Model 500 - ’Deep Space’
No. 11 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Deep — that’s where Juan Atkins took seekers before the dawn of the 21st century, straight to the outer reaches of space, both in the interstellar and cyber senses of the word. Space. Time. Transmat. Transforming matter on this planet by electrifying mojo in the neuro, moving mind, body and soul through the social cosmos, feeding it back with electrons transmitted at the speed of ah-ha and uh-oh receiving echoes across the universe. Deep Space was monk music as much as it was neo funk music. Alone and shimmering, Atkins hopped into his Model 500, and warped into the gloaming...
M12. M29. M41. M50. M69…The curious numbering of the Deep Space tracks, they’re the Michigan highways that Atkins cruised, like Kraftwerk zipping along the Autobahn, envisioning his own networked honeycomb, the open road and the interlinked. Detroit techno was the precognitive echo of the future, what he would later evoke in his song ‘Postcards from the Future’ on his excellent Skynet album in 1998. It had an emotional tenor colored by the post-industrial cratering of Detroit, a machine city that became a ghost city, where a group of Black kids helped imagine an info-world with a soul, with a conscience. For all the mythic optimism encoded in techno music, Atkins imbued it with a deep sense of dislocation, and a relentless yearning for a better tomorrow…
Given Detroit’s spiritual location, the refuge of escaped slaves and Northern freed slaves who made the Great Migration, it was also blues in the matrix. Instead of the pines and pecan trees in the swamps, gulches and fields of the Mississippi Delta, lonely columns among the howls of the bluesman’s banjo and the whistling train, techno prowled and illuminated the abandoned streets and decrepit towers of a hollowed-out civilization, sparking new constellations inside the darkened city.
A city for one tribe or all tribes, that was the question. In each soul was a star, connecting together like the constellations Orion or Virgo or Draco, encompassing galaxies and nebulae and our own Milky Way with its 100 billion worlds. In 1994, a year before Deep Space, Atkins started to sketch out an intergalactic vision — the Sonic Sunset E.P., a pre-launch sequence of planetary ambitions. The title track, ‘Sonic Sunset’ and its ‘Calm,’ ‘Cave’ and ‘Third Wave’ versions, reflected an intellect of perfect patience and deep emotional intelligence, while the trance-techno of ‘Neptune’ sailed and sailed on its cosmic winds into deep oceanic dreaming.
It was the 18-minute epic of ‘I Wanna Be There’ however that marked the full breathtaking scale of Atkins’ vision and was preface to Deep Space. Ranging and skittering, hushing and heaving, thumping and theorizing, haunting and heartbreaking the rave generation with a vision of a future that was ecstatic, yes, but also humane and bittersweet. If the pilot Charles Lindbergh had normalized the techno-fascist waves of the 21st century, the yellow journalism and eugenics nationalism of the warring nations in the early 20th century, appeasing the attitudes that prefaced Nazism and post-World War II Klu Klux Klan-ism, then the good and the faithful without a shadow of a doubt, would need a better, brighter spaceship — and a talented pilot who could fly through waves of disillusionment into deep space.
“Space, to me, represents unlimited boundaries,” Atkins told The Lizard zine at the time of Deep Space’s release. “If you could open a person’s mind, even for an instant of a moment, and make them aware of all the ramifications that space presents — it’s true of anybody who lives on the planet, when they think about the stars and space and the heavens, it kind of makes the mind wander a bit.” Daydreaming or tripping over the home they deeply longed for: “It’s kind of like a therapy, an escape route, which most people wouldn’t normally think about but which they definitely need.”
Atkins himself had no cakewalk. His father and mother were 17 and 15 respectively when he was born. When he was young, his father went to jail for manslaughter. He and his younger brother Aaron went to live with their grandmother in Belleville. His mother was too young to raise them on her own. When his father got out, he again broke the law, this time as a drug dealer, a “kingpin” as Atkins described him years later when he opened up more about his troubled childhood. And yet, all along the way, music was central to his being. He bobbed to Motown as a baby. He followed James Brown’s moves and mien. Music kept him on the narrow path, so that one realizes how much techno is a miracle and how Deep Space was also a personal pinnacle. Which is why the album is light and darkness, origin and destination...
Starter ‘Milky Way’ is a masterclass in space techno, its restrained groove going galactic, as its nebulae of stardust strafes the shuttle of our night flight. A team up with Kevin Saunderson, it’s the trip beyond Detroit’s derelict ruins and into its brave fantasias — here is the interstellar jazz that influenced drum ‘n’ bass star LTJ Bukem and Warp Records’ magicians, The Black Dog; its mind-tripping bass line waits until two and a half minutes to come in, spiraling and spell-binding to a solar system of sonic delights, its tap-tap drums caressing the hull — wind-talking to the stars. Its Milky Way Galaxy of sound embraces a humanity that has slowly broken its home.
‘Orbit’ bubbles and floats in the kosmische tradition of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze — its patterns looping and slipping into the endless geometries of eternity — its tendrils of melody like astronauts coasting in zero gravity. And then ‘The Flow’ booms from within, smooth dimensional waves scrawling funk in the firmament, the soul poem of Aisha Jamiel shooting through the mind like meteorites — “He’s the truth / So light / Oh, and he doesn’t fight!” — her voice a perfect marriage to Atkin’s moving miracle of electro rhythm ‘n’ blues. Its music video is a sort of exodus from infernal conjugation to free-flowing imagination, arriving on distant shores where a paradisal hooded priest forgives the wayward. It’s one of techno’s greatest songs.
