Jeff Mills - LiveMix At Liquid Room, Tokyo

(Re-upped by request. Click on the picture to dowload.)

One of the things I find so intruiging about Detroit techno is the thougt of young black, (for the most part) middle class and quite well educated men listening not only to the New Pop/Synth Wave of Human League, Visage, Gary Numan or Depeche Mode, but also to the whiter-than-white sounds of post-industrial dance music. Especially with the 2nd and 3rd generation, there's a whole bunch of tracks on which the influence of Cabaret Voltaire, Belgian New Beat and Electronic Body Music by the likes of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb shines through. It always makes me wonder, how much this infatuation of young Black Americans with harsh European militancy mirrors the fascination ultra-aggressive hiphop and dancehall has for a lot of young, white, middle-class and often quite well educated Europeans.

Of the Detroit producers, Jeff Mills is probably the one most influenced by post-Industrial. He even started making music as a founding member of EBM-styled Band The Final Cut (though he left the group after the first lp) and especially his dancefloor-oriented tracks and his dj-sets lean towards a stark, noisy and relentlessly pounding sound. But it is counter-balanced by dense, heavily layered percussion providing a driving groove and thus resulting in a kind of bleak, futuristic and immensely funky mongrel-music, somehow sounding neither "black" nor "white" (speaking in cultural terms, of course). When the post-industrial aspects of the music takes over, Mills' dj-sets can be a bit dull and samey, but when he gets the balance right he's simply impeccable. Although Mills has done a fair share of more subdued, moody music full of wide-screen ambience I think that it's his dance tracks and djing where he shines the most.

LiveMix At Liquid Room is the second volume of the five-part Mix Up-series, released by Sony Japan to showcase the spectrum of techno music. Recorded entirely live at Tokyo club The Liquid Room on Oct 28 1995, this is a rough and rugged recording without any additional studio polish - there's even some noises and cheering from the crowd to be heard. It's a high energy affair, with Mills providing his trademark rapidfire mixing (38 tracks in just about an hour) and lots of banging, clanging voodoo percussion, often achieved through mixing two copies of the same record into each other. The general opinion on LiveMix is that it's on of the best dj mix-cds ever and after listening to it you can't really argue with that.

(Additional information: The booklet lists the recording date as Oct. 28 1995 from 3:00 am. Can't remember where it was, but a while ago I read on the net that Mills actually had another gig on Oct. 29 and that part 2 of the cd was recorded on that second night. Not that it matters much...)

NB: If anybody should have one of the other Mix Up volumes, I'd be quite interested in hearing them, especially Vol. 3 by Ken Ishii and Vol. 5 by Derrick May. The various volumes are constantly shifting in and out of print. At the moment, they are only available as quite pricey Japan-imports. So uploads would be greatly appreciated. ;-)

Discogs has a full tracklist and a little more info right here.