Juan Atkins, essential reference of techno, dies

This past weekend he passed away John Atkinsone of the great references of techno and an essential name to understand the evolution of the genre. He was sixty-four years old.

Juan Atkins, a fundamental figure in the history of electronic music and one of the pioneers of Detroit techno, died this weekend due to a heart attack suffered in his Mexico City hotel room, a few hours before his scheduled performance at the YuYu Club. The musician died on the way to the hospital.

Atkins’ name is one of the essentials in the history of techno along with his friends and colleagues Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. All of them combined house music with previous black music – mostly funk and p-funk – bringing it closer to the music that artists like Kraftwerk in Germany or the Yellow Magic Orchestra in Japan were making.

In addition to a solo career that began when he was barely a teenager, he quickly formed a duo Cybotron –along with Richard Davis–, which marked his initial takeoff before creating Model 500become an essential artist for the music scene of the future and found the Metroplex label.

Kevin Saunderson himself has said goodbye to Atkins saying that he was “the creator of techno, a real visionary who opened the doors to the rest of us (…). We shared a journey that changed music forever and I will always be grateful to him for his friendship, his way of guiding me and everything he contributed to the electronic scene.”