His age when he bought his first synthesizer. By 18 he had co-founded Cybotron.
Juan Atkins was born in Detroit in 1962, the son of a concert promoter. As a kid he played guitar and bass in funk bands with his friends and grew up on Parliament-Funkadelic and the late-night radio of The Electrifying Mojo. After his parents split, he moved to Belleville, Michigan, where in junior high he met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. At 15 he bought his first synthesizer, a Korg MS-10.
Then he built something nobody had heard before. Atkins co-founded Cybotron with Richard Davis around 1980, and their 1982 track Clear is often named as the starting point of techno: cosmic funk, rigid machine rhythms, and a vision of the future pulled straight out of the city. In 1985 he launched his own label, Metroplex, and released No UFO’s as Model 500, a record widely described as one of the first techno tracks. He is broadly credited with giving the genre its name. With May and Saunderson, known as the Belleville Three, he carried the Detroit sound from basements to clubs and festivals around the world.
He never stopped. Atkins was still touring and had played the main stage at Detroit’s Movement festival in recent years. On October 31, he was found unresponsive in a Mexico City hotel ahead of a scheduled performance, and his management confirmed his death on November 1. He was 64. No cause of death has been announced. Mayor Mary Sheffield said Detroit had lost one of its true originals.
"He did not wait for the future to arrive. He built what it would sound like, from Detroit."
Every young builder we cover gets told, at some point, that the big things happen somewhere else. Atkins is the answer to that. A teenager outside Detroit with a cheap synthesizer and a radio show in his ears built a genre the entire world now dances to, and he started his own label rather than waiting for someone to sign him. The sound traveled everywhere. Its home address stayed in Detroit.
This is the Detroit builder lineage ANF exists to honor. Take the idea in your head seriously, build your own platform for it, and let the world catch up.
He was a Detroit teenager with a synthesizer. He left the world a genre.
