Jeff Mills: The Trip
★★★★
ACMI, Melbourne Music Week Hub, November 17
Since the 1980s, Detroit’s Jeff Mills has been taking electronic music into new spaces – composing for film, contemporary art and classical music. Deeply inspired by science fiction and outer space, his latest incarnation, The Trip, travelled even further.
In his Melbourne Music Week-headlining show, the legendary producer, DJ and composer even took the show off stage.
DJ and composer Jeff Mills.
In collaboration with audio visual artist Kit Webster, the underground ACMI gallery was transformed into a mega club. Webster’s programmed lights and lasers lined the walls and created a spectacular light show in sync with a sound system so deep that even the bathrooms reverberated with the bass.
Mills opened his set with futuristic soundscapes accompanied mostly by visuals from anonymous B-grade, sci-fi films, preparing the crowd for a journey into the unknown. Mills flitted from sampling eccentric jazz piano pieces by Mikhail Rudy to Johannes Volk’s spacey soundscapes. Visuals included cutting edge neural network memes blended with scenes from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Jeff Mills DJing his compositions at the Melbourne Music Week hub on Saturday night.
The set often built momentum and then jolted away from it, creating tension in a crowd ready to rip out their best moves when a moment of release came. At one point, Mills dramatically crossed the stage and disappeared, only to reappear live on the big screen in a tiny silver capsule elsewhere. Cooped up and kneeling over his array of instruments, the crowd could intimately watch him at work.
Mills delivered his set in distinct movements similar to a symphony. For most of the performance he steered clear of big dance tracks, pushing away any preconceived ideas of how a DJ set should flow. While some listeners were challenged by this more experiential approach, they were rewarded with a dancier set towards the end. Webster's corridor of lights to S-Files track Shelter had the whole space booming.
Mills tested the audience and a few didn't last the full two-and-a-half hour journey from midnight. Programming Mills in an earlier slot could have helped. An air of mystery around the performance had set the bar very high, so for some, the show was anticlimactic and undercooked. And as this year's MMW hub, ACMI could have pulled out more stops to make the venue extra special for The Trip.
Melbourne Music Week is on until November 24.