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When I read that techno legend Jeff Mills had created a soundtrack for Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 science-fiction classic, I kissed my computer. The iconic artist of an iconic genre has already produced soundtracks to other films, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Buster Keaton’s The Three Ages, along with an EP inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Here was a chance to experience the new album in the relative intimacy of Le Poisson Rouge.
Ten years ago, I attended a screening of Jeff Mills’ Metropolis, hosted by Black Book magazine and the Dactyl Foundation. What I liked then about the Metropolis soundtrack was less about the immediate synchronicity between the aural and visual, but more about Mills’ alignment of the Detroit techno sound with an interdisciplinary, transcontinental aesthetic tradition. He established the Fritz Lang film as an ancestor of Detroit techno. The connections might already be obvious to many listeners, especially via the industrial mandate of the Motor City, but thanks to Jeff Mills, there’s something “on the record” (no pun intended) and primary – from the head of a practitioner. That said, Jeff Mills’ soundtrack does interact with the mise-en-scène at times, while seldom abandoning the four-on-the-floor structure. With the establishing shots of the metropolis, Mills invokes Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, with sweeping, slow surges of atmospheric washes. A purist peak emerges during the first blast in the machine room. Steam explosions send corpses flailing, but the music abstains from joining the horror. Against this chaos, the music pauses – it withdraws. And then as new bodies fill in for the casualties, the crackling beat resumes. Business as usual. “Such accidents are unavoidable,” claims the icy John Fredersen. Dispensable labor, unapologetic capital, unemotive music.
DJ Sleepy warming up the crowd
The show at LPR gave Saturday night escapists a cathartic night of dancing, but no chance to analyze how Jeff Mills’ new soundtrack interprets the Fantastic Voyage film. I had expected something more like a screening, followed by a DJ set, but that was wishful thinking on my part. The bill for the show actually said nothing about a screening; it only said that Jeff Mills would present the soundtrack.
Technocrat
To experience only half of the project seemed okay with most people. Shouting over the thumping, droning, percolating rhythms, a few people told me that they were there for the music, and shrugged when I mentioned the film. So I’m not knocking the promoters, Basic NYC, for giving the people what they want. I’m grateful that they brought Jeff Mills to New York. But now how do we give Jeff Mills’ Fantastic Voyage its due assessment?
808 makes you go fetal
What’s the potential for a dedicated screening? How about a weeknight, for starters, and not a sloppy Saturday? And offer it to an art and film crowd, as well as speakerfreakers. You wouldn’t know it in New York, but Jeff Mills has C.V. full of art infiltration.
Technocrat
In 2000, he screened Metropolis at the Centre Pompidou. He showed a series of six video works at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois of Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen. For FIAC 2005, he performed Josephine B, inspired by Josephine Baker, at the Grand Palais. He performed his own compositions, orchestrated by Thomas Roussel, with the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra (unsuccessfully, in my opinion, though what a great experiment!) and in 2007, he was invited by film director Claire Denis to design the sound environment of the Diaspora exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum. The French Ministry of Culture gave him the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2008, he exhibited his Critical Arrangements sound and video installation at the Centre Pompidou and the Tate Modern, part of the traveling exhibition Futurism in Paris: An Explosive Avant-Garde. Last year, he was part of the exhibition Detroit at the Kunsthalle, Vienna. (Destroy All Monsters was not.)
...and the most handsome boys love Jeff Mills, too.
The European art world loves Jeff Mills. Why doesn’t New York? Would this have been an invigorating appendage to Performa? Is there potential at PS1? BAM? Will we need a techno comeback, first? I spent Halloween in Bushwick with tooth-rattling techno from Juan Atkins, so maybe that moment is imminent.