‘Warning’ takes us into the space club, its quirky sounds grooving it out to an alien calypso, its marching flanged beat slowly building up into something sinister, then assuaged once again by chattering barflies and vogueing dancers. It’s the kind of abstract Detroit techno that IDM stalwarts As One, Stasis, and B12, would avidly scribble notes on, spinning off a hundred more galaxies. Emotionally, fear of the unknown and the threat of death are universal to living, sharper and bigger in interstellar space; the trick of time, reminding the mind, that past and future conceptually cannot exist without the present, absence making experience exhilarating up close, and from afar, everything emitting from deep time — constellations that might guide the consciousness of future generations…
Constellations that appeared inside machines — on the glowing synthesizer buttons and circuits of electronic instruments — and in the imaginations of the post-1950s electrified generations. The very first synth Atkins bought, from the backroom of a shop where his grandmother was getting her Hammond B-3 organ repaired, was the Korg MS-10. But it had no lights — just stark, buzzy, electronic sounds. The real ignition would happen when Atkins met Vietnam vet Richard Davis at Washentaw Community College, who took the young techno rebel under his far-out wings.
Going by the alias “3070,” Davis, legend has it, was a little crazy — and greatly traumatized by the horrors of the Vietnam War. A “fellow synthesizer sympathizer,” as the journalist Andy Thomas described Atkins, was the anchor of optimism that Davis needed, to key into a shared heritage of Afrofuturism, running back to Parliament-Funkadelic, the electro-experimental jazz of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Nobu,’ and of the interstellar jazz of Sun Ra. But before they met, Davis was already cooking up his electronic “apocalyptic rock,” inspired by Pink Floyd, Morton Subotnick, John Carpenter, the Steve Miller Band, Isao Tomita, Goblin, and Tangerine Dream.
Taken with the sublime Stargate Sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey — “the sound, the fury, the visualizations,” he told journalist Mike Rubin in 2016 for Red Bull Music Academy — Davis sought to transport himself and anyone else willing into the far-out hinter-worlds of moral clarity. A US Marine who enlisted at 17, a lance corporal who saw major action from 1968 to 1969 in Vietnam, as part of the “idiotic Tet counteroffensive,” the same year Stanley Kubrick’s Odyssey was released, he reprogrammed the dark with his first record, the extraordinary ‘Methane Sea.’
“I am my own fate. I am my own destiny,” a voice says in a feminine register, to gusts of electric ferment and a roiling spirit. “I am my own god. Across the black maelstrom of deep space, I have planted my seed and I have evolved my progeny as it pleased me to. A thousand worlds and a thousand tribes, my genetically…evolved children have grown to become masters of all this Earth. Here on this shore, I stand and contemplate the worth of man on this most peaceful and beautiful planet…”*
Marked by bubbling, billowing synth-waves made by an ARP Axxe synthesizer, ‘Methane Sea’ was weird, arresting, and magical. Where he and Atkins met was within that electronic sea of infinite possibilities — its “phasers!” and “lasers!” — its low-end bass patterns connecting the rock deep down in Davis’ soul with the funk high up in Atkins’ mind. The Book of Isaiah had stayed with Davis, working with its prophetic force; its verses of “I am God, and there is no other,” “heaven is my throne,” “new heaven and new earth,” and “the wolf will live with the lamb...” come to mind.
Davis was a big influence on Atkins, whose 1992 The Passage E.P. bears some hallmarks of ‘Methane Sea.’ Released on Apollo Records, R&S Records’ ambient sub-label, ‘The Passage’ cascades, sparkles, and barrels over tribal drum breaks; ‘Vessels In Distress’ echoes the heavy moods that the pair sought together in their search for a new American musical vernacular; ‘Mind Changes’ prefigures Atkins’ Infiniti classic, ‘Game One,’ but with the vocal otherworldly dreaminess of a Davis obsession — no surprise then that the Jazz Is The Teacher single, with its wild syncopated swing, a Duke Ellington specter, a Thelonius Monk fever, excels with ‘The Cosmic Courier.’
“Some sort of enlightenment,” is how Davis later described his goal. When a young Atkins entered Davis’ studio outside Detroit at Eastern Michigan University, what he saw was a sort of temple. One that could move the world into the future, by charting the infinite space between human souls. “I went into his room,” he recalled to Thomas for Wax Poetics in 2011, “and it was like going into a spaceship. All you could see was the LED lights flashing. It was like I’d stepped into a whole new dimension.”**
A new dimensional temple made of radio, not just the lights in room 3070: it was 1978, a decade after Davis’ misadventure in the jungles of Vietnam; already, another teacher had been setting the stage — a visionary radio DJ from Little Rock, Arkansas, who also served during Vietnam as a radio DJ at army station DZYA in the Philippines — Charles Johnson, AKA the Electrifying Mojo. In the era of freeform radio formats, he pioneered what he called the “Theater of the Mind,” using music, sound effects, and story, to expand minds and lift up Detroit, seeding the next generation — music that would change the world by opening up space for a global electronic imagination…
P-Funk. George Clinton. Sly and the Family Stone. James Brown. Michael Jackson. Prince. David Bowie. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Genesis. Rush. Vangelis. Beethoven. Aretha Franklin. Bob Marley. Gary Numan. Depeche Mode. Talking Heads. Ultravox. The B-52s. Giorgio Moroder. Kraftwerk. Again. A thousand worlds. Constellations. As Thomas recounts, Atkins heard the Mothership land while listening to Funkadelic with his grandmother, and seeing Bernie Worrell play his Minimoog and Korg MS-10, on classics like ‘Flash Light.’ But when Atkins heard Mojo’s Midnight Funk Association radio show on WGPR, his whole post-industrial galaxy exploded, for Mojo played Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’ and ‘We Are The Robots,’ shocking through.
