Juan Atkins, pionnier de la techno de Détroit (photo : Angie Linder, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Techno has lost one of its three founding fathers. Juan Atkins, the Detroit pioneer and central figure of the loose collective known as the Belleville Three, died on October 31 in Mexico City at age 64, hours before he was due to perform in the Mexican capital. His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news on November 1.
Found unresponsive hours before a show
According to several US outlets, Juan Atkins was found unresponsive in his Mexico City hotel room on Saturday, October 31, just hours before a scheduled performance at the YuYu Cine Club. He was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. An official cause of death has not been released, though multiple sources point to ongoing health issues related to diabetes.
Born September 12, 1962 in Detroit, Atkins grew up in a city shaped by industrial decline but alive with musical cross-currents, from Parliament-Funkadelic’s funk to the electronic sounds coming out of Europe. At 15, he bought a Korg MS-10 synthesizer and started shaping sounds that didn’t yet have a name, let alone a record bin to sit in.
Cybotron, then Model 500: a genre is born
It was in junior high, in the Detroit suburb of Belleville, that Atkins met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. The three teenagers shared a passion for a sound that had no name yet: a blend of nascent Chicago house, electronic funk, and the machine music of Germany’s Kraftwerk and Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. History would remember them as the Belleville Three, the architects of what became techno.
Atkins first formed Cybotron with Richard Davis. Their 1983 album “Enter” includes “Clear,” a track of pure machine music that many genre historians consider one of the very first techno records. It would later be sampled widely, especially in hip-hop.
After Cybotron split in 1985, Atkins went solo as Model 500 and founded his own label, Metroplex. The first single, “No UFO’s,” released that same year, became a foundational piece of the genre. It carried a clear vision: cold-sounding machine music built for the dancefloor, driven by an idea of the future. Critics would soon call him the “godfather of techno.”
An influence that reaches far beyond techno
Over the following decades, Atkins kept multiplying projects: Model 500 above all, but also the Infiniti alias, and Borderland, a duo formed with German producer Moritz von Oswald, with whom he released two albums, in 2013 and 2016. His catalog, regularly reissued by labels like Tresor and R&S, continues to feed into contemporary electronic music, from club techno to the most experimental strains of electro.
His work was also documented on screen, notably in the documentaries “High Tech Soul” (2006) and “Black to Techno” (2019), which trace the history of Detroit’s electronic music scene and the central role played in it by Black musicians too often erased from dominant narratives about dance music.
Atkins’ fingerprints are still all over electronic music today, from club techno to its most experimental edges. You can hear it in Aphex Twin, or in the recent return of The Avalanches — two very different generations, both still indebted, directly or not, to the grammar Metroplex laid down in the 1980s.
Tributes pour in from across electronic music
Tributes multiplied as soon as the news broke. Kevin Saunderson, his friend and collaborator since junior high, called him “the originator of techno, a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included.” Derrick May, the third member of the Belleville Three, also paid tribute to the man he considered a musical brother. Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield praised him as one of the city’s “true originals.”
For the global electronic scene, Atkins’ death marks the end of a founding generation. Nearly forty years after “No UFO’s” and “Clear,” the grammar he laid down, drum machines, synthetic basslines, hypnotic repetition, still underpins almost every strand of dance music being made today, from the rawest techno to the most mainstream electro-pop.
