Not many people can say they played a key role in changing popular music and culture. Juan Atkins is one who definitely could. His death aged 64, just before a DJ gig in Mexico City on Saturday, was announced yesterday. Atkins was one of the Belleville Three, three Detroit DJs and producers who in the first half of the 1980s invented techno.
The Belleville Three (Juan, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson) bonded over European electronic music (Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode), Black American funk (Parliament, Funkadelic), pioneering leftfield artists (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and a local radio station show by The Electrifying Mojo (Charles Johnson on WGPR). The Three bought turntables and synthesizers. Atkins was the first to buy turntables and taught the other two to DJ. At college he took a class called Future Studies where he learnt about the transition from an industrial society to a technological one. He then applied this to the music he was making.
Juan Atkins formed Cybotron (early 80s electro- techno) with Rick Davis in 1981 and when they parted company he became Model 500 in 1985. Model 500's records are landmark Detroit techno releases. Whatever anyone else was doing in 1985, no one was doing anything more futuristic than this...
Atkins also formed Metroplex in 1985, a record label to put out the work of other artists as well as his own. In the 2010s he formed Borderland with Moritz von Oswald, a German producer and resident of the Berlin scene (bizarrely Moritz is a descendant of Otto von Bismark, the man brought about German unification in 1871). They made two albums, one in 2013 and one in 2016. On the second they released this nine minute epic, sleek and futuristic machine music, the result of several decades of techno music crystallized and distilled...
Juan Atkins was often known as the Godfather of Techno- he merged science fiction, synth pop, cosmic Black American funk and futurism to create techno, a new form. This new type of music lit a fire in the USA and crossed the Atlantic, sending the UK and Europe into a spin in the late 80s, setting off a youth revolution that changed the culture forever. A founding father and giant of modern music.
Juan Atkins RIP
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