It’s been a long time since Jeff Mills worked his techno wizardry on Sydney audiences. Almost 25 years. Almost a lifetime. He broke that spell Friday night, May 22, with a marathon masterclass at Sydney Opera House, an Australian exclusive performance celebrating his iconic Liquid Room Mix.
Mills is an architect of Detroit techno, a founding member of the Underground Resistance. He’s known fondly as The Wizard for concocting magic at the decks, a world-class vinyl technician who thinks multiple stages ahead of the next drop, pulling at dizzying speed from his crate anonymous, white label cuts that would have the rest of us cooked.
Getting down to business in the Studio, a nightclub proper hidden underneath those famous sails, Mills got his Vivid LIVE opening night performance away with a history lesson, a 30-minute documentary on his legendary three-hour set at Tokyo nightclub Liquidroom. Recorded in 1995 at Tokyo nightclub Liquidroom, it’s a moment that’s spoken of in hushed tones. The live benchmark in progressive techno.
All told, Mills mixed more than 200 records on the night. Mills, the producer, worked many of his own tunes into that set for the first time, fresh from the studio to the wheels of steel. They were “so cutting edge,” he explains in the doc, and “reflective of what was happening deep in the underground of Europe and America.”
Many were masters and white labels, and they’d go on to become well known wherever techno is played. Some were pressed on 14” copper acetate, a format that was expensive, hard to find, and which, he says in the film, played at twice the volume as wax. The detonations can be easily spotted on those YouTube streams. “I knew I wanted to make the audience scream,” he recounts of his motivation. “So I knew I had to do something that exploded.”
“The Bells” was one. Perhaps his signature track, Mills made the track on one afternoon. “It took me a few hours,” he admits. After all these years, “The Bells” is still ringing, as it did on opening night in Sydney.
Mills last visited Australia in 2024 with his “Tomorrow Comes The Harvest” jazz-electronic project, a collaboration with Jean-Phi Dary and Prabhu Edouard. And before that in 2016, for a project with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) and fellow Detroit scene-builder Derrick May. On a drizzling night at the SOH, Mills got to work with vinyl, an appropriately austere scaffolding as his backdrop. No pre-programmed bits, no cheating, just lights, lasers, and a tireless smoke machine.
“DJing at a higher level than just mixing records together is quite complex,” he recently told Billboard’s Katie Bain. “It’s like being an athlete, like a tennis player. You have so many things you need to think about at the same time, as time is moving forward. You literally have to split your mind into multiple parts, and you have to pay attention to each one of these things at the same time, so your peripheral sense becomes enhanced.”
Although released by Sony Music on CD and cassette at the time (but not on DVD, against his wishes), the Liquid Room Mix has never been officially available digitally until now. It’d be considered a myth, if the set hadn’t been recorded for posterity.
Mills completed a two-night stand for Vivid LIVE on Saturday, May 23. Vivid LIVE is the annual contemporary music centerpiece of the Sydney Opera House, and part of the broader Vivid Sydney festival, which runs through June 13, and is owned, managed and produced by the New South Wales government, Destination NSW and Feel New Sydney.
Read Billboard’s “20 Questions” with Jeff Mills here.
