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 drum pattern. It was basically what I was creating with the pink and white noise, but it was encapsulated in actual hardware now. Then he had the [Roland] RS‑09, which was a synth that was basically all string programs. And he was using a lot of ARP stuff... the Odyssey, the Axxe.
“I was a bit intimidated,” he admits. “But y’know, I kind of held my ground. And so we started playing.”
The first track the pair created together was the electronic, funky ‘Cosmic Raindance’ that in 1981 became the B‑side of their first release as Cybotron, on their Deep Space Records label. The A‑side, meanwhile, was ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’, a starker, Kraftwerk‑styled synth track. The single went on to sell more than 10,000 copies in the Detroit area alone and many people believed it was a European record. Part of the track’s appeal was that it sounded machine‑tight in its beats yet had a human looseness to its synth parts. “‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ I played by hand,” Atkins remembers. “That bom‑bom‑bom bassline.”
Cybotron’s ‘Clear’, released in 1983, pushed the duo further in the direction of minimalist electro, while clearly being inspired by Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’. It featured syncopated rhythms, pitch‑shifted and flanged vocals and proved to be another ground‑breaking track.
“The way we did Cybotron,” Atkins says, “it wasn’t like we were living, sleeping, eating together or whatever, y’know. I’d go home for a while and come back. Sometimes we had time to make our own [tracks], like, do our own thing. ‘Clear’, for instance, was a song that when I came into the studio one day, I said, ‘Hey, Rik, take a listen to what I’ve been working on.’ And vice versa, he’d do the same thing too.”
By this point, Atkins had learned to programme bass lines using the step sequencer in the Sequential Circuits Pro‑One triggered from a drum machine. It was a fairly random exercise, however.
Some of the key gear on ‘No UFOs’, such as the Roland MSQ‑700 sequencer and Sequential Six‑Trak and DrumTraks.
“You could trigger the notes by the accent from the drum machine into an audio input trigger,” Atkins says. “So I would put the rhythm in and then I would play the notes. That bass line on ‘Clear’ was done after testing about three different types of note sequences.
It’s only four notes actually sequenced. But when you flipped the switch on, they kind of randomly came out. So there was different note patterns that I put in, and then when I hit it and the ‘Clear’ bass line came up, I said, ‘OK, yeah, that’s it.’”
A lot of the time Atkins and Davis would rehearse their tracks together live at the latter’s home, recording rough versions on cassette, before booking studio time to tape them using more pro equipment. “It was laid down in stereo,” Atkins says, “with a professional two‑track, on a Studer or something.”
In addition to his studio activities, Atkins was DJ’ing alongside Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson as Deep Space Soundworks. During this period, they began using a Roland TR‑808 programmed with their own beats to transition between records.
“When drum machines were introduced,” he remembers, “you had people that would release straight‑up rhythm track records, with a drum machine playing their own custom patterns. So it made sense as a DJ to take this drum machine out and play homemade patterns and rhythms to segue between certain records.
“The thing is there’s an art to mixing,” he stresses. “It’s not about just taking two records and slamming them into each other. You gotta find a record that fits the previous record, beat‑wise. So sometimes a raw rhythm pattern would be a great way to segue between different segments of your set.”
Metroplex Soundworks
Juan Atkins and Rik Davis parted ways as Cybotron after one album, 1983’s Enter, when the latter became more interested in pursuing a rockier musical direction. Before long, working alone, Atkins discovered the MSQ‑700 MIDI sequencer, launched by Roland in 1984.
At this point, he built his own studio, Metroplex Soundworks, in the basement of his grandmother’s house, equipped with a Tascam eight‑track tape machine and 16‑channel board, along with other synths including a Sequential Six‑Trak. One of the first results was ‘No UFOs’, an Atkins solo track that was to be his first release as Model 500.
Juan Atkins’ Metroplex Soundworks studio was based around a Tascam eight‑track tape recorder and mixing desk.
