BIOGRAPHY :: JUAN ATKINS
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 5:56AM 
“As I dug deeper into the history of techno, I discovered the genius of Juan Atkins, the cat who started it all, and who now graces our cover. While I grew up on Cybotron, I somehow never connected the dots back to techno. Considering the prevalence of and effect that digital music has had on modern society, it’s hard to imagine that Juan Atkins remains relatively unknown, while lesser-thans are getting rich off his template. Just as Herc, Flash and Bam are celebrated as hip-hop’s founding fathers, so should Juan Atkins be lauded as the founding father of techno. He is the godfather of modern Black electronic music – some of the most important music of the twentieth century, pure abstract art of the postindustrial digital age.” - Andre Torres, Wax Poetics
For an artist with history as deep-seated as Juan Atkins, it seems only right to start at the beginning. Enter Detroit in the late 80s, a city dismissed by the rest of the country as no man’s land. A land of the lost…where Atkins, a teenager in high school, was stuck in the dilapidated backdrop of a small city that sat to the west of postindustrial Detroit, Belleville. As silence hid between the broken buildings and empty streets (Robert Hood once fittingly described Detroit as “grey, a museum: a city suspended in the air”), Atkins escaped his surroundings through music. He became dedicated to finding something to fill the void, dreaming of a futurist movement.
In areas near and around Detroit, one walks through sidewalks with no people, and streets with little sign of commerce or stores. There’s only cars, of course, and many of them, being home of the crazed automobile industry that stemmed from Henry Ford’s assembly lines. That element of the city helps to explain Atkins eventual ability to conjure the old Detroit/Motown spirit through the feeling of automation, the repetition of sound; that mechanic soul that only techno holds. It’s a feeling that can’t be synthesized: singing through machines.
“From the beginning, even when I started, Detroit’s always been a fertile ground for creativity. Especially for dance music. It’s the surroundings. We’ve got a rich history. And there’s something about the factories, the smoke from the factories probably gets in our lungs and does something to us.”
Even from his earliest days, Juan Atkins always had a curious disposition, and a wide imagination that sat far ahead of his time. With his father being a concert promoter, Juan was raised in a house filled with the vast and wonderful heritage of music that bubbled deep in Detroit’s roots: from gospel to Motown, and its vibrant legacy of jazz musicianship. In a time when genre defying music was unheard of, Juan was led to the musical genius of luminaries such as George Clinton and the Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, Devo, B-52s, Yellow Magic Orchestra, through a nightly show by Charles Johnson, aka The Electrifying Mojo, entitled Midnight Funk Association (“Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise”).
“If you want the reason [techno] happened in Detroit, you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk.” – Juan Atkins (Village Voice)
It was around this time in the early 80s that, equipped with the pure artistic freedom that comes with the grey territory of Detroit, Atkins took pleasure in analyzing the music that inspired new forms and creation, experimenting with a mixing board, a cassette tape player and a Korg MS-10.
Meanwhile, at community college studying electronic sound production, Atkins hooked up with fellow musician Ric Davis, a Vietnam War veteran and synth expert who owned an array of innovative equipment, including one of the first sequencers (a device allowing the organization of electronic sound) released by the Roland Corporation. This collaboration – Cybotron – first came to fruition with the single “Alleys of Your Mind” in 1981. The avant-garde single did incredibly well for a release by a pair of unknown community college students, selling some 15,000 copies in the Detroit area after the Electrifying Mojo aired it on his radio program. More than just creative or inspired, Juan Atkins and Davis (aka 3070) seemed almost more like transmitters, forging sounds from another dimension or place in time, and utilizing recording techniques that pushed technology even further.
“When I first started I had to have a drummer, bass guitar player, guitar, keyboard player, and so forth. When I was doing Cybotron, we used to record at a studio called Pearl Sound. The engineer’s name was Ben Gross, and he taught me the reverse-clap trick. He was a great engineer. This was at a time when we recorded on 2 inch 24 track tape. And he would actually turn the tape over, turn it around and record the effect onto other tracks as it was playing backwards. Ultimately they came up with programs and drum machines with preset sounds, where you could just hit a button and it would do it automatically. But back then they didn’t have that; we actually turned the tape around and recorded the effect onto another track.”
In 1982 Cybotron released ‘Clear,’ with an electric sound that would make its mark on the minds of many enthusiasts as a milestone in electronic music’s evolution. ‘Clear’ was almost wordless; techno as a genre tended to use text only as a rhythmic element or adornment – when it used lyrics at all. The following year they released ‘Techno City,’ which ultimately gave the new sound a name; the term was anticipated and perhaps inspired by futurist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave (1980), which used the term “techno rebels.”
