Jeff Mills at fabric

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    Apr 7, 2010
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  • There's something in the purity of an original idea, refined, honed and machined to perfection over two decades that makes the Detroit sound so very special, and it looks like fabric's been out to present a retrospective of Motor City Techno recently. Carl Craig, Robert Hood, Juan Atkins and Daniel Bell have all graced the meat warehouse over the past two months, and the night in question here saw the man they call The Wizard play a furiously tight and rolling set in fabric's room one. Jeff Mills was preceded by Black Tokyo, another Detroit outfit remaking the classic sound in a musically orientated and more lyrical and melodic way. Their tracks had that taut, high and percussive stamp of the Michigan state city, but their live set nonetheless lacked something. Although different from the average laptop setup (they had a live drummer and vocals) there's just something qualitatively different about a set controlled largely by the laptop that lacks the interaction that comes with a real people-machine interface. The sound was too polished, too clean and slightly clinical. And I was left wondering, as I often am, how much is easy presets and programmed tracks, and how much is spontaneous performance, where the controller really is the human, not the AMD chip inside the laptop. It's good to hear mistakes, impromptu solos or ad-hoc combinations that the tight control of software seems to deny. But, by this time the sound had edged upwards, the engineers (who, tonight, were on absolute top-form) had been tuning the system towards that distinctive Detroit sound and at three am, Mills stepped into the cockpit-like confines of room one's DJ booth. Sweaty, rammed and suffering slightly from that pre-4 AM fabric collection of drunk and confused, suited, booted and out-on-the-lash London boys and girls, the preceding moments before Mills started threatened to dampen our anticipation of the next three hours. However, the eight-minute plus beatless, dark and apocalyptic sci-fi intro had the hairs on the back of the arms standing up, the heart beating faster and the excitement levels reaching a peak just as a thunderous four-four emerged from the murk and struck the room with a syncopated rhythm that was so utterly, distinctly and minimally Detroit. What sounded like a stripped out reworking of a Sandwell District track started what was to be an almost relentless three hours of the best in minimal techno music. An hour in, the crowd had thinned slightly as the merely curious gave way to the truly captivated, and as classic Detroit tracks dropped the appreciation of the crowd was palpable with "The Bells" whipping the main room to a frenzy. It seems too little to call Mills a DJ. He's something else. His mixing flawless, precise and so rapid-fire that his three hour set must have contained twice as many tracks as a regular jock. He played, teased, toyed with the crowd: Holding back, dropping in, holding back, then just releasing the snare before dropping a jacking beat and desolate bassline. At one point, towards the end, a semi-live percussive solo emerged out of the DJ booth, stopping, staccato-like, and restarting just as you were almost thinking there had been a technical failure, before playing one final track and then closing his set with another beatless, floating, spacey closer, bookending what must be, for this reviewer at least, one of Mills' finest sets in London. The silent speakers and riotous applause continued for what seemed an unusually long time for fabric, before Craig Richards played a closing set well suited to keeping the already very happy crowd going further.
RA