YOUR CHOICE: JEFF MILLS
Your choice is another techo stalwart, Jeff Mills who with Mike Banks set up the influential and radical Underground Resistence label.
Jeff Mills (born 18 June 1963 in Detroit) is an influential techno DJ and producer. In the 1980s, Mills was an influential radio DJ on WJLB under the pseudonym “The Wizard.” In going on to create his own music Jeff Mills is credited with laying the foundations for the highly influential Detroit techno collective, Underground Resistance, alongside ‘Mad’ Mike Banks, a former Parliament bass player. Dressed in uniforms with skimasks and black combat suits, they were ‘men on a mission’, aiming at giving techno more content and meaning.
Mills would never leave UR officially, but later on he still went his own way. He moved to New York and after a short stay in Berlin (Tresor) ended up in Chicago. There in 1992, with fellow Detroit native Robert Hood, he set up his most important record label, Axis, aiming for a simpler more minimal sound than most of the techno being produced in those years.
His albums and EPs are mostly separate tracks of his compositions, which Mills would mix into the live DJ sets for which he became a legend. Tracks are almost chopped to bits to showcase the strongest fragments for his relentless sound collages. He usually uses three decks, a Roland 909 drum-machine and up to seventy records in one hour. Two tracks from “Lifelike”:
Jeff Mills – Yantra
Jeff Mills – Detached
Jeff Mills MySpace
Buy product from Axis Records
