Enter

Released

If A Number of Names’ 1981 single “Sharevari” was the initial codification of what Detroit techno would come to offer, the arrival two years later of Cybotron’s full-length album Enter (a/k/a Clear) was the glowingly optimistic progress report. Like many great dance music LPs, the sole full-length to come from the partnership of Juan Atkins and Richard “3070” Davis is built around the succession of singles that justified the full-length in the first place, so it’s worth noting the way circa-’81 cuts like the “Alleys of Your Mind”/”Cosmic Raindance” register at the outset of this fast-moving new musical development — prototypical but recognizably formative takes on electro-funk that wear their Kraftwerk/YMO influences with the creative zealotry of catalyzed superfans. By 1982’s Motor City man-machine anthem “Cosmic Cars” and its b-side, the raw-nerved, guitar-pierced proto-industrial (musically)/post-industrial (economically) “The Line,” both technological advancements and creative developments pushed them towards a more intricately complex yet to-the-gut sense of funkiness. So by the time they fleshed out their repertoire in ’83, they’d given the familiar Parliament-ary flourishes of synthesized boogie a singularly futurist biomechanical sci-fi gloss that felt nearly as epochal a cyberpunk statement as anything William Gibson wrote. That resonates the most in a pair of dueling bookend title cuts that promise renewal through reset-button negation that reads like a dry run for the Singularity. Opener “Enter” shines as a midtempo funk-rocker with Phil Oakey-as-Bootsy Collins vox demanding a mind expansion to escape physical constrictions — “One Nation Under a Groove” as a manifesto for transhumanism. And the iconic robotic pop-lock of closer “Clear” surveys the landscape — of Detroit itself, and any other city fated to face its perpetual remaking — as it’s in the process of being erased by a techno-progressive duality that finds upheaval and promise inextricable.

Nate Patrin

Suggestions