On October 31, Juan Atkins died in Mexico City. He was techno’s visionary chill big brother, the man who fused Kraftwerk’s machine music with George Clinton’s cosmic funk and created an entirely new, ever-shifting musical language – a sonic blueprint for the future. It makes me sad.
I once spent hours dancing to a DJ whose identity I couldn’t make out through the thick smoke at a legendary Copenhagen rave in the mid 1990s.
The music was unlike the fast minimal being played at the time. Fluid, alien, strangely emotional. I couldn’t leave the dancefloor. When the smoke finally cleared, I realised it was Juan Atkins. Behind him stood Derrick May and Robert Hood. Taking notes.
Morten Vammen here. I’m a sound snob. An occupational hazard after decades of making records and listening to records, a lot of records – but every time Juan Atkins released something new, I had to listen several times. Not necessarily because I liked it immediately, but because I needed to work out what the hell he was doing – and what new emotional territory he was mapping out. His tracks were often slow burners. Strange machines, peculiar swing, unfamiliar emotions – There was always something to learn from.
More Than Breakdance Tools My first encounter with Juan Atkins was through a record: Cybotron’s Clear, released in 1983. At the time, electro was the soundtrack to the breakdancing craze, with drum machines, vocoders and synthetic basslines serving primarily as dance tools for young people spinning around on pieces of cardboard in tracksuits. Addictive as Pac-Man, built from breakbeats and Kraftwerk quotes.
Juan’s Clear was something else entirely: sophisticated electro, sonic fiction from the funky future. There was a cool elegance and a more sinister tone, making it perfect for my post-industrial funk DJ sets.
More than two decades later, Clear would provide the foundation for Missy Elliott’s enormous 2005 hit Lose Control, demonstrating just how far Atkins’ sonic inventions could travel beyond the Detroit underground. And how remarkably little they had aged.
The Belleville 3 Early Detroit techno began with three school friends from the suburb of Belleville: Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson.
Derrick May was the supreme DJ, the charismatic ambassador and interview prophet who could discuss techno as if it were an almost philosophical or spiritual movement. His music could be dramatic, romantic, and overwhelming, and his famous description of techno as George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator became one of the genre’s most quoted lines.
Kevin Saunderson was the hit machine, with his more house-oriented Roland TR-909 on cruise control. With Inner City and tracks such as Big Fun and Good Life, he introduced Detroit’s music to a much wider audience.
But Juan Atkins was the visionary big brother, the man who didn’t simply produce tracks within a genre but helped invent the genre itself, before continuing to twist, stretch and challenge its sound and parameters – he was the futurist and inventor.
Model 500 – Techno Finds Its Identity
In 1985, Atkins founded the Metroplex record label and began releasing music as Model 500. With records like No UFO’s, Night Drive (Thru-Babylon), The Chase, and later Starlight, he developed a distinctive, fluid musical aesthetic: these weren’t novelty DJ tools or rave fodder. The music could be cool without being emotionless, and emotional without becoming sentimental.
Today, anyone with a laptop can produce a reasonably convincing techno track using AI or loops in an afternoon. Juan Atkins had to invent much of the musical vocabulary before there was a manual, a preset pack or a YouTube tutorial explaining how to sound like a Juan Atkins clone.
The early machines were limited, often primitive and unpredictable. The challenge was to discover what these strange electronic boxes could do that nobody had imagined before, opening new mental landscapes. Atkins didn’t regard synthesizers and drum machines as expensive lifestyle accessories, museum pieces, or status symbols. They were tools for mental exploration and space travel.
The Future in a Dying City
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate birthplace for techno than Detroit in the early 1980s.
The once-prosperous city that had invented modern industrial mass production was slowly falling apart. Even Motown had moved its headquarters to Los Angeles back in 1972. Car factories were closing, jobs were disappearing, and the American Dream was turning into a nightmare of crime, drugs and poverty, leaving behind enormous abandoned factories and decaying neighbourhoods.
The economic security of Detroit’s Black middle class was eroding as the American car industry struggled with Japanese competition, automation, corporate restructuring and the relocation of manufacturing.
For a young Black man growing up in and around the city, the present was hardly an inspiring advertisement for the American Dream. And the past was not necessarily a more comforting destination.
