Jeff Mills is undoubtedly one of the founding fathers of techno music. In this transcript (Part 1 of 3) of a recent interview he has given to the Red Bull Music Academy Radio, you can read all about him starting out on Detroit radio in the mid-80’s, meeting Parliament bassist “Mad” Mike Banks, the evolution of techno, Underground Resistance, traveling for the first time to Europe, Axis, rescoring Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, The Rings of Saturn and treading that careful line between dance-music and high art. Click the record label art to get an idea of the tracks Mills is talking about with links to relevant Youtube videos. Listen to the radio show in full here or download it here. The accompanying tracklist is as follows:

Jeff Mills – Landscape (Utopian Dream) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Blue Print – Tresor
Underground Resistance – Eye of the Storm – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Predator – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Base Camp Alpha 808 – UR
Underground Resistance – Final Frontier – Underground Resistance
X-101 – G-Force – Tresor
X-102 – Ground Zero (The Planet) – Tresor
X-102 – The Rings Of Saturn – Underground Resistance
Jeff Mills – Perfecture (Somewhere Around Now) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – The Bells – Axis
Jeff Mills – Transformation B (Rotwang’s Revenge) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Robot Replica – Tresor

My name is Jeff Mills I originate from Detroit, I live in Chicago now, my main profession is to produce music and also to DJ. I try to explore as many different things as I can on behalf of electronic music. I was a street DJ doing residencies at many clubs and happened to be in one club during a live “simulcast” I think it was back in 1982 or ‘83. It went so well that I was asked if I could come to the station to do an audition which I did and luckily everything went well so I was offered a job to do a radio show. I assumed the name The Wizard and curated a radio show for about 10 years. At that time the hip hop culture had really moved into the urban centres of the country in America. So much so that it was really dominating the clubs. The clubs that had the DJs that were remnants left over from the disco era and the funk era, these DJs were occupying all the dance clubs in Detroit but when hip hop came, young DJs like myself were somehow replacing those DJs that had been there for years.

You had to be very fast, you had to be technically really advanced, you had to learn the tricks that were happening from DJs from other parts of the country like New York or LA. I was lucky enough to have the time to really master these things and when the radio came it just broadened the idea of being a DJ that was very quick and could transform and do all those kind of things, to manipulate the music to the point that you create another version. I was one of those kids that did that. We were just beginning to start to get the very early releases from Def Jam, Cooky Puss, early Schoolly D things. So I was mixing that with funk, with Chaka Khan, Billy Ocean, I remember having to mix with Millie Vanilli, mixing all these things together with rock and industrial with anything I could get my hands on that was really happening in the street.

I was a DJ for many years before I went to radio, I had done residencies every day of the week at three or four clubs. At the time I was so busy as what we used to call a ’street DJ’. I really didn’t have an off day. I have always had this skill of programming of being able to cue records very quickly and smoothly, to manipulate three turntables and tape machines were things I learned very early. Now I still have the ability to do those things but just the style of music really dictates how I approach it. As music over the years has gotten more minimal and faster in tempo and almost to the point where you are dealing with individual tracks like you would in a recording studio, so has the technique that you apply in order to program it for people. Three and four turntables has become a way of dealing with that. Not so much reorganising compositions, but using frequencies so you hide sounds within the track by manipulating the EQ and layering, and things like that.

Someone from the radio station I worked at, she said she knew a young guy who was in the studio and wanted to make a hip hop record and if I could go by to the studio and help him. As a favour to her, I did. I went by the studio and it was Anthony Srock and he was a big fan of Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and he wanted to make something in that direction. I said, ok, and we started working together. I wasn’t in the group I was just helping them at the time but what happened was that I was doing so much production I should have some interest in what we are doing here. We became good friends as a result of working in the studio and then we eventually decided let’s just get together and make more music like this and so the band Final Cut was put together. We produced the album Deep In 2 The Cut and I didn’t have much pieces of equipment like keyboards and things like that. The only person I knew with a lot of keyboards was Mike Banks. He was in a band where two bands had merged together and had merged their equipment together as well. So they had lots and lots of keyboards and those type of things. So I used to call them up and ask them if I could borrow certain keyboards to produce certain things for this album that we were working on. So he would come over to my apartment and bring the keyboards, would listen to the music that we were producing and thought it was very interesting. The album came out and we went to Berlin for a performance, it was ok. But I realised this kind of music, this kind of sound is not something I could really grasp onto. I left the group Final Cut, Tony Srock had wanted to take it in a less danceable more gothic kind of way. I wanted to stick to dance music so I left the group.

Somewhere around that time Mike’s band had left to go to LA, they had disbanded as well. Mike and I had kept in contact so we began talking about the idea of getting together, merging our studios together. He had already thought of the name Underground Resistance but he didn’t do anything with it. He registered the name, asked me if I thought it was great, I said yeah let’s do it. And that’s how we started. I was in college – in school and he worked during the day so we could only record at night. So we would record literally from 8 o’clock at night until 7:30 in the morning. We had so much equipment that we could produce multiple tracks at the same time. We had so many tape machines and multitrack machines and so many keyboard setups. Our studio was in the basement of Mike’s mothers place so we had taken the entire basement and set up small work-stations. We would be working on Sonic EP in that corner, and here would be Yolanda, something here, something else here… That’s one of the ways we would produce so much music at the same time.

I had lots of experience with editing in cutting tape. He had lots of experience in playing keyboards, MIDI and all those things. We just merged. I had brought some compositions from some of the things I had produced and he had brought some older works and we merged those two together, and from there comes the diversity of the tracks when we first started. There were things like Waveform EP which were very dark that comes probably from the Final Cut direction. And there were things like Yolanda that came from some of the things he was doing with his band before we got together. So we could produce lots of different types of things from very early on. We knew that we could produce in multiple directions. We just worked endlessly, once we had finished with something we would start on something immediately. We would never stop really.

More to come in Parts 2 and 3. From that Waveform EP…

Red Bull Music Academy Radio

Axis Records – Official Site

Underground Resistance – Official Website

Tags: Anthony Srock, Chicago, Def Jam, Detroit, Interview, Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks, Production, Radio, Red Bull Music Academy, Techno, The Wizard, Underground Resistance, Yolanda

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