DANCE ZINE SCIONAV.COM VOL. 3

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JEFF MILLS Story: Miles Raymer
JEFF MILLS HAS LONg bEEN rEgArDED AS A LEgEND IN tHE tECHNO <strong>COM</strong>MUNIty, bUt SOMEtIMES A pErSON’S rEpUtAtION gEtS SO MASSIVE tHAt NEw<strong>COM</strong>ErS DON’t EVEN KNOw HOw HE gOt It IN tHE FIrSt pLACE. SO IN CASE yOU’rE NOt HIp tO wHAt MAKES JEFF MILLS SUCH A DIStINCt FIgUrE, HErE’S A brIEF prIMEr. HE’S A VIRTUOSO MULTITASKER Most DJs only use two turntables or two CD-Js. Granted that can get pretty hectic, especially in the days before Serato and cue points, but Mills prefers to use three turntables at a time, as well as a pair of CD-Js. He also throws in a vintage Roland TR-909 drum machine that he programs on the fly. Altogether there’s an astounding number of potential ways for things to get messy. He’s like the techno equivalent of those guys who talk on the phone and play Angry Birds while carrying four cups of hot coffee, except he’s less of a menace and he never messes up. HE WAS IN TECHNO’S PUBLIC ENEMY Mills has been living in Chicago for a couple of decades now, but he got his start in Detroit in the early 1980s during techno’s formative years. In 1989 he started collaborating with “Mad” Mike Banks, a fellow Detroit techno producer and former member of Parliament/Funkadelic, on a project called Underground Resistance. In 1991 they pulled together the hardest, noisiest ideas happening in techno, acid house and hip-hop at the time and turned them into a four-song EP called Riot and wrapped it in a confrontational and highly politicized package that included wearing military gear during public appearances. Underground Resistance has opened up to include more members, and Mills isn’t closely involved any more, but UR’s website still includes manifestos. HE’S FASHION FORWARD On Division Street in Chicago there’s a stretch where it borders the Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village neighborhoods that has been full of jock bars and yuppie pet shops ever since the area started to gentrify a decade ago. For a long time the strip’s lone reminder of the area’s former weirdo artsy cool was a boutique called Gamma Player, which displayed men and women’s clothing that looked like costumes for sci-fi movies, but was made out of really expensive luxury materials. It was mostly popular with Japanese techno fanatics who came to the store because one of its owners was Jeff Mills. Maybe that’s the reason the store ended up closing, but the Gamma Player name lives on in an exclusive accessories line available on the website of Axis Records, Mills’ label, next to his own merch, which is frequently created in collaboration with fashion designers. HE MADE ONE OF THE BEST TECHNO SONGS OF THE 1990S Mills is incredibly prolific, but he’ll forever be best known for “The Bells,” a single he released in 1996. If you went to a rave anywhere in the world from that point and beyond, you definitely heard it played and saw a crowd go nuts to its thumping beat, staccato bass and lead synth line that sounds vaguely like The Twilight Zone theme being squeezed and stretched apart by a robot. Mills composed “The Bells” in roughly three hours in late 1994. Before it was given an official vinyl pressing, Mills spent a year spinning the track off of a metal reference disk as a way to test drive it in front of an audience. HE RECORDED A LIVE ALBUM WITH AN 80-PIECE ORCHESTRA In 2005, Mills recorded a live program of 15 songs from his catalog alongside the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra underneath a 1stcentury Roman aqueduct in the south of France. He provided percussion and the beats from his 909 and the 80-piece orchestra played the parts he’d originally composed on synthesizers. Unlike pretty much every high-concept attempt to fuse techno and classical music, the music’s amazingly not cheesy or embarrassing to anyone involved. For the concert DVD that German label Tresor issued, Mills contributed an essay about how human life may be descended from aliens. axisrecords.com To watch a video interview with Jeff Mills, check out scionav.com/music/houseparty
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DANCE ZINE SCIONAV.COM VOL. 3

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