Juan Atkins, the originator of techno who died on 31 October, spent his lifetime translating a fascination with the future into sound. He was the oldest of the founding fathers of techno known as the “Belleville Three”, along with his junior high school friends Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. He was the first of the trio to buy a Korg MS-10 synthesiser, and also taught the others how to DJ on turntables.
His work in the duo Cybotron alongside Rik Davis was the sonic blueprint that sketched out what later became known as techno – indeed, he is the one who gave the genre its name. Without Atkins, and the way he empowered those around him, electronic music certainly would not exist in its current form today. After moving from his birthplace of Detroit to nearby Belleville, Michigan, Atkins holed himself up in his bedroom, toiling away for hours creating drum kicks.
As a teenager in the 1970s he wouldd listen to The Midnight Funk Association, a five-hour late-night radio programme by DJ Charles “The Electrifying Mojo” Johnson, which opened with the space-age introduction of The Landing of the Mothership before braiding together selections from Prince, Michael Jackson, Parliament-Funkadelic, the B-52s, the Human League and Atkins’s biggest influences, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk. Atkins was a conduit for a particular moment in musical and technological history: able to draw from this increasingly accessible globalised pool of music, and put those influences to bear on musical hardware that just a few years earlier would have been the wildly expensive preserve of universities or computing companies. Atkins also loved anything about space, time travel, UFOs, religiously consuming TV shows such as Star Trek and Lost in Space, and the books of HP Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov.
Three texts in particular defined the extraterrestrial reach of his sound: Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke, and Future Shock and The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler. The latter two were how he initially developed a bond with Davis at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as they discussed Toffler’s idea of the third wave, a way of living that would come after agrarian and industrial societies. Inspired by Toffler, Atkins deployed words such as Metroplex, the name of his record label which evokes a sprawling future city, and Cybotron, the name of his duo with Davis which calls to mind a brutally efficient robot who may or may not be benign.
He also applied Toffler’s idea of “techno rebels” to music – those people who wield technology for their own creative empowerment; a third option between destructive luddites and uncritical techno-optimists. Atkins reportedly rejected Derrick May’s suggestion to label their music “hi-tech soul” on the Virgin Records compilation that introduced the propulsive Detroit sound to the UK. Instead, the compilation was titled after one of Atkins’ tracks on it, Techno Music, and that became the name of a whole global movement.
Crucially, and like his hero Toffler, Atkins wasn’t naive or needlessly optimistic about the impact technology would have on the future, even if it was giving him the means to make a totally new style of music. Living in and near Detroit, where the city’s car manufacturing industries had badly decayed by the 1980s, Atkins had a front row seat to see how an industrial society could become obsolete and end up far from a techno-utopia. In the 1996 Arté documentary Universal Techno, he is filmed against the backdrop of post-industrial Detroit, explaining: “The general attitude here with the powers that be is that industry must die to make way for technology … I think that we probably wouldn’t have developed this sound in any other city in America … There is a certain atmosphere here that you can’t find in any other city that lends to the technological movement.” Detroit’s mayor Mary Sheffield paid tribute after his death: “Today, millions of people dance to music that traces back to him and to our city.
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