these sounds with newly accessible electronic equipment and a fascination with space, science fiction and the social changes associated with technology.
Ideas from Alvin Toffler’s books Future Shock and The Third Wave shaped his thinking. Atkins used the term “techno rebels” for people who take technology into their own hands as a source of creative power. The name Cybotron and his Metroplex record label also reflected his interest in imagined technological futures. When a compilation introduced Detroit’s sound to the UK, it took its title, Techno Music, from one of Atkins’s tracks, helping establish the name for a wider movement.
Atkins’s view of technology was not simply optimistic. Detroit’s declining car industry showed him how industrial change could leave communities behind. In the 1996 documentary Universal Techno, he described the city’s post-industrial atmosphere as part of what made its music possible. After his death, Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said that millions of people dance to music whose roots lead back to Atkins and the city.
His music also found an audience in Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Dimitri Hegemann, founder of the Tresor club and label, described Atkins’s music as “the sound of freedom,” saying it helped provide a soundtrack for the reunification of east and west.
Atkins continued producing and performing internationally for more than four decades. In 2023, he revived Cybotron with Laurens Von Oswald, releasing the singles Maintain the Golden Ratio and Parallel Shift. Von Oswald said Atkins had given the future its sound, adding that much of Atkins’s own future remained unwritten.
For Atkins, electronics were ultimately a way to bring human feeling into music. He once praised synthesiser functions designed to approximate a human touch, saying that Detroit’s strength lay in putting emotion into its sound.
Sources: The Guardian Music.