Juan Atkins Techno Mastermind
Juan Atkins is universally seen as one of the creators of techno music and the detroit techno sound, he was probably the first person to apply the word “techno” to music. His original electronic soundscapes influenced nearly every genre of dance music that came after. Yet except for followers of electronic dance music history, few music fans recognize his name. Despite being prominently featured in “Techno: Detroit’s Gift to the World,” a 2003 exhibition mounted at the Detroit Historical Museum, he remains among the most obscure of modern musical pioneers.
Techno began in Detroit, Michigan, and it was there that Atkins was born on September 12, 1962. Fans worldwide associate the music with Detroit’s often bleak landscape, littered with abandoned buildings and other relics of the roaring 1920s and the golden age of the automobile. Atkins himself shared his impressions of Detroit’s desolate core with techno historian Dan Sicko: “I was smack in the middle of downtown, on Griswold. I was looking at this building and I see the faded imprint of an American Airline logo, the shadow after they took the sign down. It just brought home to me the thing about Detroit – in any other city you have a buzzing, thriving downtown.” But the true beginnings of techno music took place a half hour’s drive to the southwest of central detroit in Belleville, Michigan, a small backwater near an interstate which led to Detroit city. Atkins and his brother were sent there to live with his grandmother after his grades dropped in Detroit, in the hopes of removing him from the city’s violence. As a junior high and high school student in Belleville, Atkins met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, both techno pioneers. The trio made trips into Detroit for dance parties on the weekends. Later they became known as the “Belleville Three,” with Atkins, receiving special mention as “Obi Juan.”
Atkins’s father was a gig promoter, and there were various musical instruments around the house while he was growing up. He became a fan of a Detroit radio disc jockey named the Electrifying Mojo (Charles Johnson), one of a rare breed of “freeform” DJs on American commercial radio whose shows mixed genres and forms. Atkins erstwhile mentor “Electrifying Mojo” wove various kinds of music around the 1970s funk of artists such as George Clinton, Parliament, and Funkadelic (which had some Detroit roots of its own), becoming one of just a few American DJs who played the experimental electronic dance music of the German ensemble Kraftwerk on the radio. “If you want the reason techno happened in Detroit,” Atkins says, “you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk.”
In the early 1980s, Atkins became the artist who found an American middle ground between Kraftwerk’s electronics and funk’s big bass lines and distinctive atmospheres. Atkins played keyboards as a teenager, but he was a DJ and sound manipulator from the beginning, experimenting at home with a mixing board and a cassette tape player. Later Atkins studied at Washtenaw Community College. It was through a friendship with a fellow student, Vietnam veteran Rik Davis, that Atkins began to learn about music production; Davis owned a spread of then-innovative equipment including one of the first Roland sequencers (a device allowing the user to organize electronic sound). “He was very isolated,” Atkins comments.. Soon Atkins’ collaboration with Davis gave rise to a new music.
“I was around when you had to get a bass player, a guitarist, a drummer to make records” Atkins says. “I wanted to make electronic music but thought you had to be a computer programmer to do it. I found out it wasn’t as complicated as I thought.” Atkins joined with Davis (who called himself 3070), and the pair billed themselves as Cybotron, a name they chose from a list of futuristic compound words that they had compiled and called “the grid.” The two released a single “Alleys of Your Mind,” in 1981, and it sold around 15,000 copies in the Detroit area after the Electrifying Mojo aired it on his radio program. A second release, “Cosmic Cars,” did equally well, and the duo’s sales got the notice of the West Coast independent record label Fantasy. Atkins and Davis hadn’t sought a record deal, and in fact, Atkins told Dan Sicko, “We didn’t know anything about Fantasy’s interest until one day we opened the mailbox and found a contract.”
In 1982 Cybotron released “Clear,” a recording with a distinctive and elementally electronic sound that would later mark it as an electronic music classic. The following year cybotron released “Techno City” and listeners began to use the record’s title to describe the musical genre of which it was a part. The term was probably inspired by futurist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave (1980), which used the term “techno rebels” and which Atkins had read in a high school class in Belleville.
Eventally Atkins and Davis split up due to creative differences, with Davis wanting to push their music in more of a rock-oriented direction. Davis eventually drifted into obscurity, but Atkins took steps to popularize the new music he was making. Joining with May and Saunderson, he formed a collective enterprise, Deep Space Soundworks, which had begun as a DJ group headed by Atkins and in turn launched a downtown Detroit club called the Music Institute. A second generation of techno DJs, including Carl Craig and Richie Hawtin (also known as Plastikman), began to hold forth at the Deep Space Soundworks club, and techno even found a place on Detroit public radio affiliate WDET on a program called Fast Forward.
In the middle and late 1980s, Atkins used the name Model 500. His recordings from this time, such as “No UFO’s” (1985) and the evocative “Night Drive” (which featured Atkins’s whispered narration of a drive around Detroit’s freeway system), are often considered techno classics. Economical and polished Atkins Model 500 work they inspired younger electronic musicians, especially after techno became popular over in Europe. Atkins in 1985 formed a label of his own, Metroplex, releasing his own recordings as well as those of younger Detroit musicians. He had envisioned the label, Derrick May told author Dan Sicko, as early as age 17.
The late 1980s were probably the high point of Atkins’s fame, and in England he was invited to do remixes of hits by top acts such as the Style Council, the Tom Tom Club, and the Fine Young Cannibals. He cut back his activities in the early 1990s somewhat, although he released several recordings on which he billed himself as Infiniti. A series of European reissues of his earlier work stimulated his creative juices anew, and he returned to the recording studio, now working in the more expansive album format. The 1995 Model 500 album Deep Space was really Atkins’s solo CD debut. He released new albums under the names Infiniti (Skynet, 1998, on Germany’s Tresor label) and Model 500 (Mind and Body, 1999, on Belgium’s R&S).
Through all this, Atkins was only moderately well known, even in his Detroit hometown. But the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, held annually along Detroit’s riverfront, showed the impact of Atkins’s creation as a crowd of an estimated one million people turned out to hear his musical descendents make people dance with nothing more than an array of electronic gear. Atkins himself performed at the festival in 2001, In an Orange County Register interview he reflected on techno’s ambivalent status as African-American music. “I gotta believe that if we were a bunch of white kids, we’d be millionaires by now, but it may not be as racial as one may think,” he said. “Black labels don’t have a clue. At least the white guys will talk to me; they aren’t making any moves or offers, but they say, ‘We love your music and we’d love to do something with you.’ But blacks don’t even know who we are.”
In 2001 Atkins also released the Legends, Vol. 1 album on the OM label. Scripps Howard News Service writer Richard Paton observed that the album “finds him not resting on past achievement, but still mixing pumping, well-crafted sets,”
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