In 2004, Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills released his first Exhibitionist DVD. It captured him on three turntables, going to town on a dynamic selection of techno, house, and even disco. It was as ambitious as you'd expect from a DJ who used to be known as the Wizard (a sobriquet he picked up back in his days as a hip-hop DJ known for his lightning-quick fingers), but he’s more than topped it with the new Exhibitionist 2, which includes not only a DJ mix—this time, using three CDJs and a Roland TR-909 drum machine—but also an extended solo set on drum machine; a duet with a human drummer, Skeeto Valdez; a tour of Mills' compositional methods; and, finally, a 45-minute dance solo by Pierre Lockett, a Chicago dancer who spent time in the Joffrey Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem.
If it's a remarkable demonstration of Mills's skills, it's also a curious product. A few segments, like the drum duet and the dance solo, feel like experiments that probably looked better on paper. He has developed a vast and devoted fan base over the years, but it will take a truly committed follower to sit down and just watch those bits all the way through. Certain aspects of the DVD, like the ability to view Mills' hands from different angles, do give the viewer unprecedented access to his creative process, but the very idea of plopping down on a sofa to watch somebody spin feels slightly at odds with the entire purpose of dance music. But Mills has never taken the path you'd expect him to: Recently he has been pouring his energies into collaborations with symphony orchestras—a relic of the 19th century that would seem to be at odds with the futurism espoused by techno.
Mills sometimes gives the impression of being an artist so focused on his own ideas that he exists in a bubble. "Statistically, I wouldn't be considered one of the world's best DJs," he told me last month, when I reached him at his apartment in Paris. This is an odd thing to say, in part because within techno, he's widely acknowledged to be one of the best, if not the best, selectors alive. But from the measured tone of his voice, you could tell that he wasn't simply being humble; the guy simply resonates on another frequency. ("I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the city where I come from, Detroit, there are, in my opinion, some great DJs there," he continues. "But, statistically, and from popular opinion, we don't see that. There's some great, incredible DJs from Chicago. And New York. But statistically, you know, the populace says that that's not true.")
Musically, Exhibitionist 2 is much more focused than its predecessor. Gone are the days of playing other people's records: He’s responsible for every note on the DVD, and he produced the music in such a way that every track becomes a building block in a much larger structure. He's no longer thinking in terms of songs or even tracks, but in terms of flow. Exhibitionist 2 shows the DJ not as a selector, but as a conduit.
The goal behind Exhibitionist 2, as with its predecessor, is to demystify the art of the DJ, Mills says. "There are too many things that are still mysterious," he says. "They don't need to be mysterious, we're just reluctant to talk about them." The irony is that Mills himself remains as mysterious as ever. A conversation with him moves much like his DJ sets do, with different ideas weaving almost imperceptibly in and out of mix; the topic may shape-shift from '80s Detroit to drum-machine interfaces to the future of space travel. The best option is simply to sit back and enjoy the ride.
Pitchfork: It's been 11 years since Exhibitionist; what made you decide it was time to do a new one?
Jeff Mills: I think there's really no right or wrong time to do something like this. I think any information about any type of art form, it's always the right time. But since the last one, I could see there were many things about the culture of DJing that we don't really talk about. We don't really look at how the music is made, how it's conceptualized, how it's put together. We talk about the equipment and the software, but we don't talk about the reasons why we put the music together in the first place. I thought, you know, maybe it's time, maybe we've mastered the technique of putting together music, and mastered the technique of mixing music together, but we've just barely scratched the surface of why we want to do that in the first place.
Pitchfork: It's funny to hear you say that we've mastered the form of DJing, because few people have skills approaching yours—as you show on the DVD, playing three CDJs along with a TR-909 drum machine.
JM: It used to be more detectable whether DJs could mix or not. These days it's really hard to detect, because the software is doing the mix for you. Everything is being synced up, and it's harder to see where the skill starts and the technology starts and ends. Maybe that's a good thing; it's more enjoyable for the listeners, more enjoyable for the party, if you don't need to worry about things falling off. So maybe we can concentrate on other aspects of the art form.
Pitchfork: I wanted to ask you about that, because I suspected that the mixes on the DVD are improvised, but I wasn't sure.
JM: Yeah. I just made a large collection of music on discs that were untitled, so I had no way of knowing what I was about to pick up next. It was all music I had made for those mixes—I needed to have a certain type of music, knowing that I was going to layer them together. In some, the melody line was more prominent, whereas in others the percussion was more prominent, and so forth. I was just feeding the machines material, and I would not know what it was until I cued it and heard it, and then I would have to figure out how to mix it. I think I must have had 100 discs, and they were all unmarked.
Pitchfork: How would you say your style of DJing has changed over the past decade? Has it changed?
