Audiopile Review – Model 500. Classics. Is that not enough for you? Just buy it already! Okay, fine… Model 500 is Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins. This dude is one of the three people who literally invented techno (the other two being Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson). ‘Classic’ is a compilation featuring unimpeachable dancefloor classics like ‘No UFO’s’ and the almost impossibly infectious ‘Night Drive’. But, as with all the music Atkins and his Belleville Three comrades made in the mid-to-late ‘80s, there’s much more going on here than mere functional dance music. Years before anyone thought of the term ‘intelligent dance music’ these guys were forging a sound that mixed Black radicalism with European modernism, to sleek and sophisticated effect. That isn’t to say this album is not wall-to-wall floor-fillers, because it most definitely is. It’s just that ‘Classics’ is also an endlessly listenable collection of electronic music, the historical importance of which simply cannot be overstated.

As these things go, and probably due some licensing fuckries with original compilers R&S, or lost masters, it features alternative versions of some “classics” alongside originals (probably mastered from vinyl) spanning the project’s first five years, before it went sleeker, aerodynamic in the early ‘90s. The remix of ‘No UFO’s’ is exclusive to the set and kicks off a roll call that takes in the glyding smooth mix of ‘The Chase’, hi-tech 313 funk template of ‘Off To Battle (Remix)’ (1988); his untouchable electro joint ‘Night Drive (Time, Space, Transmat)’; the Kraftwerkian wriggle of ‘Electric Entourage’ and ‘Sound of Stereo’ from 1987; and the comp exclusive acidic M500 version of ‘Techno Music’, whose original found on the 1988 introduction to the UK/EU market, 10 Records’ ‘Techno! (The New Sound of Detroit)’ compilation.