The past offered a magnificent musical heritage, but a brutal political one. Behind him lay slavery, segregation, racism, and generations of struggle. Ahead lay unemployment, urban decay, and diminishing prospects. Outside the door crack, your neighbours turned into zombies with guns. So Juan stayed in the small studio; the future was the only place where everything could still be possible.
Afrofuturism and Berlin on Ecstasy: Instead of romanticising the past or accepting or describing the miserable possibilities of the present, a generation of Black American futurists turned towards science fiction, technology and outer space – not as escapism, but as positive action.
Atkins read futurists such as Alvin Toffler, whose books explored the social consequences of the coming information age, while listening to a remarkable collision of European synth music and funk broadcast across Detroit by the legendary radio DJ The Electrifying Mojo. It could be Yellow Magic Orchestra and the futuristic Black pop of Prince, side by side. In most other places at the time, these records belonged to different musical worlds. In Detroit, they were all part of the same inspiring transmission from the future. And Atkins connected the dots.
This was Afrofuturism in action: taking a rich but painful historical inheritance and transforming it into an alternative technological future, where Black identity was no longer defined by the limitations imposed by the past or present.
Atkins could imagine a future in which Black Americans were not merely participants but architects. And then something extraordinary happened.
Before the internet, when fax machines, hardware sequencers and vinyl still ruled, his rare music travelled across the Atlantic and found its spiritual home in a city undergoing an equally dramatic transformation: Berlin.
After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the city was full of abandoned industrial buildings, empty warehouses, underground bunkers, cheap space and an entire generation looking for a new identity. Just like the Detroit guys.
The young Germans had inherited the ruins of a failed political experiment. The young Black Americans had inherited the ruins of a failed industrial dream. And the young Berliners, dancing through reunification on ecstasy, needed a soundtrack.
Young Black Americans, whose own city had been devastated by industrial decline, provided the musical blueprint for a new generation of largely white Europeans celebrating freedom among the ruins of another failed industrial and political system.
The connection would become one of the most important cultural alliances in electronic music, with labels, clubs and record shops such as Tresor and Hard Wax helping to establish a direct musical axis between the two cities.
And it was in this world that Atkins developed a particularly fruitful creative relationship with the German producer Moritz von Oswald.
With his post-punk background, aristocratic von Oswald was a master of dub, space and sonic understatement, a sophisticated Berlin musical adventurer whose work with Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound and other projects had transformed Jamaican dub techniques into a uniquely European form of electronic stoner minimalism.
Their association stretched back to the early 1990s, including collaborations around the 3MB project with Thomas Fehlmann, long before they formally joined forces as Borderland.
The beautiful Borderland albums, Borderland (2013) and Transport (2016), brought their shared sensibilities into focus.
These were not nostalgic exercises by ageing techno legends attempting to recreate their glory days. They were spacious, deeply musical explorations of rhythm, texture and atmosphere, existing somewhere between the fading echoes of a nightclub at four in the morning and a spacecraft drifting through the universe.
Maybe Juan’s studio sessions didn’t end with space travel, but he escaped dystopian Detroit and traveled the world.
A Night at Pakhus 11: I truly experienced Juan Atkins’ genius live on a dancefloor in Copenhagen during the 1990s.
I had been playing a live set at the legendary, chaotic Sound and Vision festival at Pakhus 11 for a trippy crowd, and at some point I found myself on the dancefloor, completely hypnotised by the music. I stayed there for hours.
It wasn’t the fast, industrial, hard-edged or trance-influenced minimal techno that dominated large parts of the European scene at the time.
This was something far more sophisticated. The music had a peculiar fluid, almost weightless quality, with rhythms and poetic, alien melodies constantly shifting and opening up new spaces.
It was intelligent and deeply physical at the same time. You could lose yourself in the details while remaining completely unable to stop dancing. I had no idea who was playing. Only when the smoke machine was switched off, and I could finally see the DJ booth, did I realise it was Juan Atkins.
Standing behind him were Derrick May and Robert Hood, among others, watching intently. Taking notes.
A Perfect Day in Ørstedsparken
On another occasion, I experienced Juan Atkins play at Tripping (founded by legend Henrik Møll RIP) on Sunshine in Ørstedsparken, one of Copenhagen’s most beautiful and distinctive settings for electronic music events. I opened at noon, playing a humble W30 sampler and a 303.
The park, also well known as one of the city’s gay cruising areas, was packed with ravers, many of whom had arrived directly from the previous night’s parties without a minute of sleep.