“Electrifying Mojo on radio — that was the first time that I heard ‘The Robots’ by Kraftwerk,” Atkins recalled decades later. “It froze me in my tracks, man. It was like the best, baddest shit I’d ever heard. You know what I’m saying? And I was making music by this time. I didn’t have anything released yet. This was around 1979, 1980…these early songs that were all drum drops and me playing synth over it. I was amazed at how the music sounded like what I was doing but more precise. And the difference was that they were on the radio, and I wasn’t out on the radio at that time. A lot of people thought that I listened to Kraftwerk…but it was basically parallel.”
“It would not just be knee-deep, it would be Totally Deep,” Mojo would write of his musical philosophy decades later. “You not only have to flow through music, it has to flow through you.” He also played ‘Methane Sea’ in those early WGPR years, a fitting manifesto for the curious and courageous. For one thing, Mojo would play albums in full, like Funkadelic’s masterpiece, Maggot Brain, the city experiencing big visions. Mojo would also push boundaries around identity, playing plenty of female artists, from Teena Marie and Janet Jackson to Kate Bush and Alison Moyet to Donna Summer, Grace Jones, and Debbie Harry. But perhaps more importantly, he championed big ideas, reading from Alvin Toffler’s book, The Third Wave…
“The Techno Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave,” wrote Toffler, in his 1980 book, describing and predicting the rise of hackers and the techno musicians who would help shape our spiritual space. “They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilization as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our exploration of oceanic depths.”
Reading from Toffler on his show, Mojo would first introduce many to the futurist’s prescient views about the power of social change, that he and future generations would both harness and in the end grapple with: the First Wave was agricultural, foundation of human civilization; the Second Wave was essentially the Industrial Revolution; and the Third Wave is what came next: the electronic, digital phase, computers expanding and mixing knowledge and human endeavor in dizzying, accelerating and amplifying ways — hyper — the so-called Information Age.***
While the Bronx vibrations of hip hop would make words the centrifugal conscious force of its artistic tumult through “rap” lyrics, rippling out across America and the world, techno by contrast would take ideas like Toffler’s Techno Rebels and Third Wave and send them into the depths, underneath the waves, turning poetry into motion — hidden, unspoken, submerged — a new kind of collective intuition. For Detroit was a very different kind of city than New York. As the writer Chris Sharp observed in 1995 for The Lizard, Detroit was a “Midwestern island of originality,” “enraptured by the stark.” It had never lost its sense of starry Midwest isolation.
An old French frontier town settled by Europeans in the early 1700s, on the strait (détroit) connecting Lake Huron and Lake Erie on the Detroit River in lands that once belonged to clusters of Huron, Odawa, Potawatomi and Iroquois Native American tribes, the city that would become synonymous with automakers was a sort of contradiction in terms: called “Motown” because it was the town where the industrialist Henry Ford birthed the motorized automobile. His Model T was particularly important, helping transform America into a car-driving people.
Mojo came to Detroit with an earnest point of view, refocused on expanding the horizons of the city’s imagination. Coming from Little Rock, a flashpoint of the civil rights era, and where the desegregation of the city’s schools started in 1957 with the Little Rock Nine students and completed in 1972, the drama of social change was on his mind and would remain so, as his book The Mental Machine would explore years later, including bringing his own poetry to bear on times of hatred, chaos, and war.
“There are a few less brothers / On the streets every day / Like a flash of lightning / So quickly they passed this way,” he wrote. “The sound of automatic gunfire / Was heard all over town / Another Mother in Black will leave the cemetery / Looking back at another child shot down / Another doo-wop group singing / ‘It’s so hard to say goodbye’ / Off to find the guys who shot him / To make another mother cry.”
In a way, Mojo’s laments about shootings and the plight of the poor echoed the Midnight Funk Association’s larger mission to raise consciousness and spread peace through art, music, and a “Theater of the Mind.” Whether Toffler or invoking P-Funk’s Mothership, he was constantly connecting the dots between cultures, musics, and tribes. And like George Clinton’s own embrace of the cosmic, journeying from his Parliament doo-wop days in Plainfield, New Jersey, to his harder nights in Detroit where he formed Funkadelic — Mojo — rode his own mothership into the stark.
From Funkadelic to cybernetic, Mojo arrived in Detroit in early 1977, following decades of depravity in the city, from the redlining of real estate that locked most African Americans in poorer districts like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, to the Klu Klux Klan’s urban membership in Detroit that made it a major force in Michigan’s racial divisions, to race riots in 1943 and 1967 that devastated parts of the city. 3070. Mojo. Magic Juan. They would all climb out of the ruins of Detroit’s crumbling society. But the late 1970s and early ‘80s in Detroit were far-out and electrifying times, because like Sharp perceived, and Mojo’s lightning flashed — the darker, the starker it was.
