2018 reissue - The only old-school electro LP with any amount of staying power (thanks in part to its release on Fantasy), Enter includes crucial early singles like "Alleys of Your Mind" and "Cosmic Cars," as well as techno's first defining moment, "Clear." The collision of Atkins' vision for cosmic funk and the arena rock instincts of Rick Davis results in a surprisingly cohesive album, dated for all the right reasons and quite pop-minded.
Cybotron’s 1983 album, Enter, is widely considered to be where Detroit techno began. The collection's obsessed with the future as co-creators Juan Atkins and Richard Davis saw it, a vision dominated by the notion that human life would become so intertwined with technology that they’d be essentially inseparable.
Davis and Atkins’ reliance on electronic sounds is less an aesthetic statement than a revolutionary one. They were among the first American pop musicians to fully grasp that synthesizers weren’t just a modern update of the organ but an entirely new kind of instrument, capable not only of emulating traditional instrumental sounds but obliterating them entirely. Even more importantly, they seem to have understood that this new technology had the potential to dramatically change the relationship between musicians and their instruments: when a person presses play on a drum machine’s pre-sequenced pattern, are they playing the drum machine or is it playing itself?
But Enter isn’t just a record that should be listened to because it’s important—history aside it’s an intensely pleasurable experience. While you can make out the almost-completed outline of Detroit techno that Atkins and a few other musicians would fill in soon after, it’s not a techno record, exactly. The songs are more pop-oriented, with the verse-chorus-verse structures that techno treated as optional, and as much as Atkins and Davis were trying to emulate Kraftwerk, they were just as heavily influenced by Funkadelic, which comes through in their trippy Afrofuturistic lyrics and in Bootsy-esque bass lines that were far funkier than what Kraftwerk could manage. Neither of them had fully immersed themselves in the man-machine merger that would come to define techno, and there’s a kind of loose warm-bloodedness around the edges that makes the album feel like Davis and Atkins weren’t so much programming machines as trying to teach them the essential concept of funk.
As diehard technophiles Atkins and Davis had no problem putting their gear front and center in the mix. Aside from their vocals and (on a few songs) John Housely’s guitar you can’t usually tell which parts were played by a person and which were sequenced. Trying to puzzle that out in a time where computer-assisted music making is commonplace enough that we can do it on our phones offers the barest hint of how challenging the concept was then.
| A1 | Enter |
| A2 | Alleys Of Your Mind |
| A3 | Industrial Lies |
| A4 | The Line |
| B1 | Cosmic Cars |
| B2 | Cosmic Raindance |
| B3 | El Salvador |
| B4 | Clear |
