Juan Atkins, the lifelong producer and DJ who co-founded Detroit techno music, has died; Green Smith Artists, Atkins’ management company, confirmed his death. Atkins was scheduled to perform at the Yu Yu Club in Mexico City last night (October 31). He was 64 years old.
As a member of the Belleville Three, Cybotron and Borderland, Atkins’ impact on electronic music is, at this point, incalculable. At age 18, he formed Cybotron with his friend Richard “3070” Davis. Fusing funk, electronic instrumentation and futuristic themes, they helped reorient the sound of the genre with their first singles – “Alleys of the Mind”, “Cosmic Raindance”, “Cosmic Cars”, “The Line” – before fully dominating the dancefloor with “Clear” in 1983. The electro track became an instant underground hit and quickly broke into the mainstream. The single sold 50,000 copies and became a defining composition of the genre, sampled by Missy Elliott and countless others. The duo then released three albums: 1983. Enter1993 Empathyand the 1995s Cyberghetto.
As a born and raised Detroiter, Atkins was part of the community’s local music scene from a young 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 high school, Atkins turned his attention away from guitar and bass to digital instruments, purchasing his very first synthesizer, a Korg MS-10, at the age of 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, it wasn’t just about getting people lost in the trance of dancing. “My lyrics are meant to make you think about things other than shaking your butt on the dance floor and falling in love,” he said recently. 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) made techno music”, despite the fact that DJs from the nearby Chicago scene, like Derrick Carter and Frankie Knuckles, referred to it as Detroit house music. “When you listen to Chicago records, a lot of them sounded like Philly International records,” Atkins said. “They always sounded like the Philly International disco sound.ks-ks-ks-ks…‘ You know! That’s all the difference. In Detroit, we have no real reference point. All the Detroit stuff was purely futuristic. The only thing we really had in common was the form… There was definitely competition between the DJs from Chicago and the DJs from Detroit. We all wanted to be famous. But we were also friends, Tyree Cooper and all those guys. Farley was a good friend. We went to Farley’s in Chicago just to hang out and they came to Detroit.
Gn entert