As Dan Sicko’s book Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk details, the emanations of such waves into Detroit’s suburbs was another crucial element in the emergence of Atkins’ Model 500. There, in neighborhoods like Southfield, Oak Park and Farmington Hills, and even outer boroughs like Belleville, where Atkins would spend his high school years, Mojo’s midnight funk would reach and enrich; in his earlier years, at WGPR, he would often open with Parliament-Funkadelic, playing Worrell highlights from Mothership Connection and One Nation Under A Groove.
“My first instrument was actually bass guitar,” Atkins later explained. “I was always musically inclined. I always had dreams about being in a concert, singing in the mirror and shit, playing with broomsticks — I was always kind of a spaced out kid…always the one who would be caught daydreaming all the time….When I first heard synthesizers dropped on records, it was great, it was like UFOs landing on records, so I got one.”
Funk, like techno, has always been hard to define. It grooves and it flows. James Brown described it as coming down tight on the one — the downbeat — giving the flow an explosive punch and sway, and taking the evolution from blues to jazz to soul into a more percussive energy, with heavy touches of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin to boot; that “apocalyptic rock” that Davis AKA 3070 long pursued. It was a crucial feeling and a major influence on Atkins, deep and foundational, like Toffler’s First Wave.
And as Sicko documented in his Techno Rebels, Atkins was not the only one daydreaming to Detroit’s electronic drift. Mojo cast a spell on other high schoolers, and young adults, across the area, especially in the city’s northwest suburbs and its east-side. Middle class Black kids and many urban kids were especially taken with the electro-pop and post-disco sounds flowing to America from Europe and beyond. Italo-disco, by the likes of Moroder’s Italian, French, Belgian and German followers, from Claudio Simonetti and Kano to Jacques Fred Petrus and Jean-Marc Cerrone to Liaisons Dangereuses and Telex, ushered in the era of “conceptual disco.”****
Mixed in with the British “new wave” and even Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra — Eurodisco combined with Kraftwerk’s stark scaffolding of the future, to create the ingredients that would combust into techno. Kraftwerk in many ways represented Toffler’s industrial Second Wave best; Kraftwerk in German means “power plant.” Kraftwerk, more than anyone, empowered Atkins’ young ambition. “I was really mesmerized by the precision of their music; everything was really robotic,” he explained to Thomas for Wax Poetics. “Man — a light went on in my head.”
The path was becoming even clearer, as he later criss-crossed the Detroit metropolitan area’s highways, coming up the I-94 from Belleville towards its downtown, DJing week after week as the leader of the Deep Space Collective which he started with his childhood friends Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. “All those so-called snob parties, playing for all those kids and organizations — for us it was dress rehearsal,” May told Sicko. “Even though we were young, we had serious dedication for what we were doing. That’s why Juan called it Deep Space. We always saw ourselves as being ‘out there.’” So started the legendary “Belleville Three.”
But before May would produce the Detroit techno classics ‘Nude Photo,’ ‘Strings of Life,’ and ‘It Is What It Is,’ and Saunderson would pen ‘Big Fun,’ ‘Good Life,’ and ‘Just Another Chance,’ Atkins, the Godfather of Techno, the first of the Belleville Three, would form the proto-techno band Cybotron with Davis. Cybernetic rock meets electronic funk, Cybotron took the ideas of The Third Wave and the music of a multiplicity of originations, and in 1981 made the classic ‘Alleys of Your Mind.’ Clairvoyant, its lyrics speak prophetically to 21st century confusions with its declaration: “Lies and truth side by side…Storms of hate warp your mind…”
Unmistakably Kraftwerkian, nevertheless, ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ was alien, and unmistakably Detroitian. It was stark and dark. But playful too. And funky in a way Kraftwerk was not; even with George Clinton’s Computer Games album, released a year after, with its heavy use of electronics on songs like ‘Atomic Dog,’ Cybotron was electronic in a way Funkadelic was not. Published on their own Deep Space Records, Cybotron’s first single might only be a footnote, if it weren’t for May’s persistence. A hardcore patron of a Galaga arcade game machine inside a 24-hour deli, right near WGPR’s studios, he waited and played until Mojo showed up one night for a bite.
Promo in hand, Mojo then put ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ on the air. Soon after, Cybotron would sign a deal with California’s Fantasy Records. Their album Enter, and its lead single ‘Clear,’ would result. Remixed by Jose “Animal” Diaz into an underground electro classic, ‘Clear’ was a spaced-out cousin to New York’s Afrika Bambaata and Newcleus anthems, ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Jam On It,’ tracks that Atkins felt pursued something different. Even with the Diaz remix of ‘Clear,’ which became the song’s standard version — a timeless fusion of New York City attitude and Detroit melancholy — Cybotron’s sound was more electronically pure. It was more dark, more stark.
Enter itself was a clashing of styles and even generations. Tracks like ‘Industrial Lies’ and ‘Cosmic Cars’ were odd bedfellows. The former is like Kraftwerk with The Wall era Pink Floyd rocking on top, John “Jon-5” Housely’s electric guitar snaking and sighing over its slow locomotive beat. The latter sends electric shocks of nasty synth waves under the wheels, a clear tip of the hat to Gary Numan’s car obsession with its feline punky vocals. “I wish I could escape,” Davis and Atkins snarl together. “From this crazy place.” A fugue of synth-lightning arcs along the windshield: “Suddenly, surprise! / Right before my eyes / All I see are stars / And other cosmic cars.”
