Classic Tracks: Model 500 ‘No UFOs’

Widely credited with not just inventing techno but also coining the name, Juan Atkins tells the story of his genre-defining record, ‘No UFOs’.

Listening now to ‘No UFOs’, Juan Atkins’ pioneering techno track released under the name Model 500, it’s hard to believe it was actually made in 1985. With its stripped‑back, driving machine beats, squelchy synth bass line, stuttering vocal effects and emphasis on strict repetition, it was a glimpse into the future and is now considered to be the first techno record.

“It still sounds fresh today,” Atkins says, in a rare interview with SOS. “I think it’s timeless and the reason why is because a lot of my productions were made at the beginning of an era. These records kind of set the tone. But, y’know, that era is still in progress.”

While the Detroit producer made his name creating purely electronic music, his musical roots stretch back to his childhood and more traditional instruments. He first picked up a guitar at the age of 10, before he branched out into playing drums and bass.

“I have a brother that’s 10 months apart from me,” he says. “I used to talk my parents into buying him musical instruments for Christmas, so I could play them. I talked them into buying a drum set and I switched from guitar to bass guitar when I was 13 or 14 years old. I actually asked my grandma to buy this Rickenbacker copy bass.

“I learned by ear,” he adds. “I wasn’t really a trained musician. I would play along with a lot of records. Eddie Kendricks’ ‘Keep On Truckin’’ on Tamla... that was a record that I learned to play to, because it was a real drum‑heavy record.”

The now 62‑year‑old Atkins believes that his initial, non‑electronic grounding helped him greatly when he first turned to synths and drum machines.

“Yeah, I mean, I think any type of experience with any kind of musical instrument would definitely translate or transfer into future music endeavours. So I think, had I not had those early instruments, who knows if I would even be making music now?”

It was in 1979 that Atkins’ interest in electronic music was first sparked. His grandmother owned and played a Hammond B3 organ, and he would often accompany her to the Grinnell’s music store in Detroit when she went there to buy sheet music. One day, the teenager happened to wander into a back room where they kept the synths.

“Of course, these were like baby synths in a way,” he points out. “Monophonic, like the Minimoog and the Korg MS‑10.” To his surprise, Atkins’ grandmother bought one of the latter synths for him. When he took it home, a whole universe of sound opened up.

“What I was doing at the store was I was creating all of these different, weird sounds. Like what a UFO landing would sound like, and things like this, and I just put all that stuff in my recordings.”

Cybotron

Home recording for the teenager was at this point a fairly primitive operation. Using two Kenwood cassette decks and a Yamaha four‑channel mixer, he began making tracks involving tape‑to‑tape overdubs, first creating white or pink noise beats on the Korg MS‑10.

“You can make a pretty good electronic kick sound using gated pink noise,” he says. “White noise you can use for like hi‑hats and cymbals and snare. Pink noise you can use for kick drum and toms... y’know, the lower region sounds.”

As time went on, Atkins began to experiment with EQ to make his recordings sound clearer and punchier. “I became an expert at doing this,” he recalls, “because I realised that during each pass you get a generation. So, my very first recordings, by the time I got to the end, man, the drums were so buried in static and muddy sounding. I had to learn how to tweak all of the bass out. So by the time it got to that last generation, it would even out. With each pass, you’d just add a little bit more bass, and a little bit more bass, until the last pass, it was like, you can leave it sort of flat and natural.”

During his days at Belleville High School, Atkins became friends with another two future Detroit techno innovators, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. “Belleville was in the suburbs, and it was only maybe 10 percent black people in the whole school,” he says. “So you automatically bonded. Especially at lunchtime, because all the black kids sat at one table. Derrick and Kevin were in my brother’s class, and they would come by the house to visit my brother. So, somehow me and Derrick and Kevin became friends.”

Although the three didn’t make music together at this time, they would study records by Prince, Yellow Magic Orchestra and, crucially, Kraftwerk. They were further inspired by DJ Charles ‘The Electrifying Mojo’ Johnson’s shows on various Detroit radio stations, titled Midnight Funk Association but involving genre‑blurring playlists featuring anyone from Parliament to Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder to Devo.

But it wasn’t until Juan Atkins enrolled at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and played his home‑recorded tapes to a fellow student, Rik Davis, that he chanced upon his first key collaborator.

“I met Rik as a fellow synthesist,” he remembers. “He was doing the same thing that I was doing, like a one‑man band, so to speak. And then when he heard the demo, he invited me to come over and jam with him.”

The first time he visited Davis at his home studio, Atkins was amazed by how much music tech his classmate owned. “I went over, with my little Korg MS‑10 under my arm,” he remembers. “I walked into his studio, which was a bedroom in a two‑bedroom apartment. He had the lights basically off, shades down. So all I could see was the LEDs coming off the keyboards and all of the sequencers and drum machines. I thought I was going into a new dimension or something, man. I thought I was in the cockpit of an alien spacecraft.

“He was a lot more advanced,” he adds. “This guy had a Boss DR‑55 [Dr Rhythm]. You could create your own...