Juan Atkins founded Metroplex Records in 1985. He had just split from his Cybotron partner Rick Davis, and the new label was the vehicle for the music he wanted to make alone. The first release was Model 500's "No UFO's." The catalog number was MET 001. Forty years later it is still the most-reissued record in the Metroplex discography and one of the standard-issue first records in any history of techno.
The early Metroplex run, 1985 through 1988, is the most important sequence 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 appearing on Metroplex before founding KMS. Derrick May appearing as Mayday before launching Transmat. The label was operating as a Detroit techno hub before Detroit techno had a name.
What separated Metroplex from the dance-music label model that already existed in Chicago and New York was that it was built around a single producer's vision and ran on minimal overhead. Atkins recorded in his bedroom and his mother's basement. He pressed records in small runs. He sent boxes to UK and German distributors who paid in cash. The model was punk infrastructure applied to electronic dance music, four years before that approach became standard.
The 1988 Virgin compilation "Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit" pulled most of its strongest tracks from Metroplex and Transmat. Model 500's "Techno Music" appeared on the comp under the genre name Atkins had been pushing since the Cybotron era. The compilation framed the music for Europe. The European market then sustained Metroplex through the 1990s, when most US labels would not touch it.
The label slowed in the 2000s. Atkins released less. 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 across the 2010s. The Model 500 records have been continuously available in some pressing for most of the last 25 years.
Metroplex still operates. Atkins has released new Model 500 material periodically, including the "Digital Solutions" album in 2015 with Mike Banks, Mark Taylor, and Domenico Cicchetti. Atkins continues to tour internationally, including a 2025 set at Glastonbury where he performed Cybotron material with Davis's blessing — the first Cybotron-billed performance in years.
What the Metroplex archive amounts to is the closest thing the genre has to a founding document. The label is the foundation. The artists who came after — at Transmat, KMS, Underground Resistance, Planet E, Plus 8, Mo Wax, Warp, R&S, Tresor — built on the format that Atkins set in 1985 with a Roland TR-909, a vocoder, and a mailing list.
Distribution runs through Submerge. Atkins still lives in Detroit.
