The Essential… Jeff Mills

Hail Jeff Mills: techno’s greatest ambassador, techno’s greatest believer, and arguably techno’s greatest innovator.

As he prepares to play Turin’s Club To Club festival this weekend, we salute the work of the Detroit native who, as both DJ and composer, revolutionised electronic music over the course of the 1990s. To those of you familiar with Mills’ work, the next 10 pages will simply jog your memory, and prompt you to fish out those prized, well-worn Axis and Purpose Maker 12″s from the depths of your collection. To those of you who’ve yet to fully acquaint yourself with the master, this is your indispensable route in.

Better still, Mills himself is your guide through the highlights of his peerless catalogue, commenting on each landmark release that we’ve selected, and on rather weightier issues too.

“I believe that our future won’t be here on Earth, but out there, in Space,” he opines. “Our future will consist of struggling to understand the unbelievable. Technology will makes many things possible, but re-calibrating the human mind is something more complex and the education needs to start now.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2011 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Features, Lists, Top Slider and tagged with , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

  • Jean Michel Genre

    “Arguably”…you’d need some damn good arguments to convince me of that…Speedy J, AFX, Carl Craig, Surgeon, Hawtin….I find him a bit samey although ‘The Bells’ in undeniably brilliant. What’s with the sleeve notes in his CD’s too? Some serious twiddle in there… 

  • Mnmlmalaysia

    Techno music is nothing without him

  • Raul Cornejo

    A bit sad to think that he spent 15 years without releasing anything worthy of the adjective “essential”. Slightly unfair, I’d say… even more so because Every Dog Has Its Day is Mills at his best in terms of diversity.

  • Damiencain

    Who else rocks 3 turntables/cdjs and drum machine like him? No one. When will someone step up? Looks like never.

  • Damiencain

    He deffinitly has his ‘own’ sound. Yes a lot of his tracks are samey, but he puts them all together so well. Nobody else can use his tracks in a set like he does. Steps to enchantment is my favorite.

  • Jeffmills

    dunno if this is just my computer btu why would u put up just pictures of the 12s and not stream the tracks?

  • hobo

    He’s the father of techno!

  • Rwrobertwalsh

    hav patience my sun

  • X-head

    Does anyone know the original source of the comment attributed to Jeff Mills, please?

Featured Events

End of Year Lists

Advertisement