IDM Mailing Archive

Of course, Jeff Mills needs no defense. Any musician with a discography that includes X-103, Humana, early Underground Resistance, Cycle 30, and Waveform Transmission Vol. 1 is adequately equipped to fight his own battles. At least give him the opportunity to speak for himself -- http://www.phreak.co.uk/haywire/JockeySlut/Mills.html addendum: :> I loved this last part; "anti-human music." Brilliant. A new genre - :> something like mills (hard techno) and cylob's industrial folk songs. :It's hardly a new genre. Go directly to Merzbow and follow the thread :back from there. You can hop over to grindcore if you'd like something a :bit more rhythmic. Um, but that stuff doesn't _bump_, man... :Amazingly enough, Mills' stuff is considered dance music by those :challenged enough to enjoy twitching spastically to a bored drum machine :for hours. I dunno, maybe it' s just not explicable to anyone who hasn't spent 3 hours in a 100-degree riverfront warehouse having their brain pureed by a madman jacking in mental tracks at the rate of 2 a minute. That 4/4 isn't a crutch, in this context it's the center beam holding the damned _building_ together. Mills approach is to work three turntables + a drum machine in his set. the only way that's going to work without continuous trainwreck city is if the tracks he's using are skeletal. Does this disqualify him from the IDM club? Does the list primer have a "Thou shalt employ polyrhythms" commandment? :It doesn't surprise me to learn that Mills grew up making :industrial music. Most of the people floating on that boat much past :the early 80's should have sunk with it. In the early 80's Mills was cutting up booty tracks and prototechno live on the air on WJLB. There were no leather pants involved (maybe a few oiled up bikini thongs, perhaps.) He spent a few months in an industrial band, the Final Cut. We've all go skeltons in our closets. :) -d.w. ps: I have no problem loving (and seeing the "intelligence") in both "Spanners" and "Lyot (Maurizio Mix)" [i.e. BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM...] I don't see a contradiction, sorry.

Miles Egan said: :It would if I made the rules. I'm not qualified to criticize Mills on :technical grounds. I just think it's lazy and unneccesary to use such :boring rhythms. The sky is the limit with a drum machine and a good :sequencer. Why not use the tools? Um, weren't we talking about a DJ set here? A fair bit of space was spent in the Jockey Slut interview on the tightrope a DJ walks between moving the punters and pure exploration. Check out the Mills back cat. and you'll find quite a bit of stuff outside of 4OTF. Ah well, here's to diversity of opinions. As the "straight beats or not" debate tends to run distressingly close to religion, I'll refrain from dragging it out any further (damned Hugenots!) I'll just end here by saying that in the context of DJs playing straight techno (no chaser), Mills comes closer to "getting it" (i.e. working out the implications of making and spinning the "Movable Parts" of modular music) than anyone else I've seen work a pair (or trio) of SL-1200's. In the immortal words of Tomi Koskinen, if it kick it kick, period. -d.w. on now: "Joe 90" - Claude Young & Ian O'Brien