JM: I have gotten slower, because I don't need to be as fast. I'm using three and four decks, so what I would normally try to do on two, I can do with four. For instance, syncing and looping on a CD player is perfect. Previously, to mix three and four turntables, I would have to really monitor and hold the pitch on each one. But now it's locked, so I can spend more time doing other things. So I've gotten slower, but my focus is creating more—creating a DJ set, but also creating the feeling that it's a certain type of production that's happening using multiple decks. I'm layering tracks together, but I'm kind of doing the same thing that I would do in a recording studio.
Pitchfork: You play with a drummer, Skeeto Valdez, on the DVD. I understand he plays a lot with Trey Anastasio, from Phish.
JM: I didn't know any drummers in Detroit; I had kind of gotten out of touch with musicians. So we really searched to find out who the best drummer in the city was, and his name kept coming up, so we took a chance. We didn't even have time to rehearse. He just set up the drums, I explained to him what was going to happen, and I hit record on the camera. We did it in one take.
Pitchfork: What made you want to have a drummer on the DVD? Was it a nod to your own roots as a drummer?
JM: A little bit of that, but I wanted to show the difference between a live drummer improvising and somebody improvising on a drum machine. My point was that we can try to put more of our character into these machines—not only programming them, but using them as instruments.
Pitchfork: That leads us to the 909 workout, where we see you really playing it in real time. What is it about the 909 that makes it your instrument of choice?
JM: More than anything, it's the sound of the machine. They don't need much treatment. You don't need to put reverb and delay on it; the machine sounds great just straight from the outputs. You don't really need to prep it or modify it in order to get a great sound. The 909 is a very strong machine, it's very powerful. And the features of it are very simple, so I can be very quick with it, writing patterns.
Pitchfork: I suspect that for many people, the studio portion of the DVD will be the most educational, because you're showing how the tracks actually get made.
JM: I probably should have said in the commentary that that's not the typical way I make music. I'm normally in a much bigger studio with more keyboards, more gear, it's more set up for recording; that was just a temporary location. I just took the basic pieces that I could produce on in that small setting. What I was trying to show was mostly to people who don't know how to make music, or the people who like electronic music but never understood how a track is made. I was trying to show an older way, without a computer without software, how one machine can speak to the next, and you use one machine to trigger all these things, and then you turn to the mixer and choose which sounds you want.
Pitchfork: Where did you film the studio portion? Is that your apartment?
JM: No, it's my office in Chicago.
Pitchfork: I was fascinated by the art on the walls. It looks like you're really into 20th-century high modernism.
JM: It's an accumulation of things from over the years. But the whole office is pretty much like that. There's one area that's all science fiction stuff. It's like that because I'm looking for certain inspirations. That's actually the place where I come up with most ideas, and I thought maybe that might be the best place to record for the DVD. Those are the paintings and sculptures that I'm looking at when I'm coming up with ideas. And we've seen people in studios before, so I didn't think that would be so interesting. Maybe to try to find a different location would be something refreshing. Being around paintings, I thought, would bring color into the scenario of the compositions I would make.
Pitchfork: Do you make music every day?
JM: Almost! At least five days out of the week.
Pitchfork: The last few years you've done so much narrative-oriented work and film work; do you also just jam?
JM: I would say the project-oriented stuff is around 40 per cent. Sixty per cent is just trying to materialize a certain idea, a certain type of technique that could be interesting.
Pitchfork: R&D.
JM: Yeah. More than half of the time it's just trying to make the machines do something that I haven't done before.
Pitchfork: How does emotion figure into your music? Do you think your music is expressive?
JM: Well, I usually record at night, for the reason that the day is done, and things are more quiet. The nighttime hours are, you know, different. I rarely ever record during the day. Usually that time is spent working or traveling or working in the office. Usually I don't get around to recording until midnight.
Pitchfork: I hear a certain amount of melancholy in your music, but also a certain sense of abstraction—kind of glassy and atonal, like a suspension of emotion.
JM: Maybe that has something to do with a certain view I have about where we're headed—not in terms of music, but a certain type of future that I see. A transparent one, but multi-layered. Clustered. I don't know what the clusters may represent; it could be information, it could be complexity. But I'm always producing with the idea that the music is representing one person. That could play a factor in the intimacy of it. I'm always producing for that one person, never for a group of people—especially if it's non-danceable. I'm always thinking that one person's going to listen to this and that person might want to feel a certain way at a certain time. That can be out in space, it can be at the bus stop, it can be laying in bed listening to music. I look at it as if I'm whispering in someone's ear, basically.
Pitchfork: That's interesting, because on the one hand you play for crowds of 20,000 people at festivals like Sónar, and at the same time you're making records where you whisper in people's ears.
JM: I think when you're in the studio all by yourself, maybe it's easier to think of someone like yourself than a crowd of 10,000 people.