Cybotron: a late discovery (mea culpa).

Between the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, after a brief but intense infatuation with early punk, also thanks to the fact of hosting an “oblique music” broadcast on the radio, I began to be interested in electronic music and its surroundings. I had started from Kraftwerk – completely skipping all the “kosmische musik”, which I had always found a bit boring -, I had really loved “N° 1 in heaven” by Sparks with Giorgio Moroder, and I had followed in the footsteps of people like The Normal (Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute, with his single “TVOD” / “Warm leatherette”), Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, without neglecting less extremist exponents like Joy Division, Human League, the first Depeche Mode, and of course the David Bowie of “Station to station”.

Right in a special issue of “Mojo” dedicated to David Bowie I found a flying quote of a name I had never heard, and which intrigued me. I went to find out, and I understood why it had escaped my radar at the time: they were an American duo, while I – Sparks aside – have always been mainly Anglophile.

The discovery, although late, was interesting.

Cybotron were two guys from Detroit, Juan Atkins and Richard “3070” Davis, with different musical backgrounds but both interested in the relationship (even philosophical) between men and machines. For this reason they chose to call themselves Cybotron, a name that evoked the cyborg – the term invented in the early 1960s by scientists Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, abbreviating “cybernetic organism”, to indicate an organism that combines organic parts with mechanical parts.

Similarly, Atkins and David’s music attempted to bring together the funk of Parliament and the “motorik” of Kraftwerk. A European-African American hybrid that is exemplified in Cybotron’s first single, “Alleys of your mind”, released in 1981.

The song’s only local circulation meant that Cybotron’s next rehearsal had to wait a year before the next single, “Cosmic cars” (1982)

which was followed by “Clear”, perhaps the best exemplification of Cybotron’s musical project

expressed more widely and fully in the 1983 album “Enter” (Fantasy Records).

“Enter”

“Techno City”

But at that point the paths of Atkins and David had already begun to diverge – Davis more optimistic about an expansion with “real” instruments, Atkins more radically essential – and the separation came in 1985, with Davis who kept the name Cybotron and released other works in the following years, while Atkins founded his own label, Metroplex, and inaugurated the season of Detroit techno with the alias Model 500.