Here is the template of Detroit “electro” as perfected by Drexciya and Dopplereffekt. Listening to songs like ‘Industrial Lies’ and ‘Cosmic Cars’ is like watching missiles and drones and Space Invaders war in cyberspace, and predicting the asymmetrical and multidimensional cyber wars of the future. Opener ‘Enter,’ with its Gothic vibes and Davis’ near operatic vibrato delivery, with heavy metal guitar, is closest perhaps to Davis’ “apocalyptic rock.” “We are just dreams and space! / Stranded in this funky place!” he wails. ‘The Line’ and ‘El Salvador’ continue in this vein, while ‘Cosmic Raindance’ trips to delayed synth riffs deep into a heavy motorik dreamland...
It’s a deeply strange album, and yet after years of techno’s international rise, Cybotron’s rock-electro vision deserves revisiting again and again, to hear techno’s original stirrings and its more earthbound origins — just as its album cover suggests, with its image of a man jumping through digital glass, transforming into a spectral, ghostly presence; seemingly inspired by 1982’s Tron, which like Blade Runner, released the same year, a year before Enter, inspired William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, echoing into Akira, Hackers, and The Matrix.
Which is to say, culturally speaking, Cybotron was on the cusp: Enter was a breakthrough that nevertheless failed to capture the mainstream, in part because it was so honest in a decade that programmed the “greed is good” mantra. What they achieved next though, was astounding, a followup single called ‘Techno City,’ far ahead of its time, which is why Atkins protested releasing it as their next single. Released in 1984, it starts with moody chords and then kicks into a vamping, sidewinding, colossal groove, with moments of quiet and moments of joy…
“Ooo-ooh, techno city!” Atkins soulfully crooned. “Hope you enjoy your stay / Welcome to techno city / You will never want to go away!” For none other than the renowned punk-scribe Jon Savage would still be singing its praises in The Guardian a quarter century later. “Inspired by the dereliction of ‘80s Detroit, Cybotron projected themselves into the future to create Motor City machine music,” he wrote. He described its rhythm as “choppy, insistent and clonky.” It was “revolutionary.”
Here, it all came together: Techno. “Emptiness meant space, and that gave the opportunity to drift through the ruins,” observed Savage: Detroit, the derelict city, the ‘Techno City,’ was “a perfect fusion of technology, ambient mood and human warmth from a time when people were not afraid to project into the future.” Also, as Savage learned, it was inspired by Fritz Lang’s sci-fi silent film Metropolis, not just Detroit; Lang’s film is a fable about futuristic inequality, elevators moving from deep under earth where the workers live and high up into the sky where the aristocrats reign.
“The music is just like Detroit, a complete mistake,” May would famously tell British journalist Stuart Cosgrove in 1988 for the breakout compilation, Techno! (The New Dance Sound of Detroit), enshrining techno in the minds of Europeans as a cross-cultural, intercontinental conversation. “It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
The music would conquer the world, but Atkins and Davis would split as their partnership peaked with ‘Techno City.’ In many ways, that fragmenting reflected Detroit’s heart which had been torn apart. Thomas’ Wax Poetics article deftly cherrypicks that quintessential drift from a French documentary on techno: interviewing May, Universal Techno’s filmmakers follow him into the grand, abandoned, baroque Michigan Theatre — old husk of a vibrant civilization.
“Inside this building was a theater, and they tore out the theater and they made a car park,” May says, as he points to decaying plaster and the theater’s archways. “So you are parking your car in a theater. And it’s fucking scary… I mean, look at these arches. They’ve been broken off, totally destroyed. Being a techno-electronic futurist, high-tech musician, I totally believe in the future, but I also believe in a historic and well-kept past. I believe there are some things that are important.”
The rot inside the machine was immense. It spoke of a spiritual blackhole and industrial burnout. But in Detroit, such ruins also begged a question: who or what would not just fill such emptiness, but travel to the other side of it? Atkins had the answer before anyone else. He was ready to finally create something that surpassed his city’s troubled history and could shine its enduring light on a more open path. He chose a name that called back to the Motor City’s mythology, of Henry Ford’s Model T and the numerology that Davis so loved to spin into mysteries, off into eternity.
Striking out on his own as Model 500 — “…something that came out of the old Cybotron dictionary,” he told Sharp, “it just seemed anonymous and right” — Atkins would continue to extend the purely electronic expanse that Kraftwerk pioneered with his own scurry into sonic infinity. His solo releases on his own Metroplex label — ‘No UFO’s,’ ‘Night Drive (Thru-Babylon), Time, Space, Transmat,’ ‘Off to Battle,’ ‘Techno Music,’ ‘The Chase,’ ‘Ocean to Ocean,’ ‘Sound of Stereo’ — all modern classics, blueprinted a way of hearing and seeing more than the future but the universe.
Kraftwerk had of course opened the floodgates — their functional and funk-tional electro-pop sent a shock wave through the Black urban centers of New York, Chicago and Detroit. But Atkins, further out in the suburbs of the Motor City, a “backcountry” of sorts after Motown and much of the Black elite headed West to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1970s, was reimagining a racially progressive America, not post-war Germany; so that when Atkins wrote Deep Space in 1995, lauded by Europeans from Belgium’s R&S Records to Berlin’s Tresor, his heart still ached for a welcome home.
