New two track single out in a month’s time

Juan Atkins has shared ‘Maintain’, the first new track from his revived 80s electro project Cybotron for nearly four decades.

The track is one side of a two track release titled ‘Maintain The Golden Ratio’ set for release on Tresor on October 13. ‘The Golden Ratio’ will appear on the flip side.

Cybotron was formed in the early 80s and their 1983 electro track ‘Clear’ is widely credited as being the spark that eventually lit up the Detroit techno revolution. They disbanded in 1985, but Atkins, who went on to found the still-active Metroplex, played a show at the Barbican under the name in 2019 and a later London date at Printworks.

The band’s Bandcamp page also features an extensive, impressionistic statement by someone calling themselves claiming to be The Rhythmanalyst (aka DeForrest Brown), Jr about why now is the right time for Cybotron to return:

“Cybotron has re-emerged in our contemporary cybercultural age when artifactual futures begin a transition into a new era of “Meta”.

“By combining their knowledge of philosophy, science fiction, and mechanical engineering, at a time when electronic instrument companies were only just beginning to distribute their products to the masses, two prosumer audio technicians named Juan Atkins and Rik Davis were able to re-engineer Cybotron – a combination of the words “Cyborg” and “Cyclotron” (an atomic particle accelerator) – to be used as a home studio performance music that would change the course of independently produced and distributed electronic music.

“Dissolving the boundary between singer, songwriter, and producer, Juan Atkins named Cybotron’s future forward funkadelic sound “techno” in reference to Alvin Toffler’s concept of unlikely “techno rebels” against technocracy. Techno is music that sounds like technology, and its purpose was to help society survive our collision with a universally felt “future shock” by inserting an audio virus into the cultural matrix.

“Techno’s blueprint spread across the Detroit-Berlin Axis between Metroplex and Tresor. As human society began its transition from a post-industrial to an information-based market economy, Cybotron enabled a thorough system override of the human senses towards a tangible man-machine hybridity and showed the world how to channel their emotions and imaginations into new sound technologies and create new ‘sonic’ spatialities where listeners can transport themselves out of the physical world into the future. The cover of their debut album Enter (1983) transmitted a fragmented view of a body in motion being digitized mid-stride, dissolving physical and virtual reality into sonic fiction.

“Today, the man-machine hybridity of Cybotron is still the truest form of techno, coevolving in conversation with the technological music they created and inspired. The latest data disk marks a new chapter that reflects a techgnostic musical expression of the knowledge acquired during their decades-long hiatus. Unlike the dance music industrial replications of the Model 500 formula, acknowledging the content marketing expectations that segments music into specific, sellable genres, this techno music is self-aware.

“Cybotron processes dance music tropes spawned from its very own blueprint with a meta-tactical precision out of sync with our current rave new world. Cybotron’s return demonstrates a studied engagement with what techno was and should be with a peerless update of Juan Atkins’ initial inventive idea of do-it-yourself electrically reengineered music xeroxed onto both sides of the 12” – uploaded directly into the alleys of your mind.”

Pre-order Cybotron’s ‘Maintain The Golden Ratio’ on 12″ by clicking here