Metroplex Records is the founding document of Detroit techno

Juan Atkins started Metroplex Records in 1985, right after splitting from Rick Davis, his partner in Cybotron. The new label gave him a vehicle for the music he wanted to make on his own. The first release was Model 500's "No UFO's," catalog number M-001, cut in April 1985. Four decades on it remains one of the standard first records in any history of techno, and it is among the most-reissued titles in the Metroplex catalog.

Atkins recorded "No UFO's" in the basement of his mother's house on Detroit's east side, working off an eight-track tape machine, a 16-channel mixing board, a Roland TR-909 for the drums and a Korg MS-10 for the synths. He had just been through an audio engineering course at the Recording Institute of Detroit and was applying it at home. He had already shopped the track to other labels and been turned down before pressing it himself.

The early Metroplex run, roughly 1985 through 1988, holds the most important cluster of releases the genre has. Model 500's "Night Drive (Thru-Babylon)," "Future" and "No UFO's." Eddie "Flashin'" Fowlkes's "Goodbye Kiss." Blake Baxter's "When We Used To Play." Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May both appeared on Metroplex before they launched KMS and Transmat. The label was running as a Detroit techno hub before the music had a settled name.

What separated Metroplex from the dance-label model already operating in Chicago and New York was that it was built around one producer's vision and ran on almost no overhead. Atkins pressed records in small runs and shipped boxes to distributors in the UK and Germany. Early on, the records traveled by hand. Per the documented account of "No UFO's," May and Baxter drove a pickup full of copies to Chicago, where the track caught on and from there got exported to Britain. The setup was punk infrastructure applied to electronic dance music, years before that became the standard way to run an independent label.

The 1988 Virgin compilation "Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit" drew heavily on Metroplex and Transmat. Compiled by Derrick May and Neil Rushton, then an A&R scout for Virgin's 10 Records imprint, the album took its name after Atkins's late-entry track "Techno Music," and it is widely credited with fixing "techno" as the label for the sound coming out of Detroit. The compilation framed the music for Europe, and the European market then carried Metroplex through the 1990s, when most American labels would not touch it.

The label slowed in the 2000s as Atkins released less, and the reissue economy picked up the slack. Clone Records out of Rotterdam, R&S out of Belgium and Metroplex itself put the catalog back into print in batches through the 2010s, which is why the Model 500 records have stayed available in one pressing or another for most of the last 25 years.

Metroplex still operates. Atkins has put out new Model 500 material periodically, including the 2015 album "Digital Solutions" on Metroplex, his first under the alias in 16 years, with production from Mike Banks and contributions from Amp Fiddler and others. He also revived Cybotron for live performance and recording, releasing the EP "Maintain The Golden Ratio" in 2023 and bringing the project to Glastonbury in 2025, where he played the festival's IICON stage with a backing lineup that included Laurens von Oswald and Tameko Williams.

What the Metroplex archive amounts to is the closest thing the genre has to a founding document. The artists who came after, at Transmat, KMS, Underground Resistance, Planet E, Plus 8, Warp, R&S and Tresor, built on the format Atkins set in 1985 with a drum machine, a synth and a mailing list. Distribution still runs through Submerge, and Atkins still lives in Detroit.