- Juan Atkins, regarded as the father of techno, died on November 1, 2026, in Mexico City, aged 64. He was due to play at the YuYu Cine Club there. No official cause of death has been given.
- With Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, he formed the Belleville Three, three school friends from the Detroit suburbs who started the genre.
- “Clear” (Cybotron, 1983) and “No UFO’s” (Model 500, 1985) laid the foundations of techno. His track “Techno Music” (1988) gave the genre its name.
- Founder of the Metroplex label, he also helped build the bridge between Detroit and Berlin, with the duo Borderland and the Tresor label.
If you danced to Missy Elliott’s “Lose Control” in 2005, you’ve already heard Juan Atkins. Missy samples “Clear” on it, a track he recorded in 1983 with Cybotron. That was Juan in a nutshell: a sound everyone has in their head, a name only the real fans truly knew.
At Woodbrass, we spend our days surrounded by synths, drum machines and turntables. A good part of what we love goes back, one way or another, to a teenager from the Detroit suburbs hunched over a little Korg. So when the news broke on Sunday, November 1, it felt like a kick drum cutting out right in the middle of the track.
Belleville, a grandmother and a Korg MS-10
Juan Atkins was born in Detroit in 1962. After his parents split up, he moved in with his grandparents in Belleville, a small town about fifty kilometers west of downtown. As a kid, he played guitar and bass in funk bands.
And then there was his grandmother, Lily. She played the Hammond B3 organ and, when he was 15, she helped him buy his first synth: a Korg MS-10. A little monophonic synth he squeezed absolutely everything out of on his demo tapes: the basslines, the melodies, even the percussion. “The thing about the synthesizer is it could make all kinds of different sounds that’d never been heard,” he used to say.
In Belleville, he became friends with two boys slightly younger than him, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. At night, the three of them had their ears glued to the radio. On the Detroit airwaves, radio host The Electrifying Mojo played Kraftwerk just as readily as Parliament-Funkadelic. “We listened to him religiously. Every night,” Juan remembered.
Juan Atkins found the word “techno” partly in a book. In The Third Wave (1980), futurist Alvin Toffler writes about “techno-rebels.” The phrase stuck with him. It turns up as early as 1984 in Cybotron’s “Techno City,” then in 1988 in “Techno Music.”
Cybotron, techno before techno
At community college, Juan met Richard Davis, ten years his senior, who was already tinkering with sounds on an ARP Axxe. In the very early ’80s, they started Cybotron together. The first single, “Alleys of Your Mind,” came out in 1981 on Deep Space, Juan’s own small label. Then came “Cosmic Cars” in 1982, and “Clear” in 1983, from the album Enter.
“Clear” sold around 50,000 copies, a real hit for a record made by two people with machines. More than forty years later, Carl Cox wrote that the track “never left my soul.”
In 1985, the two partners went their separate ways. That was the end of Cybotron, at least for a while.
Model 500 and Metroplex: Detroit finds its voice
Juan didn’t waste any time. That same year, he founded his label, Metroplex, and released “No UFO’s” as Model 500. This is the record that carried Detroit techno across the Atlantic.
Juan was also the oldest of the gang, the one who showed the way. Kevin Saunderson recalled it this weekend: Juan was the one who helped him finish his very first record, “Triangle of Love.” “That meant a lot to me then, and it still does today,” he wrote.
In 1988, a British compilation set out to introduce this new music to UK audiences: Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit. Juan contributed “Techno Music.” The name stuck, and the genre never let go of it. It was an Englishman, Neil Rushton, who gave the trio their nickname: the Belleville Three.
You don’t need a studio full of gear to get started. Juan Atkins began with a single monophonic synth, which gave him his basslines, melodies and percussion. A well-chosen little analog synth is enough to understand how a sound is built, from the oscillator to the filter. If you’re not sure which one to pick, we’ve compared the best models in our guide to choosing your first analog synth.
From Detroit to Berlin, forty years on the road
As Model 500, Juan released the album Deep Space in 1995, and piled up aliases, from Infiniti to Audiotech. He also turned to Berlin, where Detroit techno had found a second home. With Moritz von Oswald, he formed the duo Borderland, which released its records on Tresor.
Sven Väth sums up what he built: his vision “inspired generations and helped build a musical bridge between Detroit and Berlin.”
He never really stopped. In 2023, he revived Cybotron with Berlin producer Laurens von Oswald, again on Tresor. Over the past two years, you could still catch him in clubs from New York to Berlin, and at festivals like Movement in Detroit, Dekmantel in Amsterdam and Houghton in England.
Mexico City, the set that never happened
On Saturday, October 31, Juan Atkins was due to play at the YuYu Cine Club in Mexico City. The club first announced the cancellation on Instagram, before the news broke. Juan had been found unresponsive in his hotel room before his set, then taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His agency, Greensmith Artists, announced his death on Sunday, November 1. No official cause of death has been given.
Derrick May wrote the hardest line to read: “He never complained. He never mentioned how sick he was, for years.” Kevin Saunderson spoke of his “brother,” “the originator of Techno, a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included.”
The French scene paid tribute too. “Today, we lost one of the founding fathers of our music,” wrote Laurent Garnier. Agoria spoke to Juan directly: “You laid the foundations of our whole scene.”
Spaceships on records
Juan Atkins had a lovely way of summing up what he was after: “I wanted to land spaceships down on my records.” When asked whether he’d managed it, he simply answered: “Absolutely.”
Hard to argue with him. Forty years on, his spaceships keep landing in clubs, in home studios and in the headphones of people who have never heard of Belleville. Tonight, we’ll put “No UFO’s” back on, a little louder than usual. Rest in peace, Juan.
Sources
- NBC News – Juan Atkins, co-creator of the techno music genre, dies at 64
- Complex – Detroit Techno Pioneer Juan Atkins Dies at 64
- Houz-Motik – Juan Atkins, pionnier de la techno de Detroit, est mort à 64 ans
- The Quietus – Remember Them: The Incalculable Legacy of Juan Atkins
- Local 12 – Techno architect, member of Detroit’s “Belleville Three” Juan Atkins dies at 64
- Wikipedia – Juan Atkins
