Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo

Getting onto the dancefloor of Liquidroom was always a mission. You first needed to venture to Kabukicho, the seedy edge of Shinjuku whose claustrophobic alleys and clutter of neon signage are what many think of when they picture Tokyo nightlife. From there, you’d line up around the block, trek a seven-floor staircase, pass security, elbow your way through the typically rammed 1000-cap venue, and hope whoever was playing that night was worth the cover charge. The club had hosted its fair share of notables by October 28th, 1995, but nothing on the scale of what went down that Saturday night. Because whether you were pressed against the stage or posted up at the bar, as soon as the clock struck 3 a.m. and Detroit’s Jeff Mills cued up his first record, you bore witness to the future.

Sixty-eight minutes and 38 songs chiseled out of that three-hour DJ set became Mills’ first commercially accessible mix, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo. No real-time video of the performance exists, nor can you access the audio on any streaming service, but scan the comment sections under dozens of unofficial uploads or spend enough time in the danker corners of club smoking areas, and you’ll crash headlong into a wall of consensus that this is a mix without equal, the Techno Bible, unequivocally The One. You can ask ChatGPT right now what the greatest DJ mix of all time is, and it’ll hedge on the amorphous nature of subjectivity, then list Liquid Room top anyway.

Released in spring 1996, Liquid Room was a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be. The received wisdom of how to construct a club set—one song after another; build-up, breakdown—was obliterated by this lean, striking man mixing like a Spirograph, executing a blur of hip-hop battle techniques over waves of crushing pressure. Records were piped in hot with phased doubles, scratches, stabs, rewinds, inverted frequencies, and hard stops, then torn from the platter without warning and discarded onto the floor, until you couldn’t be certain if this was dance music or a new frontier in free jazz.

A detail still broadly unknown is that Mills wasn’t even using his preferred setup of three turntables: In order to demo unreleased cuts within the mix, he was operating on two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape machines, which upped the difficulty level appreciably. It didn’t hurt that one of those quarter-inch tapes was built around a four-note call-and-response between a higher and lower rung of bells, a quirky splash of chiaroscuro in otherwise total darkness. Bouncing around like a hacky sack off the steel-capped toes of two established Midwest bangers, Mills’ “Life Cycle” and DJ Funk’s “Work That Body,” the track was listed only in the liner notes as “Untitled A.” We know it today as “The Bells,” a stone-cold anthem.

In the decades hence, a vast swathe of DJs and producers from the top of the commercial tree down to the roots of the underground have credited hearing this set or watching Jeff Mills play as their personal eureka moment. It would save time listing those who haven’t been influenced by him, his label Axis, and the collective he co-founded, Underground Resistance, whose infusion of self-sufficiency and martial messaging into electro and techno helped shape how listeners receive the ideology of Detroit and its music. Then, as now, Liquid Room stands as a high-water mark of a Black artform built around space travel and the necessity of forward motion: ’90s techno at its most unyielding and free.

And yet. At surface level, this thing is also… sort of a mess. Liquid Room may be taxing for anyone reared on the high-definition, blemish-free mixes that flood our digital feeds today. You don’t have to make it past the first song to detect crackle and damage in the audio. The third of the mix’s three segments has under seven minutes to build flow, which is shorter than most killer electronic songs. There’s sophistication and structural harmony in a Frank Gehry sort of way, but many of the transitions on Mills’ landmark set are fistfights, and the fidelity hovers a few steps north of garbage.

“What a DJ does with their hands,” Mills told Resident Advisor in 2019, “isn’t something you can expect to hear every time. It’s like sports… like you’re a tennis player, and your timing is really everything.” Well, Liquid Room is not the dignified sound of Mills gliding on clay. He’s in full McEnroe mode, battering aces down the middle of the court, showboating, snapping rackets, double-faulting constantly, propelled by a third lung—all while the crowd deliriously laps it up. Here’s the oracle, and he’s handling records so coarsely that it seems as if he’s close to losing control entirely.

Veteran electronic music journalist Michaelangelo Matos likes to compare Liquid Room to the Ramones’ debut, but I’d strike closer to home. This is techno’s Raw Power, both in essence and spirit. Don’t sweat the blown-out sound or odd loose passage among those daredevil moves; to chart Liquid Room’s influence, zoom out to observe the impact crater it left behind, ringed by onlookers who stood agog at the new possibilities available to them. It’s polarizing for a reason. It’s also brilliant for the same reason.

