Today I unearthed a nice stack of choice records at a thrift store spot I seldom swing through, and clearly, it was a good thing I stopped there. The first joint I spotted, the one that made me realize there were goodies lurking, was Clear, by Cybotron.
A legendary electro release, and one of the records that heralded the dawn of techno. Cybotron (Juan Atkins, Richard "3070" Davis, and John "Jon 5" Housley) got signed to Fantasy Records after their two earliest tracks, self-released out of Detroit as 7" slices of wax in 1981 and '82, sold a combined 15,000 copies. Clear was the most successful single off their 1983 debut LP, Enter, and shipped 50,000 nationwide.
There's debate over whether this can be considered the first-ever pure "techno" track, an argument that's a little silly in light of the fact that Cybotron was building on the foundation already laid down by Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra. And a lot of people consider Clear too electro to be techno, pointing to Cybotron's 3rd single, Techno City, as the real techno holy grail, or No UFO's, the first track that Atkins released (as Model 500) on Metroplex, the record label he founded after leaving Cybotron over creative differences with Davis. But however you want to classify it, Clear is still a classic track.
- Dyn-O-Mite
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