It’s a deeply human album, because at its center is an incandescent soul. It is so brilliant, it is hard to look straight at it. As his early Model 500 singles demonstrated — most of them collected on R&S Records’ Model 500 Classics compilation — he was a determined visionary. ‘No UFO’s’ for example, released in 1985, contains all of the components of techno that would fuel the 1990s: banging, bending, warping, and shattering one’s jaded, programmed, and modernized sense of space and time. It somehow distilled Kraftwerk and Funkadelic down to their most human essence.
Like so many kids of their generation, Atkins, May and Saunderson would put on a record album, turn off the lights, and daydream. For all the talk about Detroit’s motor myths and the obsession with a barren cityscape, the techno rebels were human after all. And whereas a city like Paris — the City of Lights — might also evoke the stars and cosmic clouds of outer space, nonetheless its stone masonry and its cathedrals, Eiffel Tower and Arc De Triomphe, are well lit enough for lovers to walk safely down empty boulevards and étoiles late at night. But the Motor City was more dark than bright.
So to illuminate its future and its spiritual life, techno would have to light the night.
His debut album is of course filled with the spirit of escapism, but escape from the ghetto of the mind and the cynicism of the hive. None of this is to justify the artistic merits of Deep Space. Its musical acuity and bravery stand on their own. But it does have a larger context that goes far far beyond the usual assumptions of the rave and post-rave generations. This is deep music, and not in a pretentious way, but in a genuine, battle-scarred, heroic way. It’s a soulful blaze in the human darkness.
It speaks to how it feels to be human in the techno age. But through its austere inhumanness, its clanging metallic tones, its electron whirls and drums, is how he shapes space, leaving a whole dimension for nature, or the question of nature, to occupy the mind with the presence of one’s own spirit and righteous movement. Immersive is one way to think of it. Propulsive is another. And contemplative too, inviting reflection on reflection. And yet long cast was the aspersion that techno wasn’t music. Though, in a way, that was because techno was more than music.
“I had been away from Iceland for over a year and when I returned for New Year I stayed on top of a mountain,” the esteemed Icelandic singer and musician Björk says in the very opening (of the Preface) to Sicko’s Techno Rebels. “I went for a walk on my own and I saw the ice was thawing in the lava fields. All I could hear, was the cackle of the ice, echoing over hundreds of square miles. It was pitch black. The northern lights were swirling around and just below them was a layer of thick cloud. I could see the lights from all the towns of my childhood mirrored in the reflection of these clouds, with the lava fields cackling below. It was really techno.”
Techno moved across the world because it sounds like the heartbeat of a world. Like Björk observes, it has blended with our reality. It soundtracks life because it expresses the many great rhythms at the heart of nature and deep in our minds, the fluctuations of thought, the rustling of leaves in the wind, and their shadows. Even though it is all orchestrated with machines, undeniably, it bares more starkly any human touch; it contrasts its wired electricity next to our humanity. Ismistik’s Remain in 1995, Daft Punk’s Homework in 1997, and say, Gus Gus’ GusGus vs. T-World in 2000, are all reflections of Atkins’ original experiments: techno is about the rhythm of truth.
And sometimes, the sharpest contrast comes when that edge is closest, like a precious arc of light. In 1993, the year before Sonic Sunset, Atkins wrote two of his greatest compositions: ‘I See The Light’ and ‘Pick Up The Flow.’ The former is a laser romance with electro and deep down mojo, his voice poised right in the pocket of the groove, breakbeats a-booming and synths a-whirring, the portrait of a devout singing searcher: ”I can’t understand if I am so free / why I have to fight to protect my rights, why can’t I just be me / I have the vision and I have the insight / I believe in God and that’s how I woke up, because I see the light / I see the light! I see the light!”
While many of his works were instrumental, in fact, his words — informed by observations, philosophy, spirituality, and experience — were at the center of his techno vision. In a Third Wave that would bring edge lord algorithms and techno-apartheid schisms, Atkins was clear-eyed about the deep divide. Politics was not something he would always highlight, but he was more than renegade, noting the frequent hypocrisy in casting this group versus that group. ‘Pick Up the Flow’ is a brilliant counter to the idea that “rave” was only about techno-anarchy: beautifully enchanting chords float above fractures in time — from the dream to the drum.
“On the horizon, I see, the light of day, as I sway, to the rhythm of your drum / So therefore, I care for, I share forth, and I’m there for, to pick up the flow, pick up the flow, pick up the flow, until I let you know…Your destiny, is with me, and I see, that you’re free, to be…” It all came from a very deep place — deep down and far out. Decades later, Atkins, R&B songwriter from the future, brought his spirit back in parallel with his Deep Space self once again, as Cybotron. His Parallel Shift E.P. showed he had lost none of his brilliance, for his magic touch had only grown.
