JEFF MILLS Vinyl & CDs

Review: ***B-STOCK: Missing obi-strip, product in working order***


Jeff Mills' The Trip is an audacious exploration of musical landscapes that marries the unexpected with the familiar, creating a sonic journey that is as unpredictable as it is moving. The album, which evolved from a concept first introduced in 2009, comes alive with its 2023 live performance in Tokyo, showcasing Mills' skill in weaving together elements from different musical eras and styles. In tracks like 'Contradiction (Silent Shadow Mix),' snippets of a pad burst through the mix, underscoring the tension and release that characterize the album. Jun Togawa's vocals add a raw emotional layer, enhancing the dramatic interplay between fast-paced drumming and evocative melodies. Unsettling yet serene, The Trip encapsulates a dynamic range of emotions, from the unnerving rush of 'When Time Stops' to the robust rock guitar in 'Long Radio.' This album is not just a collection of tracks but a narrative of perpetual motion and change, reflecting the thrilling unpredictability of life itself and the wonder of experiencing moments anew.

Review: Jeff Mills' The Trip is an audacious exploration of musical landscapes that marries the unexpected with the familiar, creating a sonic journey that is as unpredictable as it is moving. The album, which evolved from a concept first introduced in 2009, comes alive with its 2023 live performance in Tokyo, showcasing Mills' skill in weaving together elements from different musical eras and styles. In tracks like 'Contradiction (Silent Shadow Mix),' snippets of a pad burst through the mix, underscoring the tension and release that characterize the album. Jun Togawa's vocals add a raw emotional layer, enhancing the dramatic interplay between fast-paced drumming and evocative melodies. Unsettling yet serene, The Trip encapsulates a dynamic range of emotions, from the unnerving rush of 'When Time Stops' to the robust rock guitar in 'Long Radio.' This album is not just a collection of tracks but a narrative of perpetual motion and change, reflecting the thrilling unpredictability of life itself and the wonder of experiencing moments anew.

Review: Jeff Mills throws a spaghettifying curveball with latest EP 'The Trip'. Themed after the terrifying notion of entering a black hole, and likening this to the vicarious yet no less enjoyable illusions of grandeur that might go hand in hand with attending a Millsart rave, 'The Trip' has been routinely billed as "the world's first cosmic opera" (in its performance incarnation), and attempts to sonically answer the question as to what exactly happens when we cross that fateful event horizon, in ambitious, live-jam-born-recorded form. Via eight cosmic suites of terrifying techno wizardry (we'd expect nothing less from the Belleville 'blazer), Jeff Mills brings his originally live, light-eating vision to vinyl, nailing the cosmick perceptual horror of being "sucked in" through dust-bitten repetitions, descending mind-melts and dissociative-detuned fugues - the latter is most intriguing; 'When Time Stops' is the track of choice for exploring Mills' least repetitious and most improvisatory tendencies.

Review: As Jeff Mills returns to his third deepest obsession after 909s and UFOs, he presents an addendum to his renewed Metropolis Metropolis soundtrack which doubles down on three of the themes and gives them a different framework through the lens of a 12". This is still the more cinematic end of the Millsian spectrum, but there's some intensity which may well be of use to the more dramatic or daring techno DJ. 'The Dance Rebellion Starts' is plenty loopy and disorienting, full of interwoven, clangorous patterns which should stay nicely in time if you get them locked in the mix. 'The Other Maria' might well be the star of the show though, a nightmarish, ever-building drone piece with some half-time percussion stalking around the edges for guidance. 'Freder's Reality Switch' completes the picture with a slightly more stable synths n' strings piece, but there's still that innate sense of otherness Mills always threads into his work.

Review: It is now 23 years since Jeff Mills dropped his seminal Metropolis album, which was a shortened version of his electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang's Metropolis movie from 1927. Mills is a famous futurist but his sounds work perfectly on this project which is a symbiotic mix of compositions that makes for a nuanced representation of the plot and storyline. It's a testament to his skill that his album is utterly timeless and wholly absorbing, and likely always will be.

Review: Last year Detroit techno stalwart Jeff Mills launched a new project, The Zanza, an ever-changing collective of jazz, Latin and electronic musicians who could help him explore his love of a wide variety of styles and genres. Following on from the project's debut release, Mills has now delivered a debut album that once again proves not only his versatility as a producer, but also the vivid, widescreen nature of his musical vision. Wonderland is not an ambient or techno album - though it does contain multiple nods to the latter - but rather a hybrid affair that draws great influence from Latin music (and samba in particular), jazz in many forms, dubbed-out electro, jazz-funk and, on the rushing 'The Time Is Tight', organ and piano-heavy gospel house.