Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it - “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very nearly as long.
Back when Mills was part of Underground Resistance in the early 90s, releases would regularly come with gnomic statements or manifestos referencing interplanetary maps or lost continents, and he’s still very much at it. The text on this record imagines a majority female, spacefaring human race of 2097, escaping an Earth rendered uninhabitable by sonic vibrations in a space fleet to Vega – a star referenced before in Mills’s personal cosmology.
The music is some of his moodier work. It is recognisably techno in parts, but the sounds, chords and structures being used as are at least as much referencing the 21st century avant garde – serialists, Ligeti, Xenakis, serialists – as filtered via sci fi soundtracks. There’s very little use of high frequency (particularly cymbals), which adds to the air of foreboding and mystery, and certainly helps with the sense of endless cosmic darkness. As that might suggest that doesn’t make it the easiest entry point to Mills’s oeuvre.
Then again, you probably know whether an album with a 14-minute-plus exploration of shimmering discord called “March of the Purple Orbs” is likely to float your boat. With at at least nine Mills albums and 14 EPs in the 2020s alone, the trepidatious might be better set to start with the 2022 Latin jazz collaborative project Wonderland or the continuing series of soulful Millsart EPs. However if you are ready for 76 minutes of meditations on doom, hope and endless empty space, it’s hard to imagine you’ll find anything further out there this year.
Listen to "Equinox":
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