For the track’s beats, using MIDI, Atkins chained together a Roland TR‑909 and Sequential Circuits DrumTraks. “When I’d MIDI out of the DrumTraks and MIDI into the 909, it was a perfect sync,” he says. “The only thing about MIDI in the early days was that... like if I started the DrumTraks, the 909 didn’t start automatically. You’d have to make it start. And sometimes whether [the patterns] played in sync or not depended on where you started.”
Atkins meanwhile used the MSQ‑700 to trigger the Six‑Trak for the ‘No UFOs’ bass line and added stab and drone effects played on his Pro‑One, fed through his Lexicon PCM‑60 digital reverb unit. He then added his part‑spoken, part‑sung vocal, recorded using a Sennheiser MD 421, before capturing parts of it for distinctive ‘freeze’ effects using a Lexicon delay. In the final stage, he mixed the track down to a Tascam 22‑2 two‑track, domestic, seven‑inch‑reel tape recorder.
“It wasn’t like a professional machine,” says Atkins. “It was that little one that you could buy from Tascam, and I mixed it down to that. ‘No UFOs’ was a total home recording.”
Released in April 1985 on his Metroplex label, it proved to be a hugely inspirational record. Atkins says this didn’t take him entirely by surprise. “Well, y’know, you got to remember that this was the first record I released on Metroplex, but I had been doing Cybotron since 1980. So, I sort of had a five‑year head start in terms of knowing what the public liked, or what our scene liked... people, y’know, from the ghetto in Detroit, pretty much, in terms of dance music.
“So,” he adds, “it was sort of a no brainer. The experimental phase was somewhat over with by that time.”
Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit
How ‘No UFOs’ exploded on the dance scene, particularly in Chicago, was almost by pure luck. Derrick May’s parents had moved out west to the Illinois city and on his visits there, May began checking out the clubs and touting copies of the Model 500 record. Before long, DJs were spinning the track and it quickly earned the distinction of being the only American dance record that influential figures in Chicago, such as Frankie Knuckles at the Power Plant, were playing. The 909 soon became the sound of Chicago house, after May gave Knuckles one of his beatboxes.
“That drum machine was the very drum machine that was used on ‘Time To Jack’ by Chip E and the first JM Silk record [1985’s ‘Music Is The Key’]. So they passed along that 909. Just like we used to pass around stuff in Detroit.”
By 1987, May and Saunderson were fast building their own reputations as DJs and musicians: the former producing the landmark dance track ‘Strings Of Life’ as Rhythim Is Rhythim; the latter hooking up with singer Paris Grey in Inner City, whose ‘Big Fun’ would go on to be an enormous hit the following year. Along with Atkins, the trio earned the nickname the Belleville Three, after their old high school.
I said, ‘Well, no, this ain’t the house sound of Detroit.’ This is techno music.
Then, in 1988, May met Neil Rushton, of the British Virgin Records dance subsidiary label, 10 Records. “By Derrick’s association with Chicago and Neil Rushton’s fascination with Chicago,” Atkins explains, “they decided to try to curate this compilation.” The working title for the various artists album was however named after their home city: The House Sound Of Detroit. Until Atkins objected.
“I said, ‘Well, no, this ain’t the house sound of Detroit’,” he laughs. “This is techno music.” Atkins had first used the term back in Cybotron with their 1984 track, ‘Techno City’. It had been inspired, like their band name, by futurist author Alvin Toffler’s books, Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980).
“Future Shock was the reference book that we used in the course in high school called Future Studies,” says Atkins. “And this course actually set me up for a lot of the lingo and things that I used, or me and Rik used. Even the term ‘Metroplex’ comes from the word ‘Metrocomplex’, which is a sort of a mesh of the words metropolitan and complex.”
Toffler also wrote about ‘techno rebels’, and in 1988, Atkins felt it was the perfect word to describe this new, modernist sound. He delivered a new track, called ‘Techno Music’, to 10 Records, for inclusion on the new compilation. “After I submitted that track,” he says now, “they decided to change the name of the album.”
May, Saunderson and Rushton agreed to the record being renamed Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit, and a musical genre — for which Juan Atkins was largely responsible — was born. A theory soon emerged that Detroit being an industrial city had inspired the sound, with its machine‑like rhythms.