Atkins left Cybotron in 1985 citing artistic differences with band members Rick Davis and newcomer Jon 5. The two wanted to take a rock ‘n’ roll approach with their music, which led Atkins to pursue his musical escapade throughout Detroit, Chicago, and New York. This created a network with other musical pioneers, and lead to define a sound that would later go on to represent Detroit city in the mid 80s. With Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Eddie Fowlkes, he formed a collective enterprise, Deep Space Soundworks, which launched the downtown Detroit club known as the Music Institute. The club inspired a new group of techno DJs – including Carl Craig, Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman), John Acquaviva – to bask in the synergy that cultivated a new art form of sound and music.
Within time, Juan started releasing his earliest DIY productions through Metroplex, a label he founded in order to better promote his alias Model 500 (as well as nurture the careers of younger Detroit musicians), along with Belleville comrade Derrick May launching Transmat, originally planned as a subsidiary of the former. His releases of this period, including ‘No UFO’s’ (1985) and the evocative ‘Night Drive,’ are techno classics whose musical weight is beyond conventional description. Spare and polished, they inspired a host of younger electronic musicians in Europe, where techno was reaching a wave of popularity, and some of his tracks began being collected in the 1990s for the ‘Classics’ album released by Belgium’s R&S label. These recordings helped to define a new form of nightclub culture in the United States, but especially in England, where Atkins, May, and Saunderson found their most dedicated fanbase. Eventually, this phenomenon caught wind of Motown fanatic Neil Rushton of Birmingham, England (credited for eventually putting Detroit Techno on the map by instigating the release of Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit on Virgin Records), propelling them to a global level.
“When Virgin Records wanted to do a compilation on us, the original concept was gonna be called the ‘House Sound of Detroit.’ A lot of the export stores were based in Chicago so that was the closest export for us (there were some in New York, but the closest for us was in Chicago). We didn’t have export stores in Detroit, really, so a lot of the early Detroit stuff got discovered near Chicago. Believe it or not, Detroit music was being played on the mix shows in Chicago more heavily than even Chicago records. And so when the record companies came to Chicago to explore house music, they discovered Detroit. I guess, when it came time for Virgin to say, ‘What is this Detroit stuff?’ – the general feeling was to call it “the house sound of Detroit.” But I said, ‘No, this is Detroit – we’ve got our own sound, it’s called techno music. We’re not the house sound. We’re not an off-shoot of Chicago, if anything Chicago was an off-shoot of us.’ And so, that’s what prompted that track on the album called ‘Techno Music’ – I put on that album because that was making a statement. And when my track was submitted, which was one of the last tracks to be submitted, they changed the whole name of the album to ‘Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.’ That was one of the instances where it wasn’t an actual plan, but at least I knew better to not be thrown underneath somebody else’s…well, I knew better than to compromise myself. That was probably really how that whole thing kicked off.
“I mean, hey – I love the guys from Chicago. If it wasn’t for Farley Jackmaster Funk playing ‘No UFOs’ heavy on the radio, this whole thing probably never would’ve happened. So there was a definite love for our competitors, we had a friendly competition. Acid House, for me, was nothing but techno. But they couldn’t call it techno because of the rivalry, the friendly rivalry. But when Marshall Jefferson started using the 303 and they called it Acid House, it was really techno music.”
With the Virgin compilation in tow, Europe (in particular the UK) took to this new sound and went with it; building progressive and more ornate melodies and rhythms producing music for the mind or what later would come to be known as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). Atkins’ sound, famously described by May and quoted in the Village Voice as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator,” also began making its way on to the commercial pop platform around that time: in England he was invited to do remixes of hits by top acts such as the Style Council, the Tom Tom Club, and the Fine Young Cannibals.
In 2003, the Detroit Historical Museum honored all that contributed to the global evolution of the music, with an exhibit called ‘Techno: Detroit’s Gift to the World.’ In addition to showcasing the seminal records, the exhibit displayed the original equipment used by the many artists of Metroplex, and sub sequential labels that were formed thereafter. The exhibit toured many cities throughout the US the following year.
Throughout the decade of the 00‘s, Juan Atkins continued to make his mark on the electronic world, with extraordinary releases on Subject Detroit, and New Religion (including his ‘Back To Basics’ series). In 2010, Metroplex celebrated its 25th anniversary with an expansive tour that made its way to cities around the world. Additionally, after a ten year absence from the scene, a new Model 500 production was unleashed early last year, ‘OFI,’ (Objects Flying Identified) which was released on the seminal imprint that has as much historical weight as the artist himself, R&S Records.
His latest projects include collaborations with Francois Kevorkian, and “with one of the major players in Berlin.” Another forthcoming Model 500 EP (as well as a festival circuit planned around the world in 2011) is in the works in addition to his recent release for Scion’s prestigious A/V remix project: http://www.pitchengine.com/pitch/124550/
“I’m going to try my hardest to always be on the cutting edge. Once you have a successful formula you can’t just keep on re- running it, ’cause somebody else is going to come along and blow you out of the water. You’ve got to move on. I want to be as far on the edge as possible without going over. I want to stand out whatever I do, but not be so far above that people won’t relate to it. I just want to be involved with things that are going to be interesting enough to set trends or standards.”