On an album inspired by the psychological effects of trauma, the Detroit techno pioneer and science-fiction storyteller pursues his search for new frontiers that lie far from the dancefloor.
In techno, Jeff Mills is one of one, and he continues to move further from the genre norm. A remarkably prodigious icon who remains deeply associated with Detroit (though he splits his time between Paris and Miami), the 62-year-old DJ/producer is unwilling to be bound to the sounds and ideas that once defined him. A long-time sci-fi adept, he continues to use the language of techno—much of which he almost single-handedly pioneered—to comment on present-day dystopias or suggest new potentialities for anyone still willing to listen.
Though Mills’ time as a turntable wizard, Underground Resistance co-founder, and techno’s ultimate ambassador and autodidact informs every inch of his music, the context of his work has stretched beyond dance culture into something wider and headier. Mills’ compositions are humanist and often highly collaborative, and created in a self-imagined environment (Black American future music gone global, fluent in advanced technology and showing Borgesian comfort with the boundlessness of storytelling), with an eye to continuously revolutionizing the milieu they came from. He remains a dance festival headliner (though, pointedly, very rarely in America), yet the stimulation behind his vast recorded output seems more focused on the mind than the ass.
The EyeWitness, Mills’ second album of 2024 and one clearly reflecting the dark night of today’s human soul, is a good opportunity to hear how an electronic- and dance-music originator pushes the fruits of his legacy toward a more imaginative discourse. (It’s also one that’s easier to hear, period: After years of being unavailable on streaming platforms, the full-length releases on Mills’ Axis Records are now an easy click away.) It is a set of listening techno that, according to Mills’ liner notes, addresses the effects of shock and trauma on the contemporary condition. That The EyeWitness may have (almost) nothing to do with dancing reflects Mills’ belief that techno’s purpose and history are grounded in principles of future freedoms, intellectual mysteries, and cosmological phenomena, rather than mere physical reaction.
