Recorded at Tokyo nightclub Liquidroom in 1995 and released as a live set in 1996, Jeff Mills’ Live at the Liquid Room is considered as nothing less than a techno Rosetta Stone, a key piece of sonic architecture that taught other producers how to create, harness and play the genre.
In 1996 Mills was 23 years old and already a luminary of the genre. Born and raised in techno’s hometown of Detroit, Mills had cut his teeth in industrial and rock bands before shifting his focus to electronic music, ultimately becoming a pillar of the then burgeoning scene, a position solidified by his time living in Berlin.
30 years later, Mills sits in the lobby of an expensive hotel in downtown Los Angeles on a bright SoCal Monday morning. His outfit is understated chic, his presence his calm, the depth of his eyes signal the multitudes within him, with his work over the years spanning music, film and conceptual art that contemplate the ineffable magic of the dancefloor, but also space, nature and life itself.
Widely considered one of the greatest DJs and producers of all time — although as Mills will say here in the hotel lobby, he believes such rankings have pushed DJ culture off course — he’s in L.A. for his current Live at the Liquid Room anniversary tour.
As such, yesterday in a hot downtown warehouse, a crowd of clubbers on folding chairs watched a new documentary about the set that features interviews from Mills and others who were there. Mills then got behind the decks to show us all how it’s done. The crowd spanned fresh faces to grey-haired heads, all of whom came to pay homage amid a 60-date tour that’s taken Mils across Europe, Asia and North America, with upcoming dates in South Africa, China and Australia. Thus far, every show has sold out.
Here, Mills talks about Liquid Room and how consciously forgetting every set he plays makes it possible for him to continue on.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what is the setting like?
I’m in Los Angeles, California, and the weather is, from what I can see, perfect. Sunny, clear, not many clouds in the sky. But that’s expected in Southern California this time of the year.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
I think it was a 45″ single of Elton John‘s “Philadelphia Freedom.”
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My mother was a housewife and modeled and did other things, and my father was a civil engineer. Growing up in Detroit and being connected to the music industry isn’t a crazy type of wish, because the city is rich with music and has had a lot of success stories like Motown and rock. Very famous artists come from Detroit, so when you tell your parents you want to become a musician, you’re given a little bit more leeway. They still would’ve liked if I’d gone to college to have regular job, I’m sure. But I think when I got my own radio program in the early ’80s, that’s when they thought, “Well maybe it’s a bit serious.” So they kind of shut up after that.
4. What’s the first non gear thing that you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
I bought myself a watch in ’86 or ’87. I was DJing a lot. In Detroit I was doing three or four residencies at the same time. It was approaching my birthday in June, and I was working so much that I kind of slept right through my birthday. The next morning, I woke up and said, “This is crazy. I’m working so hard and I have nothing to show for it.” So I went out and bought a watch.
[Rolls the sleeve of his sweater up to reveal a gorgeous Rolex.] That’s it. I wear it, although not all the time. It’s the oldest thing that I own.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what album would you give them?
I would give them Steely Dan’s Aja, because you can learn a lot from from the musicianship, from the technique, the recording, the storytelling, the sound quality is incredible, the album cover, the title, the tracks titles, the ambiguous way [Donald] Fagan is with the lyrics, the chord structures.
6. In the Live at the Liquid Room documentary, you talked about your track “The Bells” as one that shifted the momentum of the set and the night. You said that brought the dancefloor “to a place of no return.” How does that track achieve that thing, and why is it something you wanted to do?
Conditioning. It’s for being played at certain times of the night, almost to the point that people begin to understand that it’s really intentional. “When we hear him play it, it means…” It’s this nonverbal understanding about the connection to sound or rhythm or notes at a certain time in a certain context. It triggers a certain response. So after they hear that, I can elevate the pace of the night. It was designed for that purpose.
7. You also talked about “building a chain” with the set list and knowing where you wanted the set to go and mentally being many steps ahead of what you’re playing in the moment. How is your mind able to do one thing while your hands are doing another?
DJing at a higher level than just mixing records together is quite complex. It’s like being an athlete, like a tennis player. You have so many things you need to think about at the same time, as time is moving forward. You literally have to split your mind into multiple parts, and you have to pay attention to each one of these things at the same time, so your peripheral sense becomes enhanced.
Every DJ who plays music over a certain amount of years develops this peripheral attention. I notice someone way over there. I notice something way over here. I notice you sitting here, and this person standing there. Your senses become much more attuned. In a club setting, you have to watch the audience. You have to listen to the ambience and the acoustics in the room. You have to think about what you’re playing now and what to do with that, and then you have to think about the chain of records that you’d like to get to. You need to prioritize what to do first and second and third.
So you develop this unique way of managing things within a certain period of time, and that actually carries over into your life as well. DJs are able to multitask and be very calm and very cool about it. I can make three albums at the same time. I can travel here, DJ, perform live, work on contemporary art, be married, cut the grass, fix my car, go shopping. That’s one of the benefits.
