Photo by Jacob Khrist
Audio By Carbonatix
Lately, when Jeff Mills finds a break from his globe-trotting schedule as one of the most celebrated and in-demand DJs in the world, he comes home to Miami.
The techno legend tends to be more associated with Detroit, where he was born and became a one-time member of the epochal group Underground Resistance. He also lived in Chicago for many years in the ’90s. But with Midwestern winters being what they are, and after many visits to Miami starting in the ’90s, he and his wife eventually decided to move for good.
“I found myself spending more time here than actually in Chicago,” he says from his home in Miami Beach. “We’ve been here for about for about seven years now.”
Legendary musicians moving to Florida isn’t anything new. Iggy Pop, a fellow Michigander, lives in South Florida. But both artists tend to keep to themselves and rarely perform in the area. It’s what makes both of their upcoming sets at III Points, taking place October 20-21 at Mana Wynwood, so thrilling.
Few figures are as legendary in the techno genre as Mills, whose influential DJing style is acclaimed the world over. Even his gear setup – four turntables or CDJs and a Roland TR-909 drum machine – is famous and well-studied. The DJ got his start on local radio in Detroit, playing a mix of genres that included hip-hop, synthpop, and techno’s early generation under the name “the Wizard.”
Eventually, a stint in Underground Resistance, the collective that blended the hard, mechanical, yet still funky sound of Detroit techno with radical, anti-corporate politics, shifted him toward the style he became famous for and defined in the ’90s. Minimal yet expansive, surgical instead of brutal, and always full of forceful vitality, he mixes fast and doesn’t settle on any one track for long.
And yet, he’s rarely seen at home. Techno may have been invented in Detroit, where he and other early DJs like Juan Atkins of Cybotron began listening to and making futuristic music in order to escape the economic and social breakdown of the city’s industrial decline. But outside of America, especially in Europe and the UK, the culture surrounding dance music has grown and sustained itself to a much deeper extent. The sheer amount of clubs, festivals, and other venues outside of the U.S. keeps Mills and other DJs “really, really, really, really busy.” Mills himself lives in Paris part-time just to keep up with bookings on the continent.
“America embraced it, but not in the same way as outside the country,” he explains. “There are offers but not to the amount and level of outside the country, so that actually keeps me away from the U.S. most of the year. And I only really get just a few opportunities to come back to the U.S. throughout the year, and this has been going on for decades.”
Witnessing a DJ set from Jeff Mills in Miami is a rare chance to watch a true master of the form at work in a place he rarely plays. But seeing him perform is well worth traveling for. Earlier this year, I traveled to Amsterdam to see him play with the jazz band Tomorrow Comes the Harvest. The band was started by Mills and his friend Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer famous for his work with Fela Kuti. When Allen died in 2020, Mills resolved to carry the band on in his spirit. The current ensemble includes French-Indian percussionist Prabhu Edouard and Guyanese keyboardist Jean-Phi Dary, along with other guest musicians and Mills playing percussion and programming the TR-909.
“Before I had started DJing, I was trying to be a musician, a jazz drummer. And I don’t think I ever lost that sense or wish to become that, even throughout the ’90s as a techno DJ,” he says. “I still wanted to play with other musicians, and if not play with them, then at least have conversations with them, to work together to make certain things happen.”
Mills’ project stems from these desires. He found himself wanting to blend his techno expertise with live instrumentation “to a point where there’s no compromising, where the musicians don’t have to tie themselves to a MIDI clock or some type of tempo that’s generated by a computer.” He wanted to work with musicians he could converse with in both the musical sense while performing and in a more literal sense. He looks for musicians who are “great talkers and always have something to add or something to say.”
“The more conversation we have, the more we get to know each other, the more interesting our performances become,” he says. “And this comes from my interactions and relationship with Tony Allen. Before performances, during rehearsals, whenever we would meet, we would often dive into these very, very long, complex types of conversations about just everything. And then, just moments up until we take the stage, we’re still talking even as we’re walking onto the stage, and then when we get behind our instruments, it’s just an extension of that.”
Jeff Mills in Berlin performs as part of Tomorrow Comes the Harvest.
Photo by Thomas Ecke
It may not seem like it relates much to electronic music. But in both Mills’ DJ sets and his work with Tomorrow Brings the Harvest, one can sense a certain indescribable feeling in both the performers and the enraptured audience. In interviews, Mills sometimes describes his experience DJing as something like an out-of-body experience or a fugue state he doesn’t come out of until he’s back in his hotel. That embrace of an otherworldly, communal spirit that only music can provide comes out in our conversation when he encourages fellow DJs to “always play like it’s your last set.”
“It’s not about the audience, and it’s not about yourself; it’s about it. Right? It is it that is the reason why the people are there, and you became a DJ, to be the transfer of it,” Mills explains. “The industry of dance music and the financial part of dance music often becomes this obstacle and makes people believe that you have to be a certain thing or do a certain thing in order to be recognized, which is true to a certain extent. But the most important thing is about the atmosphere that a DJ is going to create – and not by dancing around, but what they’re going to do with the music. And if you are serious about that, and you don’t compromise, and you try not to be intimidated by it, and you stay focused, and you just concentrate, then you will begin to see why. I mean, really, truly begin to understand why this music is so special and why you should always take it very seriously. When people give you a few moments of their time for you to play music for them, you should always respect that.”
Oh, and one more thing. “Listen to other forms of music. Simple as that. Listen to as many different types of music as possible, then you’ll realize how unique electronic music is.”
III Points 2023. Friday, October 20, and Saturday, October 21, at Mana Wynwood, 2217 NW Fifth Ave., Miami; iiipoints.com. Tickets cost $169 to $599 iiipoints.frontgatetickets.com.
