Jeff Mills Man From Tomorrow

ICA, London | 19 April

Jeff Mills’ audio-visual collaboration with French director Jacqueline Caux is a strange one: a distillation of sixty years worth of avant-garde cinema tropes that thuds up and down endless staircases, trudges through corridors and inserts itself into the back of a taxi with the Detroit pioneer, soundtracked by an entirely new score from the man himself.

Visually, sadly, it adds up to very little – repetition isn’t always significant, obscurification isn’t always enough to mask vapidity, difficulty isn’t analogous to quality. Mills’ audio contributions elevate it from grim experiment to admirable attempt: drivingly bleak minimal is the order of the day – a master of his craft, a genuine genius, Mills knows build is always preferable to release and he really makes us work for that first flat 4/4 – dotted with rumination on the future of techno, the future of space exploration, and the future of man himself. Mills has always foregrounded the sci-fi aspect of his music, always theorized about the connections between techno – a genre, lest we forget, that still manages to sound as eerily otherworldly now as it did when the Belleville Three changed everything all those years ago – and the friction between the limits of the known and the possibilities of that which we can only speculate about.

In the plush environs of the ICA we were treated to a Q and A with Caux and Mills. Given the amount of press he’s done over the years, the countless hours spent answering questions like “what’s your favourite club?”, Mills was understandably keen to do something a little different. He flipped it: we were the respondents, it was us under questions. Strolling up red velveteen steps in a gorgeously fitted, suitably spacey suit, microphone cable dangling behind him like a Vegas pro, he playfully asked us what we thought music would sound like in 2022, 2200, the year 3000, tried to get us to examine our relationship to techno – is it entirely functional, can we theorize about it, can we intellectualize it and assess it as something that isn’t just for club play only – situated us in a liminal space somewhere between the academy and the Funktion-Ones. To hear one of music’s most forward of thinkers in full flow made up for the slightly hokey film that brought us here in the first place.

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Words: Josh Baines