8. That sounds like a pretty big benefit, yes?
You also give up a lot. As a DJ at this level, for this long, to do this much, you do give up a lot of simple things. Like watching a TV program regularly is not possible because I’m traveling so much. I can’t play golf or tennis with friends regularly. Also family, it’s difficult to keep in regular contact if you’re moving around from country to country, city to city, for decades. You miss birthdays. You miss anniversaries. You miss many, many things.
9. Was there a fork in the road when you decided your career outweighed what you were giving up?
I think every DJ at a certain point is asked that question, or anyone in creative field. At a certain point you ask if you want a normal life, or if you want a career and to do what it takes to make that happen. I’ve played music for people all of my adult life. At this point, at 62, it’s so natural that I don’t even think about it. It’s not something I need to force myself out of bed to do. I don’t even think about what I’m going to play. It’s an afterthought, actually, playing for people.
It’s effortless, going from a serene setting into [a room with] 8,000 people and a huge soundsystem with flashing lights and chaotic atmosphere. Then I can go immediately from that back to the serene setting. That also affects your personality.
10. Were there tools you cultivated to make going from the club to the hotel room manageable and enjoyable?
A lot has to do with what you remember and memory. Many years ago, I began making an effort to purposely not remember. Like, if I don’t concentrate on seeing certain people in the audience or on someone’s face, I have less chances to remember that person. When I’m in a club setting, I’m looking at the audience, but I really don’t see a thing. It’s like looking in the ocean, and you see the waves, but you’re not looking at one particular wave.
So by the time I come back to the hotel room, I don’t remember much. I think I purposely conditioned myself to forget, so when my head hits the pillow, that thing that happened a few hours ago could be weeks or months ago. I think I’m more happy, more at ease, because I don’t really remember everything that happened, or if the needle skipped. The number of parties I’ve done must be in the tens of thousands. How many people, I can’t even imagine, so I don’t keep track.
11. Do you feel any sort of, maybe sympathy is too strong a word, but something like that, for young artists that kind of really live and die by by streaming numbers and Instagram likes and all these data points and instant feedback?
No, I don’t sympathize with them, because the truth is that we are all free. There’s no big company that’s making DJs play certain types of music, and that to be successful, you must do it. It doesn’t exist. The truth is that the moment you press that key on the synthesizer or drum machine, you are free to create anything your imagination can come up with, and no one’s watching you, no one’s controlling you, and you can do that as much as you’d like. There’s no one looking over your shoulder watching. The truth is that we have never been freer in the music industry than we are now.
12. Can you say more about that?
It’s a conscious choice to put your music on social media. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to jump up down and pretend like you’re doing something. There have never been any rules of how to do this. There’s no university, no school. So no, I don’t sympathize with them. If you love music and you like to play it for people and you’re serious about it, there are a lot of things to learn from older DJs. When I was young, I used to just watch other DJs, not thinking I was competing or anything, but just watching to see why they’re in the DJ booth. Like, what quality do they have that puts them there to play music for people? I would look for that quality.
I understood many things from that. First of all, there is no perfect DJ. There is no perfect scenario. DJs do certain things right, other things could be better, but it’s not a perfect art form. People are not perfect, so mistakes are all part of the process. The important thing is that [the audience] felt something more than what they did before they came, that they left with something that touched them. Somewhere in those hours, within all those beats, something happened that made them excited. If you can do that just even once, that’s it.
13. What are some of the ways you’ve seen DJ culture change during your career?
We used to understand that a DJ is really trying to contribute to nightlife. You’re not so much leading it. You’re not the host. You’re like the lighting engineer or the guy who does the decorations. We used to think we were on the team of technicians making this experience happen. And then, as you know, the DJ became very recognized and very notable, and then the DJ started acting like they were very recognized and very notable. So then there comes a certain type of DJ, and that’s where we are now.
14. Was there certain point when you saw that stardom element taking over?
It was the conscious choice we all made in maybe the early ’90s. Most of us decided that electronic music needed to have superstars, iconic stars, personalities. I think that mainly comes from Europe and Europeans. If you’re from Germany, there must be a number one German DJ, and you can’t have 10, so there’s jockeying to become that.
American DJs, we were not like that. We had Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, David Morales and Louie Vega, Derrick May, Larry Levan and David Mancuso, the list goes on, and we all loved them all the same. But in the early ’90s, Europe created this structure where there must be the number one, and that took it into this type of athletics. Who’s the best star? We never snapped out of that. I think it’s dominated our industry a bit too much, and musicianship and talking about music, creativity and the construction of music, all these things were kind of pushed aside.
It is kind of sad that the industry is like that. Which makes this tour actually so interesting, because it’s not about that, and it’s really successful. Every date is sold out. The audiences are very mixed, younger and older. It’s been like that in every city we’ve done so far.
