Jeff Mills, one of Detroit’s finest techno DJs, will be spinning at Santos Party House in New York City on Wednesday, September 3. In 2004, I interviewed Mills upon the release of his “Exhibitionist” CD/DVD. Here’s how it all went down.
Run of the Mills
Techno giant Jeff Mills puts the maestro in the mix
It’s about two minutes into Jeff Mills’ new CD, “Exhibitionist,” and James Brown is stuttering.
Mills is tripping him up on the classic opener of “Sex Machine”–”I’m about ready to get up and do my thing.” Although Mills won’t admit to such strict authorial intention, he’s appropriating the Hardest Working Man in Show Business in a brilliant statement of purpose.
There’s no one else in the world who creates electronic music with such a mesmerizing combination of pure physical showmanship and split-second creativity. Mills operates three turntables simultaneously, often blending the bassline of one and the mid-range of the second with the upper registers of the third, and he blazes through dozens of records an hour, needling only the best snatches of vinyl on each one. It’s difficult to believe, as you’re watching him, that he’s not on fast-forward. And, as his hands play over the mixer’s sliders and knobs in a blur, it’s impossible to deny that DJing is an art, and turntables are a legitimate musical instrument.
“There have really been few attempts to explain to people what electronic music is really about,” Mills says from his Chicago studio. Mills’ “Exhibitionist Mix” is a self-conscious attempt to do just that: its seventy-two frantic minutes are recorded in one take, without digital editing, and there’s a companion DVD which allows, via multiple angles, a close-up look at exactly how Mills is manipulating the sound. It’s an exciting high-wire act, and the definition of live improvisational performance–for all its kaleidoscopic intensity, there are definitely places where experiments don’t pan out perfectly. God does, occasionally, create a platypus.
“Sometimes the effort, the attempt to try to create something, can be just as interesting as the end result,” Mills says. “Techno is…a music of ideas, of trying to make something of the future–future music, music of a type of transition–something between two points… .” Mills almost always talks in this manner, with pregnant pauses and vague shapings, then rafting back into a confident beat. “I wasn’t trying to conclude something, whether I was a good DJ or a bad DJ or whatever. It was made with the objective of documenting what a DJ does.”
One of the CD’s unusual qualities is Mills’ tendency to pair his own tracks together–of the forty-five records selected for the mix, eighteen are his. Often, he produces his own music deliberately for mutual interlocking, “or even with someone else’s track… . Taking the information from the parties that I do, watching the people, then bringing that information back to the studio, and composing tracks in relation to other people’s, or something of my own–looking to see what is available, and what is missing, actually.” Even with this deliberate compositional technique, in performance it’s almost unreal to see Mills spending, at most, a couple of seconds flipping through the record box, then seamlessly fusing the new selection with the compounded beats resounding at the moment. “Everything in the record box is, um, is um,” Mills says, almost sheepishly, “memorized. Every track and every part of every track is memorized, so I can grab, literally, any record and make it fit.”
The genesis of the “Exhibitionist” project is rather strange, though. Mills asserts that his hyperactive technique is a response to the declining attention span of the average listener. Then, almost naïvely, he wonders why, at so many of the parties he plays, people just stop in front of the DJ booth and stare at his hands. For the past several years, he’s wished to integrate visuals into his performance, claiming that staring at a knob-twiddler can be dull. This did lead to a highly acclaimed live-mixed score to a screening of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2000 and 2002. But his recent experiments involve multiple videos of, once again, Jeff Mills DJing. Perhaps he can add this to his many unique abilities: he’s the first self-effacing exhibitionist. But he presses this idea further. Lately, at some live performances, he’s been mixing into and out of his own DVD of “Exhibitionist,” screwing the margins between live and recorded music into what postmodernists might call a quantum headfuck. Sadly, technical considerations will prevent such self-reflexive shenanigans at Vision this Saturday, at what–unbelievably–is his first live Chicago show. “I just live and work here,” he explains, “and I’m on the road so much when I come home I’m always playing catch-up at the studio.” Our dumb luck to be the center of the electronic-music universe.
(2004-03-25)
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