Juan Atkins, the Detroit musician widely credited as the founding father of techno, has died at the age of 64. His management agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news on Sunday, 1 November, a day after Atkins was found unresponsive in his hotel room in Mexico City, where he had been due to perform at the YuYu Cine Club. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead. No cause of death has been announced.
Atkins was, by the account of almost everyone who worked with him, the originator. Born in Detroit in 1962 and raised in nearby Belleville, Michigan, he met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson at school. The three became known as the Belleville Three, the trio whose experiments with synthesisers, drum machines and tape decks in the early 1980s built a new sound from the shell of Detroit’s declining motor industry — and gave it a name that would travel the world.
Atkins got there first. In 1980 he formed Cybotron with Richard Davis, releasing the singles “Alleys of Your Mind” in 1981 and “Clear” in 1983, records that fused the funk and soul of his youth with the cold futurism of European electronic music. After leaving the group he began recording as Model 500, founding his own label, Metroplex, in 1985 and releasing the landmark single “No UFOs” the same year.
He also, quite literally, named the music. His track “Techno Music” appeared on the influential 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, released in Britain by Virgin Records. Atkins had borrowed the word from the futurist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave, and it stuck — first to the Detroit sound, then to a global genre.
The tributes came fast, and from the people who knew the history best. “Juan was the originator of Techno, a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included,” Kevin Saunderson wrote on Instagram. Derrick May told the Detroit Free Press: “He died like a rock star, didn’t he — in his hotel room, waiting to go play a show.” Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield described Atkins as one of the city’s “true originals”. Richie Hawtin, who carried Detroit’s sound into the 1990s, also paid tribute.
His music, released under monikers including Cybotron, Model 500 and Infiniti, broke out of Detroit’s underground to penetrate wider club culture in the 1980s, carried to Britain and Europe where it found its first mass audience. Cybotron’s “Clear” would later rank at No. 77 on Billboard’s list of the 100 Best Dance Songs of All Time, and critics have called Atkins’s discography perhaps the most influential body of work in electronic music. The Detroit sound he helped create — machine rhythms with a human pulse, science-fiction dreams set to soul — became the template for generations of producers who never set foot in Michigan.
Atkins never stopped. He remained an active touring performer into his sixties, and was among the most prolific artists in the history of Detroit’s annual Memorial Day weekend techno festival, now known as Movement. Friends said he had battled health problems in recent years, including diabetes-related complications, but he was still on the road — still, on the night he died, waiting to go on stage.
Why this matters beyond Detroit: techno is now one of the most influential sounds in modern music, the backbone of club culture on every continent and the ancestor of much of today’s electronic pop. It began as the work of three school friends in a Michigan suburb, with synthesisers they could barely afford, imagining a future their city had not yet reached. Atkins was the first of them to record, the one who named the music, and the one who built its first label. The genre outlived him by decades already; it will outlive him by many more.
Atkins is survived by his fellow Belleville Three members, May and Saunderson. His family has asked for privacy.