15. Do you still believe in technology as something that can deliver us to a better future?
Okay, this is going to sound strange coming from someone in techno, but honestly? Overhyped. The idea that technology will make you better in electronic music, make you smarter, wiser — I’m not so sure about that. In electronic music I don’t see the signs of that. I play with a lot of younger DJs, and I don’t see them with a wide knowledge of music. They play one thing for four hours, and it doesn’t stop. I don’t see the variety of things that could be played to create this architecture of sound.
When your machines and technology do things that even you can’t do, then I think it went too far, when you don’t understand how your machine did that. Then it’s not you, it’s the sequencer. It’s the drum machine. Skill is really what it’s about, and you can’t buy that in a machine. You can’t download it. It’s not something you plug in.
16. Having been there in the earliest days, do you feel like a different DJ culture was possible?
I mean, I was there. I was living in Berlin, ground zero, during the early ’90s and in Detroit in the ’80s, coming from hip-hop and into dance music. And before hip-hop it was industrial rock, so I watched everything and everybody, and where we are is a conscious choice. We missed a lot of opportunities as a result. I really want to say this, and I know you’re from Billboard, so I really need to say that electronic music — of course we have stars. It’s a genre of music, but for the most part in our industry it’s quite difficult to produce an album, to distribute it, to sell it, to be recognized. It’s quite hard, because at certain times we did not think enough about caring for our industry and art form, more than what I look like and what I’m doing and me, me, me. So we don’t speak to other genres the same way other genres speak to each other.
And as someone from inside the industry, remember, we decided that. I’m not trying to blame anyone, but I think a lot of influence came from Europe. We American DJs really needed to work, and we really needed to make it happen, so we had to go there, and we had to consider the way Europeans were thinking about electronic music and conform to that. Even though, coming from America, we created all this, right? But we still had to conform to that way of thinking about electronic music, and so we gave up a lot of things to get this far.
17. Do you think there’s an opportunity or even a desire for a course correction?
I think younger people that know nothing but electronic music, like there’s always been electronic music since they were born, there’s a little bit of hope there. Because with any art form or any genre, you have very popular things, but then you have those that really stay dedicated to the art form. Maybe as time goes on, these important creations become more recognized — important albums, important artists, important messaging. It’s a complex time right now. Who really made something that really spoke to this time, and what can we use as a model for moving forward? We don’t have the Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis of electronic music yet, but it’s still early. It’s only 30 or 40 years in. And something is keeping all of this up, because every weekend there are thousands of parties and events happening.
18. Not to sound cheesy, but do you think part of what’s keeping it all up is the thing you were talking about before, making people feel excited? Is there a special opportunity within this genre for that?
Yeah, the “it.” There is something about techno in particular, not so much electronic music, but techno. It has something no other genre has in that it can, within seconds, make you feel that you’re dealing with something that’s about the future. No words, no lyrics, just sounds that make you feel like you’re listening to something connected to the future. That’s something no other genre, not even classical, can replicate. That’s very powerful, and if you understand that and understand how to use it, it becomes a spiritual, religious type of thing. You are saying not only what people need to hear, but you are convincing them that there’s value and worth in standing here in front of this DJ in this moment, and that they’re going to benefit from it.
Techno is very special for that, and what I found is that most people who know how to control that have a certain type of mindset. It’s a smaller percentage of the industry, but these are really the ones making things that are convincing people that this music is relevant and needs to be played every weekend.
19. Would you like to name some of those people?
No, but the reason why I know this is because during the pandemic, I was really concerned that with the shutdown we would lose a lot of musicians in techno music. It was difficult even before then, but I feared that no revenue, no way to play the music, no reason to make it, would kill us. So we opened our label to techno artists that I curated, but I needed to know they understood a certain way of using the music in this way that I speak of. In two years, we ended up signing about 60 artists, from China to Spain and around the world who I sensed had this unique way of using electronic instruments. We released their music, and it was really successful, and they began to converse amongst themselves, because they all recognized it too.
Part of the process is that you need to submit the idea first. I don’t want any music. You need to tell me what the album is about, why those tracks are named that, how it all goes together. So basically showing them how to make a concept album. And you need to explain to me what the album is about and why you did it. So it’s kind of like a academic way of doing it, which they all did. For many of them, it was their first album, and so they entered the industry making a conceptual album. From these 60 artists, my theory about this sense was true, and it’s been space and science-oriented, UFO-ology, connected with other dimensional type of understanding about reality. For me, this is not an overground, underground whatever, but the core of an art form that has longevity, because it’s about the bigger subjects. It’s about cosmos. It’s about galaxies and nature.
20. Who’s been your greatest mentor and what’s the best piece of advice they gave you?
Prince. Not only because he was a great musician, but how he was able to manage the Prince universe and everybody connected to it. Everything, the hairstyles, the entourage, he must have been up all night. He must’ve never slept. I mean, how did he manage all this? As an artist and as someone that creates and who’s in the public sphere and has to manage and filter, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before.
