Juan Atkins

The year was 1979, and Juan Atkins knew he was onto something special. Credited as one of the founders of Detroit techno, the genre pioneer was making music on a synthesizer bought for him by his grandmother. “I was going to high school and there were no other musicians around me,” he recalls. “So I had to make my own band.”

Detroit's upcoming Movement music festival just got even bigger. On Thursday, organizers announced the addition of Juan Atkins to the fest's lineup, who will perform what is being billed as a "40 Years of Detroit Techno" DJ set. Atkins is regarded as the "Godfather of Techno," having released what is...

Juan Atkins (2011). Photo by Yann Gross/Red Bull Content Pool. A quick Google search of the phrase "who invented techno" will immediately draw up a musician named Juan Atkins. Working out of Detroit in the early ‘80s, Atkins used synthesizers to create songs that were entirely electronic, at a time when doing so not only wasn’t popular, but was rarely heard of— especially in the United States. (Importantly, he was also the first person to use the word "techno" to describe electronic music, though there’s a common misconception that the term "techno music" was first used in Germany).