Blitz

Where to start with Jeff Mills from Detroit? A figure who has shaped the course of electronic dance music and Techno like barely anyone else? A true pioneer of our culture, whose many facets span futurism, socio-political attitude, the avant-garde, rhythm, and the sound itself.
He returns to Blitz as part of his tour celebrating 30 years of his influential Live at the Liquid Room mix, accompanied by two live performances and a screening of a documentary about the defining recording, captured in mid-90s Tokyo.

The livewire session races through a staggering 38 tracks in 68 minutes: the technically revered Mills deploys hip-hop battle techniques, fast, fierce, and physical, in a rush of improvisation and raw momentum. By today’s standards, the mix is charmingly unpolished: not quite hi-fi, marked by bold cuts, backspins, and at times vinylisms charming swing, yet it reshaped the very idea of what a DJ mix could be. > A good reminder to keep things raw, weird and funky — this is just pure s**,” as Helena Hauff concluded. <

Live at the Liquid Room stands not as a testament to a futuristic machine, but to a visionary human, complete with flaws and mistakes. Pitchfork, rightly, placed Mills alongside artists such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, concluding: > This is techno’s Raw Power — proto-punk’s The Stooges debut — both in essence and spirit. […] It’s polarizing for a reason. It’s also brilliant for the same reason. < Thirty years on, it still hits harder than what’s considere > hard < today – on two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape machines!

No matter how towering the influence of Detroit’s godfathers may be, it’s impossible to overlook our resident Polygonia. Lindsay Wang is busy crafting her own vision of dance music and Techno’s future, with an exceptionally prolific output that unites quantity and quality spanning collaborations, joint productions, live bands, labels, collectives, and even music-software design.
> It wasn’t designed to be dance music, it was designed to be a futurist statement, < Jeff Mills once said about Techno, but Polygonia has no trouble marrying both.