Juan Atkins, the lifelong producer and DJ widely credited as a co-founder of Detroit techno, has died at 64. His management company, Green Smith Artists, confirmed the death, according to Pitchfork.

Atkins had been scheduled to perform at Yu Yu Club in Mexico City on the night of October 31; MusicRadar reports he was found unresponsive in his hotel room before the appearance.

The news landed hardest in Detroit, whose mayor, Mary Sheffield, issued a statement honoring him: "As a teenager with a synthesizer and a big idea, he imagined what the music of the future could be. Then he built it," she wrote, adding that "he opened doors for generations of Detroit artists who followed him."

The death came as Atkins remained fully active, touring internationally through the final two years of his life at clubs from New York to Berlin and on the main stages of Movement, Dekmantel and Houghton festivals.

Atkins met Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson in junior high school in Belleville, Michigan, forming the trio later nicknamed the Belleville Three for how they shared equipment, studio space and production work while shaping an electronic scene, as Pitchfork recounts.

Born in 1962 and raised in Detroit by a father who worked as a concert promoter, Atkins bought his first synthesizer, a Korg MS-10, at 15, per MusicRadar, and shifted from guitar and bass to digitized instruments.

He insisted on naming the genre himself, telling Pitchfork in 2005 that he "always called the music [he] was making techno music" even as Chicago DJs like Derrick Carter and Frankie Knuckles labeled it Detroit house.

"In Detroit, we don't have any real reference point. All the Detroit stuff was pure futuristic," he said. MusicRadar also notes the ARP Odyssey, Sequential Pro-One and Roland TR-808 and TR-909 shaped his early releases.

Atkins was 18 when he formed Cybotron with Richard "3070" Davis, merging funk, Kraftwerk-influenced electronics and futuristic themes on early singles like "Alleys of the Mind," "Cosmic Raindance," "Cosmic Cars" and "The Line," as Pitchfork details.

Their 1983 electro track "Clear" became the breakthrough: Pitchfork reports it sold 50,000 copies, broke from the underground into the mainstream, and became a genre-defining composition famously sampled by Missy Elliott and countless others.

Cybotron released three albums — 1983's Enter, 1993's Empathy and 1995's Cyber Ghetto — and in 2023 Atkins revived the project with co-producer Laurens von Oswald for Maintain the Golden Ratio, their first EP in 28 years.

MusicRadar highlights his 1985 solo classic "No UFO's" as Model 500 as another landmark of the early catalog.

Beyond Cybotron, Atkins built a parallel solo career that kept him productive across four decades.

In 1985 he began writing records as Model 500 and founded his own label, Metroplex, later releasing the albums Deep Space (1995), Mind and Body (1999) and Digital Solutions (2015), and occasionally performing as Infiniti on the 1998 album Skynet, per Pitchfork.

In his later years he collaborated with Basic Channel founder and dub techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald as Borderland, releasing a self-titled album in 2013 and Transport in 2016 — a bridge between Detroit's first generation and Berlin's second, as MusicRadar frames it.

He never stopped chasing meaning in the music, telling The Guardian that "artists have an obligation to say something meaningful" and that his lyrics were meant to make people think beyond dancing.

Tributes are already shaping how techno's history will be retold. Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield pledged that "Detroit will honor his memory, and his music will keep moving us forward," per Pitchfork, a civic acknowledgment of how central Atkins was to the city's cultural identity.

For devoted listeners, the surprise is less the loss of a legacy artist than the timing: MusicRadar notes he had been booked to play Mexico City the very night he died, and Pitchfork records him headlining Movement, Dekmantel and Houghton as recently as the past two years.

MusicRadar also recalls his 2012 interview calling the Boss DR-55 drum machine "the most quantum innovation that ever happened" — a reminder that his legacy rests not just on records but on the machines and methods generations of producers inherited.

Expect tribute sets and reevaluations across the electronic world in the days ahead.