Jeff Mills & Sleeparchive

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  • In the history of techno, the connections between Detroit and Berlin have been well documented. Tresor, Underground Resistance, Mills, Basic Channel – the names and connections have acquired legendary status. That Jeff Mills continues to look to Berlin even now, however, was evident in his choice of special guest for the second part of his three-week 2006 residency at Tokyo’s Club Womb. Stephan Metzger has come a long way since he exploded onto the scene as Sleeparchive in 2004. Initially shrouded in mystery, the Berlin-based artist electrified clubs with his extremely stripped down minimal productions. In a world where Dominik Eulberg, Nathan Fake, and Tiefschwarz are all lumped under “minimal” (although almost everyone has been nervously backing away from that term for a while now), Sleeparchive mines a deeper, purer vein of minimalism, drawing inspiration from the early ‘90s pioneering work of Mika Vainio’s Ø project. Metzger has been unfairly criticized by some for being too derivative of Vainio, but the work of Sleeparchive is more of a re-visitation and reminder. Vainio’s work is the sound of a laboratory, an experiment, a series of notes concerning a theory, but Sleeparchive takes the results of those experiments and put them into practice: the practice of techno. Sleeparchive & Jeff Mills at WombSleeparchive quickly demonstrated that his music is suited to the dancefloor as the crowd was carried along on a wave of wonderfully subterranean beats, bleeps, and frequencies that cut through to the very bone. His music created the feeling of being in a deep basement full of banks of 1960s analogue scientific equipment, the machines humming, whirring, and beeping out the results of their research. Yet these machines were not clinical and cold, but were vibrantly alive, pulsating to vital, insistent rhythms. Those expecting a navel-gazing minimal bleepfest were proven wrong as clubbers crowded the dancefloor, eagerly surging forward. The machines continued crunching their data, building to an amazing moment where everything was spinning madly, shuddering and shaking, about to come off its axis. Throughout it all Metzger studied his laptop through owl-like glasses, engrossed in the music, then smiling a shy, slightly embarrassed smile as the crowd erupted into cheers and applause at the end of his set. With his ubiquitous Hardwax t-shirt, Metzger seems very much like a techno lover who, to his total and utter surprise, has suddenly found himself in front of crowds of people going mad. Jeff Mills looked coolly professional in a white business shirt and black necktie (which stayed on the whole evening), watching Sleeparchive from the side of the stage with keen interest before stepping up behind his turntables, CD players, 909, and mixer. There were some concerns after his lackluster set at this year’s Wire festival, but these worries soon dissipated as Mills launched into a tightly controlled set of furiously pumping techno. For the first hour or so the set was characterized by a slightly more modern "bleep" aesthetic (no doubt influenced by Sleeparchive’s set), before fading down the music and then bringing in the UR classic ‘Amazon’, sending the crowd mad and marking the start of an hour of pumping Detroit techno. Mills’ fingers danced across the decks and the mixer, never resting, constantly tapping, twisting, turning, tweaking as he pushed the music faster and harder. His face was a mask of concentration as he held tight to the reins, never letting them slacken or slip from his grasp. That Mills can maintain such a high level of intensity for so long is a testament to his skills, and the crowd responded appropriately, keeping the dancefloor full until the very end. It’s clear that Mills takes his annual residency at Womb extremely seriously. Unlike performing at a festival, it’s a platform for Mills to express himself, and to bring different artists to the audience’s attention. In doing so Mills attempts to position himself in both the past and present of techno (and even the future, as evinced by his ‘One Man Spaceship’ title). It will be interesting to see if and how Mills adapts future residencies at Womb in order to maintain this position as techno continues to develop and evolve.
RA