Jeff Mills has been chasing the sound of the future for most of his life. From legendary DJ gigs and mix shows in his native Detroit when he was known as The Wizard to co-founding Underground Resistance along with “Mad” Mike Banks in the ’80s, Mills has painted techno’s canvas with the broadest of brush strokes.
Musically, his rock-solid, pioneering output is vast and there are too many landmark releases to mention — 1992’s Waveform Transmission Vol.1 and 1995’s The Purpose Maker is a good place to start for the uninitiated. Mills’s 1997 opus “The Bells,” a ferocious tribal track, is his most ubiquitous but nonetheless one of the genre’s finest moments.
Mills’s musical odyssey has taken to him to far-flung corners of the world. Since the ‘80s he’s juxtaposed gigs poised behind three decks and a Roland TR-909 drum machine at raves, clubs, festivals with a four-month residency at Paris’s globally acclaimed museum Le Louvre and recording Blue Potential with the 70-piece Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006. Then there’s the ongoing collaboration between techno pioneer Mills and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen that dates back to 2016, when they played at a jazz club in Paris.
During his residency at Le Louvre Mills began flirting with the idea of performing with a band. A drummer from an early age, he saw the band format as an opportunity to reconnect with his musical past and explore other styles of music. The result of his vision is Spiral Deluxe, an improvisational quartet he helms with bandmates Yumiko Ohno on Moog synth, Kenji “Jino” Hino on bass and Gerald Mitchell on keyboards.
Fresh from releasing the band’s debut release, Voodoo Magic on his Axis label, Mills tells us that “after the first 30 minutes into our first rehearsal, I knew we had something special! It had felt like we had been playing together for years.” Continue Reading →
