Two Kinds of Future: How Cybotron’s Clear Taught Detroit to Hear Kraftwerk Through a Funk Bassline

Lineage stories usually run in a straight line: one band influences the next, and the next one gets the credit. Cybotron is a stranger case, because the duo contained two different lineages and could not hold them together. That tension is audible on Clear, the 1983 single that Detroit techno is still arguing with.

Two people, two futures

Cybotron was founded in Detroit in 1980 by Juan Atkins and Richard 3070 Davis. According to a 2014 profile in The Appendix, the two met in an electronics class at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor. Atkins was young and synthesizer-obsessed, driven by Parliament-Funkadelic and by the machine pop coming out of Europe. Davis was older and pulled toward guitars and a harder edge. Their early records on Atkins’ own Deep Space label, including Alleys of Your Mind in 1981, reached listeners partly through the Detroit radio host The Electrifying Mojo, as Wikipedia’s Cybotron entry notes.

The bassline that carried the machines

Clear arrived on Fantasy in 1983, as the lead track of the album Enter. The Appendix describes it as Kraftwerk’s sound set on Parliament’s funk bass, and that is a fair way to hear it. The sequenced precision comes from Düsseldorf. The weight in the low end, and the sense that a machine could be made to swing, comes from the funk records Atkins grew up on. Plenty of electronic acts of the period borrowed Kraftwerk’s surface. Clear borrowed its discipline and then pointed it at a dancefloor.

That is the lineage point worth keeping. Detroit techno is often told as a Kraftwerk story with a different postcode, but the Cybotron records show a second parent. Without the funk half of the equation, the machines stay cold. Without the machines, the funk stays a band.

The split that made the sound

The duo did not last. Wikipedia records that Atkins left in the mid-1980s after creative disagreements, and that Davis kept the Cybotron name. Davis wanted a rock direction. Atkins, per The Appendix, saw it differently, and his view of the idea is blunt: “You can’t come behind a record like Clear with a rock-n-roll record.”

Atkins took the next step on his own. He released Nightdrive through his Metroplex label as Model 500, and Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Eddie Fowlkes became part of the circle around that imprint. The Appendix also credits the 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, assembled with Neil Rushton, with carrying that Detroit sound abroad.

What to listen for

Put Clear next to a Kraftwerk record and then next to a Parliament record, and listen to what each side gives up. The Kraftwerk side loses its distance and the Parliament side loses its band. What is left is the template: a repeating pattern, a heavy low end and a future imagined as a place you could dance in rather than only observe.

For a guitar-and-electronics catalogue like ours, the useful lesson is about how influence travels. It rarely moves cleanly from one act to another. More often it passes through two people who disagree about what they inherited, and one of them leaves.

Sources: The Appendix, Technofy Your Mind (2014); Wikipedia, Cybotron (American band).

Cover photo: Angie Linder from Detroit, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons