Juan Atkins Showed Dance Music the Future

T here isn’t a person in dance music who doesn’t owe Juan Atkins beyond measure. His death — of heart failure during his sleep in a Mexico City hotel room prior to a scheduled club performance, in a disheartening echo of his Chicago peer Frankie Knuckles’ 2014 passing, under similar circumstances — is like if Chuck Berry had died at age 64. Atkins’ footprint was that large, that encompassing. He was techno music’s fundamental architect in much the same way Berry was for rock and roll — Atkins laid out the music’s path, defined its instrumentation and phrasing, and crafted records that still sound as fresh as the day they were born. Under a slew of aliases and group names — Cybotron, Model 500, Infiniti, 3MB, Channel One, Borderland — Atkins made music, in some cases nearly a half-century old, that still evokes the future like nothing else.

Atkins’ nickname was “the Originator,” and it was given to him by his Detroit peers, which may be the first and only time everybody in that city’s dance music scene has ever agreed on anything. As a teenager, Atkins and Derrick May, his best friend and fellow pioneering producer, would make re-edited versions of hits for the cult-like local radio DJ the Electrifying Mojo — who would talk over their mixes with encoded messages like “Everything’s on the one” — drawing that last word out, because what he was really saying was that everything was on the Juan. 

Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, “techno” was often used as a musical descriptor for just about anything with synthesizers, from Kraftwerk to Depeche Mode. But in 1988, Atkins, who’d always dubbed his own music “techno,” codified that word’s musical import for good. That year, the British A&R man Neil Rushton began collecting tracks from Detroit artists to spotlight the Motor City’s new dance music — a compilation to be titled The House Sound of Detroit. But when Atkins handed in his contribution, it was called “Techno Music,” and everyone else on the compilation had cited Atkins as their lodestone: “So they changed the title,” Atkins said with understated finality in a 2012 interview. 

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The collection, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, was an announcement not only of a new sound but an aggressively but friendly future-forward sensibility. As a teenager, Atkins had picked up the synthesizer, he told The Wire in 1997, because it conjured “what it would be like if a UFO landed in the front yard.” Atkins had been besotted by science fiction and science fact, notably the futurist writer Alvin Toffler’s bestsellers Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980). In particular, Toffler’s hybridized portmanteaus like “metrocomplex” would directly influence the name of Atkins’ own label, Metroplex Records. 

Atkins applied that forward thinking to the imprint’s music as well as its robot-centric graphics. “The difference between Detroit and Chicago is that Chicago was still in the disco era,” he said. “When disco died everywhere else in the U.S., it continued in Chicago. The music was still based on that Philly-soul disco sound, whereas our brand of electronic was totally future — totally future. We didn’t borrow anything from the past other than probably the four-on-the-floor beat.”

Atkins’ use of multiple aliases was inspired by George Clinton’s P-Funk empire. So was his DIY drive. “I never intended that to be an actual label,” he said of Metroplex Records. “I just started that to put out my own records, because I got turned down by all of the major record companies. Maybe 30 days, maybe 60 days went past, and I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do it myself.’”

The early Model 500 records wrote the blueprint and defined the sound of Detroit techno. Dense, swirling records like “No UFOs,” “Night Drive (Time, Space, Transmat),” and “The Chase (Smooth Mix)” laid out a dauntingly complete version of the dance music to come: a sparks-flying fission, melodic but not totally linear, the surging hi-hats and smeary snares converging and igniting, evoking a tangle of bodies moving together while following their own paths. 

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Throughout his career — on his own or in collaboration with others, like 3MB’s billowing “Jazz Is the Teacher” (1992), made with German techno masters Thomas Fehlmann and Moritz von Oswald (the alias stood for Three Men in Berlin); and on Infiniti’s deliriously playful “Game One” (1994) made with Holland’s Orlando Voorn — that basic approach held true. 

You can hear that all over Infiniti Collection, which gathered Atkins’ singles under that name. (Tresor Records reissued it on October 30, only two days before Juan’s death was announced.) Atkins’ music was never careless, but it was also not simply machine-tooled. It pulses with human feeling, less about perfection than momentum. Atkins reached for the stars, but the stars themselves, and the act of reaching, mattered more than who was doing it. There’s a patience to it that is immediately audible. Juan Atkins is among the stars now, but he was dancing with them right from the start, and his music is likely to remain as timeless as the spheres.