Atkins only partly buys into this. “Yeah, I think for any musician playing any style of music, your surroundings subconsciously affect your music. But it’s more subconscious than actually conscious. I mean, I wasn’t looking at the skyline, saying, ‘OK, this music fits’, y’know. But I believe, definitely, it’s just sort of a product of your surroundings on a subconscious level.”
Collaborations
When techno began to boom, particularly in the UK, a plan was hatched by British record producer and then‑owner of ZTT Records, Trevor Horn, for the Belleville Three to unite as a group, named Intellex. Horn apparently envisaged the trio as a “Black Pet Shop Boys”. But the project quickly floundered when Derrick May told Horn he wouldn’t appear on Top Of The Pops to promote the band’s records.
“Yeah, uh,” Atkins laughs, “Derrick is a great talker. God bless him. The same way he talked us into the deal, he talked us out of the deal. I mean, I can understand in a way, but you don’t go in and say to the managing director, ‘We’re not going to do Top Of The Pops.’ And then they said, ‘Well, we can’t do the project. How are we going to push the record?’
“The unfortunate thing is that he didn’t discuss this with anybody before he went in and told the guy we wasn’t gonna do it. So basically, the whole deal fell apart based on that statement.”
Down the years, Atkins continued to make his own singles as Model 500, before his first album under that name, Deep Space, arrived in 1995. Along the way, he collaborated with Doug Craig as Channel One and in 2013 hooked up with Moritz von Oswald as Borderland. Then, last year, he revived the Cybotron name for the Maintain The Golden Ratio EP, although without Rik Davis.
“We couldn’t work it out to actually get back together to do this thing,” he says. “And so, he gave me his blessing to go forth with the name. Because Cybotron is iconic, y’know, and I mean, of course, it’s synonymous with the birth of techno, in a way. There was so much public interest in releasing new Cybotron music.”
These days, Atkins works in the box, Ableton being his DAW of choice. He names Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere as his favourite soft synth. “I use a lot of plug‑ins,” he says, “because I’ve always been an advocate of technology, of progress. So, y’know, I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Hey, I’m an advocate of change and progress’, but still be saying, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna use a Pro‑One for the rest of my career.’
“Now definitely, it’s a lot easier. Because, man, MIDI cables that don’t work... and you’re like an hour or two into your project. That’s definitely a change that I welcome, where everything in the box is making the MIDI connections. The only downside I would say is that now it’s so easy that a lot of people that probably shouldn’t be making music are making music. But that’s probably the only real downside. It’s too easy [laughs].”
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why, when Juan Atkins performs live shows as Model 500 these days, he’s returned to hardware synths. “We revamped the show to actually play all of the sounds directly from the machines,” he says. “Instead of recording the sounds into Ableton or something. Because basically what we were doing before was recording a lot of the bare tracks. You’d hear certain tracks like [1995’s] ‘Starlight’ or whatever, where we would play different sounds over the top of what was the original track. But now everything is done from top to bottom with live machines.”
The Future
In 2018, both Moodymann and Luciano created new remixes of ‘No UFOs’, released on Metroplex. The former, similarly Detroit‑based producer took the track on a journey involving the sound of waves and an original era TR‑606 Drumatix. The latter Swiss/Chilean DJ reimagined it as minimalist house. “Moodymann’s mix was quite interesting,” says Atkins. “Luciano’s mix was Luciano. I mean, it fit in his crowd or his type of set. But, y’know, my all‑time favourite was the original mix.”
As to whether Juan Atkins can hear the influence of ‘No UFOs’ in modern dance music, he remains characteristically modest.
“Music is constantly evolving,” he states. “However, yeah, a lot of stuff I hear now, I can hear a direct correlation to what I was doing in the early days to where it is now. So, I guess you could say that was the pioneer, so to speak.”
Finally, then, having had a vision of music’s future back in the 1980s, can Juan Atkins predict where dance music might be headed?
“Don’t ask me what’s coming next,” he laughs, “because I don’t know what’s coming next.”