‘Parallel Shift’ quakes and weaves to killer Doppler shifts — “We must insist on a parallel shift…” it repeats. But ‘Earth’ pounds the earth, waking us to a cyber God:
“In rhythm, stumbled on among stars…human-left scars…ideas fast, future and past, we merge in melodies that forever last in this astral sea where spirits are free we find the essence of what we are meant to be…soul sonic waves…journeys to worlds…we discover truth in flight…celestial choirs…to touch the essence of cosmic fires…deep mind steams in our dreams…this is the galaxy song…through the echoes of space…
we trace our journey to a transcendent place…translucent time, space, Earth…”
It was all in the flow, emerging from the deepest past. Everything that informed Model 500’s debut single Night Drive (Thru-Babylon) in 1985, and reached perhaps its greatest articulation with Deep Space in 1995, was complex, and tangled, and far off the well-trodden map. ‘Night Drive’ conceptually, was his trip through Third Wave Babylon, a fallen corrupted city and empire, whether it be late 1900s Detroit, or a dystopian landscape as imagined by Gibson or other cyberpunk visionaries. And transforming that formula further — Atkins’ “time, space, transmat” — he would articulate a new Manifest Destiny for all peoples of compassion and good faith.
Deep Space then, was frontier music. At the edge of Atkins’ own personal journey, working under the aegis of R&S Records, and supported by a longtime collaborator, Moritz von Oswald of Basic Channel repute, Atkins had bridged his spirit to the robot soul of Kraftwerk and found common cause with German and French fellow travelers; off into the cybernetic matrix — “Going with the flow, with the flow, with the flow, I'm going with the flow, with the flow, with the flow, Oo-Oo-Oh!” — the legend François Kevorkian on the ‘Milky Way’ mixing board, and Jamiel’s sensual gospel delivery, calling back to the Underground Railroad and the Great Migration to freedom.
Transmat was a compound of transform matter, and in a way, like ‘The Flow,’ a metamorphosis of man and machine into something better. It was a progressive R&B statement. That flow and funk that Atkins perceived inside the machine. Not just the constellation of our human transition into a cyber-world — the many cities that the techno movement turned on fire, from Detroit to London to Paris to Stockholm to Tromsø to Reykjavik to Los Angeles to Tokyo — but as the writer Kodwo Eshun observed, techno as part of the R&B continuum. It was its genuine threshold.
“That’s precisely the thing that makes what I do so much harder. The way the American music industry is set up, when I go to a record company, they’re expecting a Black dude to come in the door with R&B or rap,” Atkins told Derrick Mathis for XLR8R magazine in 2002. “That’s what’s different about Europe and the US. It’s the reason why dance music had to go to Europe and come back — because of the racial attitudes here in America.” And that’s the subtle tension inside Atkins’ music. Notwithstanding its urban Black origins, techno was a universal language.
That is, it is deep not just in terms of time or sound or astrophysics, but in individualistic terms. Techno’s template reflects Atkins’ distinctly open mind. In fact, he didn’t just fault some Whites’ racial attitudes toward Black artists, but also Black audiences and radio programmers, who mostly ignored techno and house music in America because it didn’t as neatly or broadly fit their expectations and self-image. Davis, who had exposed Atkins to a lot of Europe’s electronic music ferment of the ‘60s and ‘70s, had searched for a way out of the mind-traps of the oppressed. He clearly has remained more haunted and split over the many straitjackets of the mainstream music industry. Where Atkins has kept it cool, Davis has run hot.
And that furnace of reinvention, which helped ignite the techno revolution, still deserves the deepest respect. In many ways, its DNA resides in Davis’ pain. In his telling, he arrived in Vietnam for the “the worst part” of the war, 1968 to 1969 — “I missed the Tet offensive but got there just in time for the idiotic Tet counteroffensive,” says Davis. “The jungle they sent us into, even the Viet Cong wouldn’t go in there. It was virgin jungle. All the Vietnamese thought we were completely nuts. There was nothing in that jungle but rock, apes and tigers. Everything in it was poisonous.”
“You know The Walking Dead? That’s lightweight compared to what it did to us…The jungle killed more people than the Viet Cong….The stuff you see in the movies about people like Mowgli and Tarzan going naked to the jungle, that’s ridiculous. The jungle will actually eat the flesh right off your bones. Every scratch turns to cancer and won’t heal. You can do whatever you want, put every kind of ointment in the world on it, and the jungle will actually eat you to the bone if you don’t get out of it.”*****
A deep hope is what it was. Tree-entangled, pushed to the edge of the human experience, Davis AKA 3070 knew something about being shellshocked, as well as what Toffler called “future shock,” being paralyzed and overwhelmed with the waves of technological change. It’s why old ideas like the pro-fascist ones expressed by Ann Morrow Lindbergh in her 1940 book The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith resonate in a computer world going rogue. If Davis made the temple, and Mojo provided the atmosphere, then Atkins was the Soul of the Future: Deep Space challenged techno heads and ravers to think beyond their Third Wave dawns.
The album’s second half takes us beyond the past and future into the present.
‘Astralwerks’ breezes right through with colder temperatures, contemplating life in between galaxies, the nooks of asteroid belts, wormholes and blackholes, coffee on the dashboard, the strange horizons of astral worlds. Then come the gentle guffaws of a giant planet on ‘Starlight,’ a Jupiter stirring its clouds into funky off-kilter swings into moons and suns, hopping from one multi-verse to another, a star here, a star there, forever rising inside you and above you — just let the joyful laughter of the universe rise through you — the deeper the night, the brighter its play of cosmic light.
