Juan Atkins, Detroit Techno Pioneer, Dies Aged 64

What happened to Juan Atkins?

Resident Advisor broke the news on Sunday 1 November. His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed that he was found unresponsive in his hotel room in Mexico City, before a planned show at YuYu Cine Club. He was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead.

The show was listed for Saturday 31 October, and Latin Times says it was cancelled. Neither report gives a cause of death, and there’s no mention of funeral or memorial plans.

Kevin Saunderson, who made up the Belleville Three with Atkins and Derrick May, called him “the originator of Techno” in a post on social media. He also said Atkins helped him finish his first record, Triangle of Love, as Latin Times reports.

Who was Juan Atkins?

Before there was a genre, there was a teenager in Detroit with a Korg MS-10 synthesiser his grandmother had given him for Christmas. Reverb’s interview with him puts him at about 15, already making his own electronic music.

Born in Detroit in 1962, he grew up in nearby Belleville, where he met May and Saunderson. In 1980 he formed Cybotron with Richard Davis. Their 1981 single Alleys of Your Mind is an early landmark, and Clear, released in 1983, helped define the sound coming out of Detroit. Atkins told Reverb he made it with a Roland TR-808 and a Sequential Circuits Pro One, the Pro One’s sequencer driven by the 808.

After leaving Cybotron, he made records as Model 500. No UFOs, from 1985, laid some of the groundwork for Detroit techno, and the same year he launched Metroplex. You can read about the label in the Metroplex label guide or find his profile in our Juan Atkins artist guide.

Then there’s the name. Resident Advisor credits Atkins with giving the genre its name, through his track Techno Music on the 1988 UK compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, the release that introduced the Detroit sound to Europe. Atkins has claimed it himself. “I do believe I’m the first one to coin the term techno,” he told Reverb.

His records kept travelling. They reached listeners across Europe, especially in the UK and Germany, and fed a new generation of producers and DJs. He carried on as Cybotron, Model 500 and Infiniti, and teamed up with Moritz von Oswald as Borderland.

A teenager gets a synth for Christmas. Decades later, a whole scene is still using the name he gave it, and still making the records he made possible. Techno doesn’t have many founders, and it has just lost one of them.

Put on Clear or No UFOs today, and play them loud.

Sources: Resident Advisor, Latin Times and Reverb.