Apologies for the rather long wait for part 2 of this short series, it won’t be so long until part 3 we promise. There’s not much intro needed to (cliché as it is) one of the godfathers of techno music. Incase you do, check out the informative intro in part 1. In this transcript (part 2 of 3) of a recent interview he has given to the Red Bull Music Academy Radio. 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
His Jeffness
Other than my trip to Berlin to perform with Final Cut we did not have too much information as to what Europe was like. We could only hear what Kevin, Derrick and Juan were saying about what was happening in the UK, Belgium and places like that. It was the time when the invention of the fax machine had just come out, we thought that that would be an interesting way to communicate with people. So we developed a way of communicating through the fax machine by distorting letters and images. We knew early on that there was a lot of potential for a certain type of fan base so we got into merchandising and started making t-shirts. We treated that at the same level as the music – we started exploring.
It wasn’t until maybe about a year after that we had the opportunity to go to Europe together as a unit. So for a year we were working blindly, we were working off of what we imagined Europe would be like. We thought that America would be the same as Europe. We were working with Urb magazine on the West coast and Billboard magazine in New York. It wasn’t until we got a call from a guy whom neither of us really knew, we knew of him, we knew about him. Joey Beltram called us and introduced himself. He said he had just got back from Belgium and had played one of our records and it was doing really good, he had played it to a crowd of thirty thousand people and we should make more things like that. We were like, “Who the hell is Joey Beltram?”, but “OK” so we took his advice, make more things in that direction and see what happens.
Military attire in early Underground Resistance days
We found a medium of attire, which happened kind of naturally. I was dressing that way anyway at the time, some of it comes from Final Cut which was really in that direction, our attire was really more military. Some if it comes from Mike ['Mad' Mike Banks], and the job that he used to have. He used to put people out of their houses, he was part of a team of guys that used to go to a house when someone didn’t pay their bills and he would physically move the people out. So he would have to dress in that way, he wasn’t a police officer, but very close to it. He had that type of experience so we mixed it together. We were both very much into hip hop, Public Enemy and all those other things so we kind of adopted that. We got a couple of offers to perform in New York at the Limelight and a couple of other places. We thought that maybe it would be interesting to hide our faces, so that people had no idea. They wouldn’t look at us as if we were a group of black guys and the music would stand out more than what we look like. It’s America so it’s very big on pop culture, it’s very easy to conclude what we are by what we look like – this is just a country that really excels in that. We thought that by taking that away we would put more emphasis on the sound and what the music is.
Hood, Mills, Banks
Robert Hood came in, we hired him as an assistant to work within the label at administration. He was a rapper, he was a hip hop rapper at the time. So I think we somewhat influenced him when he first came, he was really into rap. We were like, “That’s fine. But your message must be positive!” We’re not into that certain type of rap. So we brought him in and he started to work for us. We set him up with his own setup to produce music. We taught and showed him how to record it how to program it. He began to work on projects with us (with Mike and I) and then eventually started his own label called Hardwax. We worked with him a little bit to get that label started and then he took it on himself. In a week we could produce maybe twelve to twenty tracks and so we decide to do something different, something we don’t remember or didn’t hear coming from Detroit at that time. Things that we more experimental. So we decided to designate so much time to producing compositions in that way, exploring and using the equipment and machines in different ways. We decided on a name of the project as X for experimental. We would treat it somewhat like a college report, your instructor would give you a subject and you would have to report so we adopted this 101, 102, 103 as if it were a paper. So the first project was X-101, there wasn’t really any concept we just wanted to see if Mike, Rob and I could work together in this way – if we were all on the same page. It went really well so we decided to create X-102. This time we had the idea that maybe this release should really be about something connected to all people, not just certain cultures. We chose the Rings of Saturn.