‘Last Transport (to Alpha Centauri)’ slings signals out into the great unknown, gearing up for the long trip to the closest star system to our sun, coordinates being tuned, all systems go. And so ‘I Wanna Be There’ takes us there — to Alpha Centauri — or back home? Perhaps Atkins’ greatest composition, his ode to wandering and homecoming, kicks FOMO into oblivion, its windswept synths and driving beat taking us deep down into the now — “I’ll be, I’ll be, I’ll be therrrre when youuu reeee-turn.” Commitment to the future. Commitment to each other. Commitment to escaping forever.
Which brings us closer to ‘Lightspeed,’ when matter becomes energy, when time stands still, the relativity of thought containing in an instance the flash of a nova. As a final track, it is the perfect ending, based on a concept that speaks to the endless. As a metaphor, “deep space” was an ideal fit for Atkins’ fierce dreaming. The spheres of planets, suns and moons, elliptical orbits, gas clouds, pulsars — a universe filled with abstract shapes and patterns emitting the perfection of mathematical and computational models, from astrophysics to mechanics to cybernetics.
And within it all, the pain, the struggle, the search for equal worlds — the rationalizations of the powerful and of those who seek to dethrone them — the rhythmic truth between the wicked and the benevolent at the heart of the universe — held in tension, with intention — conscience — the magic of Magic Juan, the original techno rebel — the Originator — HE who turns home into the heavens.
Track Listing:
1. Milky Way
2. Orbit
3. The Flow
4. Warning
5. Astralwerks
6. Starlight
7. Last Transport (to Alpha Centauri)
8. I Wanna Be There (Edit)
9. Lightspeed
*There are a few different songs here that have no official public print source for their lyrics, including ‘I See The Light’ and ‘Earth.’ ‘Methane Sea’ is Richard (“Rik”) Davis’ first ever release, and a solo one at that, and was published independently in 1978 under his own Deep Sea label, making big waves in the Detroit music scene. Nonetheless it is shrouded in mystery and so are the exact lyrics.
Therefore, I transcribed the lyrics by ear. Interestingly, the one word I am not sure about is “tribes” — “A thousand worlds. A thousand tribes.” It also sounds to me like it could be “crimes,” or even “hives.” I am taking a little liberty here, but as is so often the case with lyrics and poetry, the interpretation is open.
**Davis’ first studio was set up in the old Farwell Building in downtown Detroit. According to Atkins however, the studio he worked in with Davis was later on the Eastern Michigan University campus, which was Davis’ second location.
***Toffler’s The Third Wave was published in 1980. While Mojo was espousing concepts from Toffler’s work, which was very much part of the 1970s and ‘80s zeitgeist, Atkins was exposed himself to Toffler and similar futurists in a “Future Studies” course at Belleville High School. Toffler’s equally seminal work Future Shock was the main text for that class. According to Sicko, these ideas stuck with him and sparked his imagination in part because he was new to the suburbs at the time and thinking deeply about his place in the grander scheme of things.
****While ‘Alleys Of Your Mind' was one of the seminal electronic dance songs to come out of Detroit’s local music scene, the other big track was ‘Sharevari,’ by A Number of Names. It was more heavily influenced by Italo-disco, Kano’s ‘I’m Ready’ specifically. It’s a fascinating history — the Detroit youth fashion club scene — and is well documented in Sicko’s Techno Rebels book.
*****Techno’s musical DNA still runs deep between Davis and Atkins, despite the former’s more rock-ist leanings and general disappearance. In many ways Davis was less comfortable with machines and wanted to keep the “human” more central or conspicuous. Also, electric guitar was more associated with his generation.
“Jimi Hendrix was like the soundtrack to Vietnam,” Atkins told The Guardian’s Lanre Bakare in 2024, explaining the massive influence Hendrix had on Davis and in turn, Atkins. “There was something about his music that blended with the Asian jungle. Everything Rik did on the synth was emulating Hendrix to a certain degree.”
Atkins, part of Generation X, though he was born at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation, was more of a techno-optimist than a techno-pessimist — of course, he didn’t go through the scarring experience of the machine-heavy, napalm-dropping Vietnam War, which in combination with Davis’ post-war disenchantment with the hippies, is part of the very real attitude shift that underscores techno’s alien soundscape escapism, and not escape in a bad way, but in a liberation way.
In that same Red Bull Music Academy interview with Rubin in 2016, Davis talked specifically about how The Beach Boys’ association or run-ins with Charles Manson — who it turned out wanted to start a Nazi-style race war — felt like a betrayal. That is, he had put faith in a color-blind society but that faith was shaken after the war.
He misconstrued The Beach Boys’ association in many ways — it was later clarified that their relationship with Manson was limited to Dennis Miller, the band’s drummer, and for a brief period of time until it was severed — but his larger point about popular music, hippie hypocrisy, and racial inequality in general, did carry some truth. For example, The Weather Underground did at first praise Manson’s horrific crimes.
“When I was a child, I thought as a child,” Davis says of his post-Vietnam revelations. “I saw as a child. But when I came back from the Vietnam War, I became a man, and I was able at last to see the level of hypocrisy that is man.”
Another good place to better understand some of these points of view is DeForrest Brown Jr.’s book, Assembling A Black Counter Culture. He also wrote the evocative liner notes to Cybotron’s Parallel Shift E.P.
Last, a vital interview was conducted by Mathias Döpfner for Rolling Stone in 2024, where Atkins talks candidly about how his father was a drug dealer, his grandmother raising him, and much, much more.