Juan Atkins, the Man Who Named Techno, Dies at 64

Juan Atkins, the Detroit producer who helped invent techno and then gave the genre its name, has died at 64.

Atkins was found unresponsive in his hotel room in Mexico City prior to a planned performance at YuYu Cine Club, and was later pronounced dead after being taken to hospital, a representative of his agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed to Resident Advisor. The Detroit Free Press, reporting from his friends and colleagues on the Detroit techno scene, reported that he died on Saturday, October 31 — Halloween night, the same night he was due on stage — and that he died in his sleep.

No cause of death has been announced, SPIN reported. The Free Press reported that Atkins had battled health issues in recent years, including diabetes-related complications — and that he kept a busy international gig schedule anyway, becoming one of the most prolific performers in the 26-year history of Detroit’s annual Memorial Day weekend techno festival, Movement.

“He died like a rock star, didn’t he — in his hotel room, waiting to go play a show,” Derrick May, his friend of many decades and a fellow member of the Belleville Three, told the Detroit Free Press.

Atkins was born in Detroit in 1962 and grew up in nearby Belleville after his family moved there, learning guitar and drums, playing in neighborhood bands and experimenting with a $400 synthesizer in his basement, the Free Press reported. In junior high he met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. The three became known as the Belleville Three — the trio whose pioneering work in the early ’80s established the Motor City as one of electronic music’s most important creative centers, fusing Detroit soul with Kraftwerk, Parliament-Funkadelic and the genre-hopping broadcasts of Detroit radio DJ the Electrifying Mojo.

His career began in earnest in 1980, when he formed Cybotron with Richard Davis. The duo’s synthesizer-driven electro-funk produced “Alleys of Your Mind” in 1981 and, in 1983, “Clear” — one of the defining records of the emerging Detroit sound, according to Resident Advisor.

After Cybotron, Atkins began recording as Model 500. His 1985 track “No UFOs” became a foundational Detroit techno release, and that same year he launched Metroplex, the label that became an important outlet for his own productions and the wider Detroit underground — the first recording home for a generation of the scene. “It’s very simple: If it wasn’t for Juan, there wouldn’t be me, a Derrick, a Kevin,” Detroit pioneer Eddie Fowlkes told the Free Press. “His dream was my dream in a sense.”

Then he named the music itself. Atkins’s track “Techno Music” appeared on the seminal 1988 UK compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, the release that introduced the Motor City sound to European audiences and fixed the genre’s name, Resident Advisor reported. He had borrowed the word from futurist Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave, SPIN reported. Nearly four decades on, the word — and the futurist vision behind it — remain inseparable from the man who first put them to record.

The tributes arrived from the men who built the sound with him. “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, in a tribute reported by DJ Mag. “I’ll never forget how he showed me how to finish my first record, ‘Triangle of Love.’ That meant a lot to me then, and it still does today. We shared a journey that changed music forever, and I’ll always be grateful for his friendship, guidance and everything he gave to our scene.”

Detroit’s mayor, Mary Sheffield, described Atkins in a statement Sunday as one of the city’s “true originals,” the Free Press reported. “Today, millions of people dance to music that traces back to him and to our city,” Sheffield said. “That is a Detroit story: genius, grit, and invention, from neighborhoods the world too often overlooked.”

Atkins never stopped looking forward. “I’ve always had this addiction to anything futuristic,” he told SPIN in a 1998 profile. “Maybe I think everything is going to be better.” In the same profile, as the music he created conquered Europe while struggling for a foothold at home, he insisted: “I’ve never given up on my home turf.” He kept recording and performing for more than four decades — revisiting Cybotron, working as Model 500 and Infiniti, collaborating with Moritz von Oswald as Borderland — and in recent years, the Free Press reported, one of his biggest passions was the music career of his daughter, Milan Ariel, a vocalist who blends R&B and techno.

Mixmag has called him “the original pioneer of Detroit techno”; AllMusic conferred the title “godfather of techno.” Both undersell it slightly. Before Juan Atkins, the music had no name. The Belleville Three is now two — and every dance floor on earth is running on the word he left behind.