Juan Atkins, Co-Founder of Techno Music, Dies at 64

Juan Atkins, the lifelong producer and DJ who co-founded Detroit techno music, has died, confirmed Green Smith Artists, Atkins’ management company. A member of the Belleville Three, Cybotron, and Borderland, Atkins was slated to perform at Yu Yu Club in Mexico City last night (October 31) where he reportedly suffered from a heart attack. Tickets were refunded to concertgoers. Atkins was 64.

By age 18, Atkins had formed the influential techno project Cybotron with his friend Richard “3070” Davis. By merging funk, electronic instrumentation, and futuristic themes, they helped redirect the sound of the genre on their early singles—“Alleys of the Mind,” “cosmic Raindance,” “Cosmis Cars,” “The Line”—before fully domainting the dancefloor with “Clear” in 1983. It became an instant underground hit before breaking out to wider recognition, with the single selling 50,000 copies and becoming lauded as a genre-defining piece of work. The duo went on to released three albums: 1983’s Enter, 1993’s Empathy, and 1995’s Cyber Ghetto.

As a born and raised Detroiter, Atkins was a part of the community’s local music scene at an early age, playing in funk and garage bands with his friends and being raised by a father who worked as a concert promoter. After meeting Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson in junior high school, Atkins started shifting his focus from guitar and bass to digitized instruments, purchasing his first-ever synthesizer, a Korg MS-10, when he turned 15. The friends later earned the nickname the Belleville Three due to their close-knit status as collaborative musicians shaping their electronic scene and sharing equipment, studio space, and production work.

For Atkins, there was more to it than just making people get lost in the trance of dancing. “My lyrics are supposed to make you think about something other than shaking your booty on the dancefloor and falling in love,” he recently told The Guardian. “I feel like artists have an obligation to say something meaningful.”

In 2005, Atkins told Pitchfork that he “always called the music [he] was making techno music” despite DJs in the neighboring Chicago scene, like Derrick Carter and Frankie Knuckles, labeling it Detroit house music. “When you listen to Chicago records, a lot of them sounded like Philly International records,” said Atkins. “They were always like the Philly International disco sound. Going ‘ks-ks-ks-ks…’ you know! That’s the whole difference. In Detroit, we don’t have any real reference point. All the Detroit stuff was pure futuristic. The only thing that we really had in common was the form… There was definitely competition between the Chicago and the Detroit DJs. We all wanted to be famous. But we were also friends, Tyree Cooper and all of these guys. Farley was a good friend. We went to Farley in Chicago just to hang out and they came to Detroit.”

Atkins stayed active as a touring DJ and performer on through to the end. In his final two years, Atkins could be seen everywhere from New York City to Berlin playing in clubs, or on the main stage at festivals like Detroit’s Movement Festival, Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival, and England’s Houghton Festival.