Spending time (and space) with Jeff Mills

I recently caught up with visionary Detroit techno producer Jeff Mills. You can read the result of our meeting in issue 127 of Electronic Sound magazine.

Mills earned himself the nickname 'The Wizard' when he rose to prominence in the so-called "second wave" of Detroit techno. He co-founded the influential techno collective Underground Resistance, and he's been putting out stuff on his own Axis Records for well over 30 years,

He has produced techno scores for numerous old films, perhaps most notably for Fritz Lang's Metropolis. He's collaborated with NASA and made a black hole-themed cosmic opera. He's basically a spaceman. I interviewed a spaceman.

Mills was a lot of fun to interview. His pedigree is undeniable, so it was always going to be an easy interview. Lots to talk about. When he got onto metaphysics and telepathy, I felt my brain expanding. This is a guy who got into comic books at an early age, and he's been having wild visions ever since. So much fun.

It's always an honour to have a cover feature in Electronic Sound magazine. This now gives me extra privileges as a hotshot journalist. I can barge into any concert with the phrase "don't you know who I am". I get to ride around in one of those sedan chair things. And I get a chufty badge, which is a normal badge that I've scrawled "chufty" onto.

Other artists featured in this issue include M, as in the famous M who did Pop Muzik fame, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark collaborator Claudia Brücken, and the quite brilliant Rival Consoles. Oh and Children Of The Bong too, whose trippy bleeps I was obsessed with in the '90s.

Blatant plug: get your Electronic Sound fix here.

Further Fats: Chosen Words: J is for Juan Atkins (2010)

Further Fats: It's just the sun rising (and being a bit too hot) (2020)

Best electronic albums of 2018: unsafe in the hands of Fat Roland

Time to shoot some more sonic ducks off the funfair wall of sound. Here is another selection of the many albums that didn't make the final top 20 – there are some big names here.

Warp Records' longest-serving act Nightmares On Wax returned with Shape The Future (Warp Records) for a mainstream take on trip hop spiritualism. Jeff Mills turned in a murder-thriller soundtrack on And Then There Was Light (Axis Records), giving us everything from Detroitian stomping to plaintive Rhodes. And considering its experimentalism, there were plenty of little hooks on Yves Tumor’s Safe In The Hands Of Love (Warp Records).

Leon Vynehall finally cracked open a debut album with Nothing Is Still (Ninja Tune), a fascinating ambient reflection on his grandparents. The 81-year-old Jon Hassell evoked strange technological spaces on Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (Ndeya). And there was never a dull moment on the box of tricks that was Syclops’s Pink Eye (Bubble Tease Communications) with its pick-and-mix attitude to dance music genres.

If you want something more robust, try these three. Blawan produced club thumpers with bite on Wet Will Always Dry (TERNESC). Grime has never sounded so glistening as on Wen’s EPHEM:ERA (Big Dada). And Helena Hauff was as downright dirty, as ever, on Qualm (Ninja Tune) – no, that’s not your speakers distorting.

I hope you like these little side-visits as I count down the top 20 best electronic albums of 2018. Don't worry, we'll be back on the main tour bus shortly.





Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.

Store Street blues: waddling with the scrotes, the clubbers and the tokers

I'm trotting under a brick-clad bridge down what feels like a road to oblivion when a wiry scroat of a man asks me for money.
Or rather, he asks me for the time. Then money.
I put on my skint face, apologise and walk on. He summons all his fury and describes what he's going to to with my skull if I don't cough up cash.
With a dark but open street ahead, I hurry on to safety with his threats ringing off the brickwork behind me.
Store Street has never been my favourite road in Manchester. I have to make it safe somehow.
If only I'd had The Tattooed Bouncer with me. He was a vicious looking gentleman with ink all over his head, and he impressed me once at a Plaid gig by dragging a casual drug toker out of the Music Box by his throat.
When I say 'impressed', I mean 'terrified'.
But sadly he has died, a claim the deceased bouncer has since owned up to according to local news reports. Fat use for next time I waddle down Store Street.
Here's another idea for making Store Street safe. When there's thrills and pills in abundance, you don't get threats of violence, so maybe someone would be kind enough to convert the street into a clubber's paradise.
Maybe, just maybe, we could bribe some of the great names to spin some plastic mp3s: Armand Van Helden, Layo & Bushwacka!, Dave Clarke, High Contrast, Jeff Mills, Aphex Twin.
I'm free this weekend, so it could run from then until, say, New Year's Eve. It's a crazy idea, and it will never happen. Hold on, the phone's ringing...
...yes? Store Street, yes. Behind Piccadilly train station.... they're doing what? The Warehouse what?
It seems my Store Street blues are over for a while. Maybe now I could walk arm in arm / headlock with the Deceased Bouncer, with scroats fleeing in the other direction down my brick-clad road to oblivion.
Thank you, Warehouse Project: you are about to make the city a more magical place.