This was a time when electronic music was still a relatively small subculture. There were no VIP enclosures, no gigantic LED screens, no influencer campaigns, and no multimillion-dollar production budgets. Or iPhones.
In a hot skunk-drenched tent, I remember smoking with Mixmaster, Sun Electric, and Juan Atkins, who was dressed entirely in white cowboy gear.
I interviewed Juan Atkins later, and what struck me most was how humble and down-to-earth he was. He had every possible reason to behave like a legend. He had helped create a musical revolution that had already transformed club culture around the world. Yet there was no self-importance, no grandstanding, no groupies, coke, or big label deals. He seemed more like a curious, thoughtful man fascinated by music and technology than someone who needed to remind everybody of his historical significance. It was almost as if he hadn’t fully grasped the extent of his own influence. I recorded the interview on DV tapes. Hopefully, they are still somewhere in my archive. By the time Juan took over the music, the day had already been perfect.
When Everyone Thought He Was High
The last time I met Juan Atkins was at Culture Box in Copenhagen. It was a very different experience. The man I remembered from the 1990s now seemed terribly exhausted. He was practically falling asleep over the mixer.
Over the years, rumours had circulated within the scene that he had developed a serious drug problem. Some even claimed he was using crack cocaine. I asked him about it myself. He told me that, yes, he smoked weed, but he dismissed the stories about crack. Instead, he told me something far more disturbing. He had spent years living with undiagnosed diabetes.
Severe disturbances in blood sugar levels can cause extreme fatigue, confusion and behaviour that may resemble intoxication. I couldn’t know how much of Juan’s condition diabetes explained or whether he had suffered permanent damage.
But I remember thinking how easily illness can become gossip (even among ravers) when nobody bothers to ask what is actually wrong.
The story also raises questions about the difference between the American and Danish healthcare systems. In Denmark, we can see a doctor without paying for the consultation and have serious illnesses investigated and treated within a publicly funded healthcare system. In the United States, money, insurance coverage and access to medical treatment can present far greater obstacles.
It is difficult not to reflect on the tragedy of someone who gave so much to the world, yet spent years struggling with a serious disease that modern medicine can often manage effectively.(His official cause of death has not been established, and I have no reason to assume diabetes caused it.)
From Revolution to Billion-Dollar Industry
Music that began as futuristic experiments by a handful of young Black Americans using relatively inexpensive electronic instruments in a struggling industrial city has become one of the world’s most widespread forms of dance music.
Today, techno is a global industry built around superstar DJs, enormous festivals, luxury clubs, brand partnerships and gigantic production budgets.
Sometimes I barely recognise the techno world I helped build: what began as an experimental underground culture populated by outsiders, sonic obsessives and beautiful freaks has become a global lifestyle industry of Boiler Room exhibitionists, ketamine casualties, Instagram aerobics instructors posing as DJs, promoter-vampires and corporate money.
Techno increasingly resembles everything it originally offered an escape from. Even Juan made a Vuitton show set.
And there is something deeply paradoxical about the fact that music originally concerned with imagining the future and breaking away from established conventions and the cult of ego has so often become an exercise in repeating the same tried-and-tested formulas in new emperors’ clothes, exploiting people’s need for social scenes and fake escapism.
Juan Atkins belonged to the time before the formulas. Before the algorithms.
Before techno became a lifestyle boring people can buy your way into.
He was there before any of it existed, creating a blueprint for play, sensuality and experimentation. Not formulaic mass excess. He imagined a musical world that did not yet exist, and then built it himself.
He’s dead now – and somewhere up there, I imagine Juan laughing with Miles Davis, Prince, Vangelis, Peter Christopherson, Florian Schneider and Sakamoto.
God knows who’s producing, who’s playing bass and who’s arguing about the mix.
But I’d love to hear what they’re working on. It probably sounds like the future.
P.S. If this rant has sparked your curiosity and left you craving for Detroit techno, Octave One will be playing live alongside Morten Vammen, Dennis HorvatSakena and Prom Night this Friday, November 6, at Copenhagen’s hedonistic oasis DAS (Den Anden Side), Axeltorv 9. Highly recommended!
CHEAP TICKET / SKIP THE LINE HERE
COPENHAGENS SECRET SOUNDTRACK
Discover more from BLAZAR
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.