Next month, Mills returns to Knockdown Center for the first time since his headlining set at WIRE Festival’s 2023 edition. Club performances by Mills in the United States are a rarity; He once quipped that “America just isn’t interested in what I’m doing and never really has been,” and his last appearance in a New York DJ booth prior to WIRE was for The Bunker at Output on a chilly, January night in 2015. We’re proud to host him once more doing what he does best.

Mills’ career began as a radio DJ at the dawn of the ‘80s. Dubbed “The Wizard,” he was renowned both for his wide-ranging curation and flashy, technical mixing. “When I was younger,” he told RBMA, “I had this goal to be the best DJ in America. I was 17 years old, so I had this determination to be able to learn all the tricks that I could. I learned everything. How to spin behind my back, you know, the feet, the toes, everything, how to break the record down into syllables.”

Fierce competition between local radio stations created a unique opportunity for Mills to innovate. “Usually, a radio station will tell you what you have to play, and when you have to play it, and for how long,” he continued. But in an attempt to maintain an edge, “they gave us complete authority to play anything. The competition got really hot very quickly, and I needed to have music that the other guy couldn’t. I came up with the idea to bring live instruments into the studio and to actually make the music just prior to the show and actually play it during the show, and then never again. Soon that led to me actually making music along with three turntables in the studio for the actual show. Then I built a studio at home, to do the production there. Then I decided to make an album, and then one thing led to another…”

An interest in the then-nascent industrial music genre led to the collaborative Final Cut project, some of Mills’ first music to find wide release. More of a curio within the larger context of his discography, the Final Cut project nonetheless prefigures the mix of driving funk and claustrophobic tension that is the hallmark of so many of his greatest works.

Around the release of Final Cut’s Deep into the Cut album, Mills met Mike Banks, a bassist for Parliament and Motown. Both shared frustrations with the music industry. “What really pissed Jeff off…” Mike Banks explained, “they wouldn’t let him play Public Enemy. He’s on the main radio station in a mostly all black city, Latinos, and Arabs, and we can’t hear Public Enemy. So Jeff smelled a rat.” Both also shared an interest in techno. They soon began a collaboration that would quickly evolve into Underground Resistance.

UR is a lot of things: a music group, an artistic collective, a label, and an ethos of “sonic revolution.” “We thought that the original idea of Detroit techno was being lost,” said Mills. “We thought we should be bolder, that we should do everything that they failed to do.” Banks bluntly echoes this sentiment: “The whole major business, I’ll tell them right now, it’s a fake. Y’all listening to fake shit. You’re listening to one-tenth of what music could be. Your heroes are just bullshit. You need to make your own shit, put it in your own city, make your own club, put your own records out and somebody will come to it. You gotta have faith.” Check out this footage of an early Underground Resistance show in Europe with Jeff Mills DJing alongside Banks and others on synth and drum machine duty, with a young Robert Hood acting as hype man.

As he traveled more and more to Europe and pursued a residency at Peter Gatien’s Limelight in New York, Mills developed his technique. The riotous bombast of Underground Resistance’s earliest tracks was honed into a more coiled, tensile form. Waveform Transmission Vol. 1, his first solo album on Tresor, stands as one of techno’s most explosive and distilled entries. It’s up there with Black Sabbath’s s/t, Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Bad Brains’ ROIR Sessions as one of the great, game-changing debuts. He once commented that “a lot of the music that I make is rooted in tribal beats and African rhythms,” and beneath the raw rave stabs and churning noise, you can hear Mills reinterpreting Sub-Saharan percussive complexities through a Motor City, sci-fi lens.

Mills’ disciplined DJing also made him a definitive standard setter on the international circuit. Renowned for the speed of his mixing, Mills’ deep knowledge of competitive, battle rap tricks gave him a decisive edge, and he played with the urgency of a man possessed. Writing for Pitchfork in his 10/10 retrospective review of Mills’ landmark Live at The Liquid Room, Tokyo, Gabriel Szatan describes it as “a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be. The received wisdom of how to construct a club set—one song after another; build-up, breakdown—was obliterated by this lean, striking man mixing like a Spirograph… Records were piped in hot with phased doubles, scratches, stabs, rewinds, inverted frequencies, and hard stops, then torn from the platter without warning and discarded onto the floor, until you couldn’t be certain if this was dance music or a new frontier in free jazz.”

Drawing on his years as The Wizard, Mills also incorporated a Roland TR-909 drum machine into his live setup. The same defiant prowess that defines his DJing came into play in his 909 work, which he plays with the speed and precision of a concert pianist. If the evolution of DJing is contingent on creative misuse of available technology, Mills’ live drum machine manipulations extend this practice in unexpected, singular ways. Seeing him work the 909 is both mesmerizing, intimidating and inspiring. One wonders why so few artists have attempted to follow in his footsteps.

All this only scratches the surface. We haven’t even had time to get into his Axis label and Purpose Maker and Something In The Sky sublabels, his symphonic collaborations, "The Bells," "The Rings of Saturn," minimal techno (“If you put the needle at the beginning of the record and you stand back, somewhere within that time frame [of 2-3 minutes], someone is going scream. Because the music just doesn’t change.”), and much, much more.

But to hear Mills describe it, everything has evolved naturally, intuitively, rooted in a clear, personal vision of how music could be. “I wanted to be an architect. I always had this inner drive, this idea like, ‘OK, this is the way that we should all listen to music, this is the way that music should be received.’ It’s this ideology that I have, that keeps this drive going over and over again. I’ll probably never think that, ‘OK, we’re finally here.’ So, it’s that that keeps me going. Why? I don’t know. What pushes it? I don’t know.”

The through line that defines his work is one of unflinching creativity and integrity. Mills has made riveting, iconic techno anthems, some of the most searing examples of the genre at its peak energy, haunting explorations of deep space imagery and, at times, music of staggering beauty.

“The more I explore, I think less and less about the people and more and more about the content. Paying too much attention to the audience continues to drag me back to things that I know work. So, if I play snare drums or claps, the people raise their hands, it becomes a very predictable type of scenario. It’s much harder to then think in the other direction. So maybe I’m the first DJ to say it, but I’m willing to cut the connection with them in order to go further. It’s all in the process of trying to become more creative. It’s for them, but I don’t really want any connection. I don’t want to know what they think, I don’t want to know what they like, I don’t really want to hear any other producers’ music, I don’t want to hear their ideas. I only want to be able to go as far as I can with this music before I stop.”