Jeff Mills Live + On the Record

INTERVIEW + DISCOUNT CODE: Mills' Tomorrow Comes The Harvest plays Pioneer Works on Wed. 10/8. Read an excerpt of my 2019 interview with the Wizard, and get 15% of a Highest Recommendation show

On Wednesday, October 8th, Tomorrow Comes The Harvest—the electronic improvising trio led by iconic techno futurist Jeff Mills, and featuring keyboardist Jean-Phi Dary + tabla player Prabhu Edouard—lands at Pioneer Works for a very special one-night-only performance. Though Mills is among America’s most revered electronic musicians, a proud co-founder of Detroit’s Underground Resistance whose DJ’ing star went stratospheric partly due to his early-90s residency at The Limelight in Manhattan, his appearances in New York have, lately, been far too rare. Especially his live-band shows. (The sole previous New York appearance by the France-based Tomorrow Comes The Harvest, at BAM in May of 2024, featured Mills and other musicians because Dary and Edouard weren’t able to get U.S. visas.)

Which is all to say that there are few recommendations Dada Strain can make which are higher than the one for this evening. If you love electronic and improvised music anywhere near as as much as I do, and you have no plans on Wednesday, I want you to see this show. So much so that I reached out to the folks at Pioneer Works and procured a 15% ticket discount for Dada Strain readers. Apply the code DADA15 during checkout. (Wed 10/8, 8p @ Pioneer Works, Red Hook - $40) Thank you to Justin, Sruly and Yume.

The occasion of Mills and Tomorrow Comes the Harvest’s appearance in Red Hook also gives me an opportunity to share my favorite interview I did with Jeff, for AFROPUNK in February of 2019 (while trying to book him to play the Bklyn festival). In hindsight, it is especially Dada Strain-centric (two years before his project was born), tackling improvisation and community from the perspective of an already legendary figure who kept breaking new ground. Our conversation took place in the wake of numerous Mills projects that found Jeff outside the club DJ booth and the straight-ahead techno environment, collaborating with live musicians. There was his duo album with the late Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and keyboardist Dary (named, not coincidentally, Tomorrow Comes The Harvest). There was also the quartet records he’d just started making with Spiral Deluxe, featuring his old Underground Resistance partner Gerald Mitchell on keys, Yumiko Ohno on synths and Kenji Hino on bass. Both albums are deep wonderful expressions of global electronics, rhythm and improvisation music, a direction Mills has continued storming.

Below is an excerpt of that conversation with Jeff Mills; if interested, read the interview in full at AFROPUNK (February 2019), as it goes into many different fascinating directions. (And if you’re interested in more of Jeff’s history and philosophy, listen to this excellent interview he recorded for First/Last Party on Earth, a podcast hosted by the Canadian electronic musician Tiga.)

(EDIT 10/8: Another bonus conversation: the night before the Pioneer Works show, the mighty producer/DJ Russell E.L. Butler hosted Mills for a great hour-long conversation on The Lot Radio.)

PIOTR: Spiral Deluxe is kind of a straightforward electronic jazz quartet. How did that idea develop and how did you approach it?

JEFF MILLS: In junior high and high school in Detroit, I’d always been into fusion jazz. (I’ve always been into it actually.) I used to play percussion and drums all throughout my youth, up until the point that I started to become a DJ around the late ’70s. And I always kind of wanted to get back to be into, a band — I came close at times, with Underground Resistance, and with The Final Cut in the early ’80s. But I still kept this idea through all these decades to form a band of musicians whose main function was to solo and to improvise, and that just about everything would be captured on the spot, in real time. So I finally got the opportunity a few years ago to form something as a test and it worked very well. Immediately I decided to move on it, finding the musicians that would form this group. In ways, the members of this band, we conflict at times because of our normal interest; but at times, there are lots of things that really tie together our perspectives on jazz, on dance music, on conceptual music, on experimental things. Luckily, it works. So once I realized that, then we begin to really plan and to kind of lay out the blueprint for what we’re going to do.

Even though this quartet first played and recorded in 2015, it’s pretty zeitgeist-y for you to be engaged in group improvisation at this time, as it feels like numerous musicians are flexing their muscles that way. Do you look at the cultural landscape when choosing where to go with your projects? Previously, it’s always struck me that you work to your own timetable rather than working off of what audiences want or where the creative world is going.

I think that it’s safe to say that I’m working in parallel with everyone and everything. I can be active and explore very diverse things, but I keep in mind the different levels of what’s going on with music in general. I’m aware of what’s happening in jazz, in hip-hop, of what’s happening in dance music and classical and film soundtracks. It’s not possible to be narrow-minded and closed-minded when you do this. So it makes perfectly good sense for me to produce something like [the NTS show] The Outer Limits — in a way it’s actually helping, by kind of widening my mind even more. And I have to assume that if I’m like this, other people are too in various ways. And I think that what we’re doing is creating the building blocks for what’s going to happen in the decades to come.

