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During a recent performance by Tomorrow Comes the Harvest that had some attendees dancing in the aisles at BAM\u2019s Howard Gilman Opera House, a thrilling rhythmic conversation began between the percussionist Sundiata O.M., who was playing African talking drums, and the Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills<\/a>, who tapped out beats on a Roland TR-909 drum machine. Over a 90-minute set, the musicians boldly blended techno, jazz and modern classical, embodying the Art Ensemble of Chicago\u2019s famous credo \u201cGreat Black Music, Ancient to the Future.\u201d<\/p>\n Tomorrow Comes the Harvest began in 2018 as a collaboration between Mills and the Afrobeat originator Tony Allen<\/a>, Fela\u2019s longtime drummer. Despite their stylistic differences, they created a sonic language \u2014 based around total improvisation, not typically a techno hallmark \u2014 that Mills found so fruitful, he wanted to continue it even after Allen\u2019s 2020 death. \u201cMy hope,\u201d Mills said, during an interview backstage, \u201cis that Tomorrow Comes the Harvest becomes an approach to play music \u2014 not always the same sound, but the idea of figuring it out while playing.\u201d<\/p>\n Mills has blazed a singular trail over the past four decades: from his 1980s roots as the Detroit nightclub and FM radio D.J. the Wizard to his early 1990s period with the politically conscious Motor City techno collective Underground Resistance to his solo work helping define the sleek, stripped-down minimal techno genre. While always known as a dazzling D.J., Mills has continually expanded his horizons beyond the booth, including on high-concept album projects that began with \u201cDiscovers the Rings of Saturn\u201d from the group X-102 in 1992, up through his new LP, \u201cThe Trip \u2014 Enter the Black Hole,\u201d<\/a> released last week on vinyl via his own Axis label.<\/p>\n Mills lifted Tomorrow Comes the Harvest\u2019s name from a phrase coined by the science fiction author Octavia Butler, who was describing the potential power of seeds, properly sown, to influence the future. The metaphor seems apt for Mills\u2019s entire career, which has inspired generations of electronic musicians, like Mali Mase, a 25-year-old D.J. and producer who releases music as Sweater on Polo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTo me, Jeff Mills is someone who exhibits mastery, not only in techno, but all forms of expressions he explores,\u201d said Mase, who spun a set dedicated to Mills during the 2023 edition of Dweller<\/a>, a Black-centered annual techno festival in New York. \u201cIt would be so simple for him to sit back and bask in the spectacle of his own greatness. Instead, he challenges the forms established, reinvents, and still beats it sicker than anyone on a drum machine.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At 60, Mills carries himself with a low-key cool befitting his role as one of techno\u2019s elder statesmen. In conversation he\u2019s thoughtful but soft-spoken, gently proposing visionary ideas between sips of tea. His stylish outfit \u2014 an olive velvet Jil Sander turtleneck with wide-legged pants by the design house Pet-tree-kor, accented by his recently dyed blond hair \u2014 seemed appropriate attire for the \u201cMan From Tomorrow,\u201d<\/a> the title of a 2014 French documentary about him. In a text message, the veteran Detroit house music producer and D.J. Theo Parrish called Mills \u201cthe example of how to carry yourself out of nightlife and into proper artistry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Trip\u201d is the soundtrack to a live multimedia production billed as \u201cthe world\u2019s first cosmic opera,\u201d which Mills and the avant-garde vocalist Jun Togawa presented last month in Tokyo<\/a>. The project \u2014 Mills\u2019s attempt to grapple with what might happen to humans journeying via spacecraft toward and through a black hole \u2014 expresses the potential distortions of time and reality through glistening ambience, propulsive percussion, swirling synth storms and interstellar sound effects.<\/p>\n Space travel is a running theme in Mills\u2019s work, a fascination that dates back to his childhood watching syndicated reruns of the 1960s TV show \u201cLost in Space.\u201d The Tokyo live presentation required nearly a year in preproduction, Mills said, employing dancers, choreographers and costume designers. He even went to Las Vegas to study casino floor shows, he said, so that he could better reimagine electronic music and how the audience might engage with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI was always into the more innovative part of music, the conceptual, because that\u2019s closer to comics,\u201d Mills said. \u201cI always had this idea that music should be like that: You should walk away with something after you hear it.\u201d<\/p>\n On the opening night of Dweller last year, Mills premiered the newest version of his soundtrack to Fritz Lang\u2019s 1927 silent sci-fi classic \u201cMetropolis\u201d (he\u2019d composed an earlier iteration in 2000), and found a receptive audience among the festival\u2019s young attendees. \u201cHe\u2019s a teacher, and I appreciate that his music provides space for thought, as well as providing a blueprint of how to inscribe music with liberatory potential,\u201d said Ryan C. Clarke, the festival\u2019s director of educational programming. \u201cWhen he was doing his mixing thing as the Wizard on WJLB, he might as well have been Charlie Parker at Minton\u2019s Playhouse. We\u2019re still coming to grips with the amount of complexity that he brought to the music.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Indeed, Mills is techno\u2019s Renaissance man. Besides \u201cMetropolis,\u201d he has created soundtracks and \u201ccinemixes\u201d for a number of silent films. He\u2019s recorded classical versions of his techno tracks with France\u2019s Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra, electronic jazz as the Paradox, and Latin jazz as the Zanza 22. Where Mills once hid his identity behind a balaclava back in his Underground Resistance days, last year he became the face of the German fashion brand Jil Sander\u2019s ad campaign, and provided the soundtrack for the unveiling of the Dior Men\u2019s fall collection in front of the Pyramids of Giza.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not fashion that I\u2019m interested in,\u201d Mills said. \u201cIt\u2019s people and how we\u2019re evolving. What we wear is an extension of who we are and who we\u2019d like to be. Clothing or a second skin shows our ambitions. It shows where we want to go.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mills began D.J.ing in high school, fooling around with his older brother\u2019s disco records, and by his late teens his skills were already worthy of his chosen nickname the Wizard<\/a>. By the time he was 20, he\u2019d made a reputation for himself spinning at Detroit clubs like Cheeks, and soon joined the Detroit radio station WDRQ. While there (and later at WJLB), he became a sensation for his dizzying, high-velocity mixes blending hip-hop, electro and industrial music on three turntables; Mills explained that WDRQ execs were so terrified that his pyrotechnic scratching would break a needle live on air, they put an emergency third turntable nearby, and he eventually just began to use all three.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1989 he joined up with the former Parliament-Funkadelic session musician Mike Banks and the rapper and producer Robert Hood in Underground Resistance<\/a>, techno\u2019s answer to Public Enemy, which espoused a philosophy of defiant D.I.Y. self-reliance. With the motto \u201cHard Music From a Hard City,\u201d the trio brought a new aggression to Detroit techno that proved a massive influence on the evolution of the German techno scene. In a text message, Banks described their global role as \u201csound ambassadors.\u201d<\/p>\n Mills left Detroit for New York to become resident D.J. at the Limelight, and then spent the next 30 years bouncing between Chicago and Berlin. A few years ago he moved his studio to Miami, though he spends most of his time in Paris. Recently, however, he and his wife also acquired an apartment in downtown Detroit, and he says he has a long list of projects he plans to initiate there. \u201cIt should be a city that spurs and develops ideas and creates them from the ground up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n