Model 500 - 'Deep Space'
No. 11 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Far out — 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, a relentless yearning for a better tomorrow.
Given Detroit’s spiritual location, the refuge of escaped slaves and oppressed 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 amid the machines.
First as part of Cybotron, Atkins made the electro breakthrough ‘Clear’ with Vietnam vet Richard Davis in 1983. Striking out on his own as Model 500, he would continue to extend the purely electronic expanse that Kraftwerk pioneered with his own scurry into sonic infinity. ‘No UFO’s,’ ‘Night Drive (Thru-Babylon), Time, Space, Transmat,’ ‘Off to Battle,’ ‘Sound of Stereo,’ ‘Techno Music’ — all collected on R&S Records’ essential compilation Classics — blueprinted a new way of hearing and seeing the world.
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, along with friends Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, 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, were reimagining a racially unequal 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 welcoming home.
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 brilliance stands on its 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 blaze in the darkness.
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. Here is the interstellar jazz that would influence drum ‘n’ bass star LTJ Bukem and Warp Records’ magicians, The Black Dog. It’s mind-tripping bass line doesn’t come in until two and a half minutes in, spiraling and spell-binding to a solar system of sonic delights, its tap tap drums caressing the hull. ‘Orbit’ bubbles and floats in the kosmische tradition of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze — patterns looping and slipping into 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.
‘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 the deep eternal.
‘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 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.
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, computational models, from astrophysics to mechanics to cybernetics. And within that, the pain, the struggle, the search for equal worlds, held in tension, with intention — conscience — the magic of Magic Juan, the original techno rebel — the Originator — HE who transforms 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