I think that the fruit of someone like myself doing all these things — exploring music with Tony Allen, then doing a classical performance, then a radio show, then DJ’ing, then working for film soundtrack — will have an effect. I know, because I watched artists when I was young, and it had an effect on me, and it had an effect on my friends, and on people we now really look to in Detroit techno. So this idea of reaching into other disciplines and art-forms is somewhat like a mechanism, a creativity I expect will trickle down to other people who are looking at what’s going on. And it doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be connected to music. It can be any other type of artists or anyone that creates for a living. Like, fashion. Right now, I’m working with a fashion brand, for [Paris] Fashion Week. So I’m quite excited, just to speak personally, about the time that we’re in because I can see the roots taking place and how people are reacting to what’s going on.

That’s a good segue, because Paris, from what I understand, is central to how you and Tony Allen started making music together. Tell me a little bit about that?

Yes. I met Tony because I was here, and he had rented out a studio in Paris, and was inviting artists to come into the studio just to jam, to record, to see what would happen basically. I was more curious about just meeting him and talking to him, than actually playing. But before I went, I listened to a lot of his music because, of course I’m not going to go into that situation not knowing what to expect. I realized from listening to Tony’s music that the way he uses his drums is so unique and unusual that going in as an electronic musician who just programs machines is not going to be enough. I thought I would need to create a new way to work, to be just as spontaneous as he is, or to find a way to be able to answer, basically, what he does on the drums. So I came up with this way of programming the drum machine pretty much on the fly, using the functions of the machine in a different way, where I can be just as free as he is, and I could think of ideas and produce them the same way I drummer does. And being a drummer myself when I was young, I still retain the sense of what it feels like when a drummer plays. So I could get a little bit closer. So not knowing if it was going to really going to work, I went to the studio and we met and began to play, and Tony immediately noticed that it was a bit different than playing with other electronic musicians, and more like playing with another musician. So very quickly we kind of clicked in terms of what we could do spontaneously. And there was the beginning of the common thread that we both worked off of.

You have now mentioned a couple of times creative freedom and its meaning, to you and maybe to people who will follow you. I think freedom and a kind of sonic and social openness that electronic music culture has traditionally promoted, is one of the reasons people get into this music. Yet as its popularity has grown, it feels like that idea of openness has regressed, that there’s a reactionary wing — audiences, critics — who are not looking for you to expand what you do. How much of that stuff do you engage with? And how do you keep focused on the work that you want to do?

Over the years, I have used the aspect of a certain type of disconnect from the audience. Earlier in my career there would be times when I would periodically, purposefully not go in the same direction as everyone else, just to create contrast. But then I would always, you know, kind of go back to the norm — using the 909 [drum machine], or using the TB303 [bass synth] or making music about a particular subject. Eventually, it had just gotten to a point where I began to disconnect more than actually connect. Around 2004-2005, I was really convinced that too many of us, producers and DJs, were basically doing and saying the same thing. The audience was getting to the point where they were expecting the same message. And I realized that if this continues, there will be too few new ideas and people will assume that we have reached a point where our job, our industry is spent, that we’ve done everything we can do.

It was around that time that I decided to just completely disconnect. So for about four years I kind of did not look at the industry, even though I spent a lot of time making music and reading a lot of science fiction and doing a lot of research, I totally avoided any contact with it and just began to create a different type of music, based on science, science fiction, space science, subjects that were much bigger, space travel and galaxies and universes and planets. I worked on trying to describe these things as best as I could in sound, learn how to make these comparisons. Around 2010, I was convinced that I had learned enough in order to be able to bring something new and different to the listener. And when I began to play out, there was a lot of ideas that we’re seeing now. Even now, I still have a certain amount of disconnect from the audience, so when I DJ, I prefer to start with the audience, but eventually, at a certain point, to let them go. My imagination and my mind kind of takes over, and I’m playing not to the audience, but towards a particular subject or a certain place. And the music I’m playing is basically describing what I’m imagining — that’s the best way that I could say. As I do that more and more, the disconnect gets further and further.

When I’m in the studio, I’m not thinking of the audience or the people at all; I’m thinking of a particular situation in the far future. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be dance music. I’m not thinking about how people are engaging what I’m doing. I’ve moved away from the showmanship, and phased the people out to be quite honest. Because I want to be able to make these presentations of music as colorful, as suspenseful, as dramatic as I can; and to be able to reach that, I can’t look at them while I do this. They’re on their own. I only meet with them in terms of the sound that I’m creating — and they have the sound. I don’t need to look at them for their approval and I don’t really care what they want me to play, because to be quite honest my mind is somewhere else. I can’t see the people, I’m looking at this machine [909], and I’m not connected to them when this happens. I can explore and play how I feel not.

I’m not looking for responses. I think what probably resonates and translates is that if people can see that I’m doing what I feel, then that should give them some initiative or some optimism that they can also do the same thing — or do it much better. Or explore even further. And so that freedom, that creative freedom is probably the most important thing that I can display. It’s not really the music, or the track, or the DJ set, not really the film soundtrack, or the orchestra performance. It’s not really those things, it’s the freedom that I’m using in order to be able to do these things. That’s basically what I… I’m trying to do as much of it as I can. I think that’s the most important thing I can do as an artist.