Before the huge international electronic music festivals filled with lasers and thumping drum beats, there was techno — gestated in bedrooms around Detroit by young Black artists experimenting with machines and ideas that looked to the future.
Juan Atkins was one of them, improvising as a teenager on a synthesizer that his grandmother bought him.
Starting in the 1970s, he would go on to build a legacy in electronic dance music that added another storied chapter to the rich musical history of his hometown, Detroit.
Mr. Atkins, a DJ, record producer and musical godfather to techno, died Oct. 31 in Mexico City, where he had been scheduled to perform. He was 64. His management agency, Greensmith Artists, did not provide a cause of death.
Influenced by George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince and Chicago house music, Mr. Atkins began creating danceable electronic music with friends in high school, went on to record his own demo tapes and formed the groundbreaking duo Cybotron, the name a fusing of the words cyborg and cyclotron.
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Although many people think of electronic music as originating in Europe, Mr. Atkins is credited with pioneering the sound that would become known as Detroit techno, music created by DJs with synthesizers, electronic instruments and digital workstations.
“Nobody knew that this was some Black kids from Detroit making this record, man,” he said in a 2011 interview with NPR, referring to Cybotron’s “Alleys of Your Mind,” released in 1981. “They thought it was, like, from Europe.”
He even gave this new style of music a name.
“When people asked him what he’d call this type of music, he said, ‘Techno. Short for technology music,’” his daughter, Milan Ariel Atkins, wrote in a remembrance to her father. “… Anyone listening to it just couldn’t help but dance. Those frequencies resonated deeply with a mass of people who needed that outlet, but didn’t know how or where to get it.”
Mr. Atkins was born in Detroit on Sept. 12, 1962. His father was a concert promoter who was incarcerated for much of his son’s life, Mr. Atkins said in interviews.
He told the music newsletter Tone Glow that his mother was young when he was born, and his grandmother did most of the child-rearing.
His father bought him his first electric guitar for his 10th birthday, and his grandmother had an old organ in their house in Belleville, Michigan, outside Detroit.
“I came home from school one day and I saw her playing the boogie-woogie and I was like, ‘Dang, Grandma, I didn’t know you had it like that,’” Mr. Atkins told Tone Glow.
He said he had always listened to music and played bass and lead guitar in funk bands in Detroit when he was 12 or 13. He also experimented with sounds on the organ and would accompany his grandmother to the music store, where he would go into the back room and play the early-generation synthesizers.
“Eventually, I was able to talk her into buying me one,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. “And the rest was kinda history.”
In high school, he began collaborating with two classmates, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. They would play their music at parties in the Detroit area.
“Juan was the originator of Techno, a true visionary who opened the door for so many of us, myself included,” Saunderson wrote on social media after Mr. Atkins’s death. “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.”
Mr. Atkins began making demo tapes and connected with community college classmate and Vietnam War veteran Richard Davis to record as Cybotron in 1981. They released “Alleys of Your Mind,” a seminal work in electronica that year, when Mr. Atkins was 19. “Cosmic Cars” came two years later.
After the duo went their separate ways, Mr. Atkins deejayed at parties and started his label, Metroplex Records, in 1985, producing and recording under the name Model 500.
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“This was especially innovative at a time when most musicians were seeking major record deals,” his daughter wrote. “Instead, he decided to do this himself, so that he had creative control and could deliver techno directly to those who resonated with it.
She declined an interview request through her father’s management company. No information on other survivors was immediately available.
In the 2017 documentary “Never Stop: A Music That Resists,” Mr. Atkins said it was only natural that the distinctive sounds of techno-funk would come from Detroit, home of Motown and the once-glorious auto industry.
“The height of the Industrial Revolution and the height of Industrial Age, I mean, Detroit was a big place, man, because the car industry was booming, and jobs and unions and auto unions and things formed,” he said.
“And then when the industry came to a close, of course, the city kind of went down. And I think a lot of good music and a lot of great art and creativity comes from depressed and stressful situations.”
Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield issued a statement after Mr. Atkins’s death that described him as part of the city’s history.
“Alongside his friends Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, Juan took a sound born in Detroit basements and bedrooms and carried it to clubs and festivals on every continent,” the statement said.
“Today, millions of people dance to music that traces back to him and to our city. That is a Detroit story: genius, grit, and invention, from neighborhoods the world too often overlooked.”
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