Jeff Mills Interview By Derek Walmsley

D: Your work recently has started looking beyond the dancefloor. When did that start?

J: Well, around 2000, people were very fearful, there was Y2K, the world’s about to come to an end, and this whole kind of what-if kind of scenario, so I made an album based on that. And that was really the beginning of this period.

D: Your performance last night still had the intensity of a rave. Is that something you aim at?

J: Yes, there has to be a balance between making it enjoyable and also trying to show…. It’s really hard to do, actually, because in that kind of setting it’s very dark, you really don’t have that much control over people. I’ve tried over many years to do it in many contexts, and it’s hard to balance out.

D: How did Metropolis come about?

J: Well, it came from a few conversations with people in Berlin. And we were discussing why we don’t hear electronic music in cinema, even if it’s a movie about science fiction, or space travel, you just hear classical as a standard. And it got to a point where I just thought somebody has to do something. We just need to see what would happen if there was something we could use at a reference. So I decided I’m going to try and do something…. So I went home and bought a DVD out of the store, and illegally copied it, and then began to compose a soundtrack for the film, and then edited the film down to the length of the soundtrack…. So I just wanted to make something that was an example for the music we know and deal with, up against a movie.

D: How different was the way of working?

J: Metropolis wasn’t very far from ….. well, it was a black and white film, my copy was very grainy and bad quality, and I could very easily imitate what I’d seen… so a lot of the music was very similar to this grainy, grey area…. And the drama, and the face expressions, and it was quite easy… not easy, but easier.

D: The Trip references ‘moments of drama’? What are those typically? There was lots of use of faces.

J: Yeah, you’re looking at this….. non-descriptive fear, panic, especially for last night, in the slightest way, and then re-examining that. So, very slight moments that display certain sorts of fear or apprehension, things that maybe go by so quickly you don’t see it the first time.

D: Is the use of visual loops equivalent to sampling?

J: Exactly, and that’s difficult, because at first if you loop it, at first people might get the impression that there wasn’t an idea there, so it has to be done a certain amount of times, a certain way, and what goes before it and what goes after it has to have some reference to it.

D: By using a lot of faces, does it help to have a personality transposed onto the screen?

J: Well, yes… well, I could hide the DJ stand in the corner and people would have no choice but to look at the screen, which I’ve done in the past. But it was more so that people could recognise something to connect with, in this somewhat disturbing situation people still feel something to connect with, so very still images or very slow footage of a person’s face, and the slight winking of the eyes… and the intensity in the face…

D: What attracts you to the ‘disturbing’ nature of the films?

J: It’s the idea that even against all the odds – at least in these science fiction stories – even against these enormous odds, they still feel the urge to go on, to discover. And I think that’s a common theme, or feeling that humanity has had from the very beginning. We could have just said the world is too difficult, we can’t catch these animals to eat them, let’s just pack it in. But we don’t, and I think that’s something which is not really spoken of, or explored too much, but it’s just this burning desire to want to keep on no matter what.

D: Is this a will to power idea, that there is something which will just keep going?

J: Exactly, no matter what happens. Whether the planet is affected by disease, or something alien from outerspace, some meteorite, terrorist attacks…. We still come together to want to move on, to progress