Juan Atkins, pioneer of Detroit techno sound, dies aged 64

Juan Atkins, one of the pioneers of Detroit techno and a huge influence on dance music more widely, has died aged 64.

His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news to the dance music website Resident Advisor, saying that Atkins was found unresponsive in a hotel room in Mexico City prior to a performance there, and was pronounced dead after being taken to hospital.

Atkins created a gleaming, mechanistic form of electronic music, first as part of the duo Cybotron and then under the alias Model 500, that could command a dancefloor while also evoking sci-fi fantasias. He was the first person to use the term “techno” in tandem with this hard electronic style, pre-empting an entire genre that now stands as one of the pillars of dance culture.

Born in Detroit in 1962, Atkins later moved with his family to the rural Michigan suburb of Belleville. “I just wasn’t used to going to school on a yellow bus and living on a dirt road,” he told the Guardian in 2024. But it was here that he met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, two junior high schoolmates with whom he formed the Belleville Three, a trio of like-minded musicians sitting at the vanguard of electronic music.

Still in high school and utilising increasingly affordable hardware such as the Roland TR-808 drum machine and the Korg MS-10 synthesiser, Atkins formed Cybotron with Richard Davis. “I had a class called future studies, about the transition from an industrial society to a technological society,” Atkins told the Guardian in 2014. “I just applied a lot of those principles to my music-making.”

Equally in thrall to Kraftwerk and Jimi Hendrix, Cybotron’s propulsive yet psychedelic tracks, such as Cosmic Cars and Clear, became dancefloor staples. The duo split​ in 1985, with Davis drawn more towards rock music. “I think that was where he wanted to be, in that album-orientated rock [scene],” Atkins later said.

Atkins went solo as Model 500, creating other foundational dance tracks such as No UFO’s and The Chase. In 1985, he also founded his own record label, Metroplex, to release his work. Over the years, it also put out material by artists including Anthony Shakir and DJ Bone.

Throughout​ the 1980s and beyond, Atkins evoked not just techno-utopian visions, but also more troubling and politicised ones. “I make social statements. My lyrics are supposed to make you think about something other than shaking your booty on the dancefloor and falling in love,” he told the Guardian in 2024.

By the early 1990s, the techno scene he helped inspire had flourished, and Atkins further finessed his sound with the uptempo project Infiniti later in the decade.

The 2000s were less productive in terms of releases, but he formed the duo Borderland with another techno icon, Moritz Von Oswald, releasing two albums in 2013 and 2016.

In 2023, Atkins reformed Cybotron, releasing new music and performing live. By this point, Atkins’s influence had extended far beyond techno, with dozens of artists sampling Clear alone. Missy Elliott made it the backbone of her track Lose Control, which reached No 3 on the US Billboard chart in 2005.

Saunderson was among those paying tribute to Atkins on Sunday, calling him “a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included”.