Cybotron
Enter
In a nifty twist on typical American racial politics, a small army of black club kids in Detroit spent the early 80’s co-opting the anglophilic (anglotastic?) dance-floor sounds of Kraftwork and Giorgio Moroder. When Juan Atkins and his Belleville posse began crafting music for that audience, he gave birth to an entire genre. In 1981, Cybotron’s “Alleys Of Your Mind” single had announced Detroit techno as an already fully-formed sound—scuzzy and robotic, with an offbeat sense of humor. On Cybotron’s debut album, Enter, Atkins and his band mates Richard Davis and Jon 5 expanded the sound of their early singles into a deeply funky blueprint—one from which today’s techno rarely strays, and one today’s techno rarely matches. You can also hear Cybotron’s influence all over today’s pop landscape—“Enter”’s synthesizer workouts show up across Daft Punk’s Discovery, for example, and Robyn’s “Konichiwa Bitches” would be unimaginable without its Atkins-like techno foundation—but the real fun in hearing Enter isn’t playing Spot-The-Influence; it’s witnessing the arrival of a new musical art form that sounds just as vital today as it must have then.
-Marty Brown, 2007
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