Jeff Mills’ reputation as a teenage DJ called The Wizard began in the early to mid-’80s, earning him club residencies in Detroit and neighboring Ann Arbor before he was old enough to legally enter the premises, as well as critical exposure on local stations WDRQ and WJLB. From 1982 to 1985, the latter was home to The Electrifyin’ Mojo, then-ruler of the airwaves and an exceptionally influential figure in the tapestry of the city’s late 20th-century musical evolutions. Competition sharpened Mills’ resolve. He would conjure slick open-format megamixes featuring several traits that later bubbled up on Liquid Room: lasered hyperfocus, an elite sprinter’s sense of pace, and the deployment of crowd-baiting feints and fades.

John Collins, Detroit techno historian and a core member of Underground Resistance, was knocked for six by the speed of Mills’ hands, which seemed to zip across the faders as if jammed on fast-forward. “No one had ever really done what he was doing,” he recalled to author Dan Sicko in Techno Rebels. “I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.” Collins wasn’t the only one. In clippings from 1985, the Ann Arbor News spends three paragraphs trying to elucidate the specifics of how a 22-year-old Mills was turning Madonna’s “Into the Groove” inside-out, before waving the white flag: “No, it’s too hard to describe.”

That same year, the release of Model 500’s “No UFO’s” helped catalyze a new electronic movement called techno. The exact provenance of the style remains contested, given the blurry creative overlap with electro and synth-pop, and the techno- prefix was an existing descriptor for music built with or fascinated by advanced technology. But the techno pumping out of Detroit—anchored primarily, though not exclusively, by the Belleville Three of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500, as well as one-half of Cybotron)—was distinct enough to pull clear as a genre in its own right.

By the end of the ’80s, as hometown clubs like the Music Institute sharpened and expanded the sound’s remit, export compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit surfed a wave of British rave fantasia, and Saunderson’s group Inner City became a fixture on the European charts, techno was established. At this point, however, casual audiences still tended to regard it as more Midwest grooves fit for peak time. From the margins, Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks saw things differently. Here now was a fresh medium, one with an unprecedented opportunity to critique the fecklessness of urban blight and mass production that had scarred their predecessors. As a form of cybernetic communication born under Motor City’s smoke-choked skies, it spoke to the sci-fi fantasists on a deeper level. Big fun this was not.

Come 1990, The Wizard was off the air and applying his hand to production. Having already released one LP as part of the industrial outfit Final Cut, the cold austerity of techno was a natural progression. Banks, a former Parliament bassist who had appeared on Techno! and was constantly in hot water with local police for drag racing, was the perfect creative foil, but it took a chance studio meeting with Robert Hood, then MC Rob Noise, for Underground Resistance to be born. “HARD MUSIC FROM A HARD CITY” blared the back of 1992 compilation Revolution for Change, a winning mantra for the label whose sublimation of individual identity, cryptic dispatches from the front line of class war, steadfast refusal to bend to the major label system, and lashings of sonic punishment ignited multiple fires that burn within electronic music to this day.

An early expedition to NYC emphasized the gulf that had emerged between Detroit techno’s first and second wave. At the fabled Limelight club, one unnamed DJ attempted to block Mills from entering the booth until the offender was nearly hurled over a balcony by UR’s enforcer. Out on the street, UR’s matching attire turned the heads of Ice-T and Queen Latifah, who couldn’t discern if the group was a music movement or a militant one, and drew confrontation from local rap crews. (Fearsome they might have been, the label still wasn’t immune from making rookie judgment calls: In 1991, a submission tape arrived at UR HQ entitled Analogue Bubblebath, the very first Aphex Twin record. Mills and Banks passed.)

As the original trio would jet off to live performances in far-flung locations, Mills’ dexterity on the wheels of steel became a front-and-center draw. The baby-faced Wizard was evolving into the man whispered about at ever-increasing volume as the most skilled DJ on Earth, a transition ushered along by a pair of star-making club residencies at Limelight and Berlin’s Tresor. Soon, his shifting demeanor in interviews showed how heavily the responsibility of being an artist able to advance the form weighed on him. By the time Mills peeled off to found the Axis label at the end of ’92, he was on a collision course with destiny.

Prior to 1995, Mills had visited Tokyo two or three times. Japan’s appetite for techno was ravenous, and it’s clear the Detroiter felt kinship with local crowds, given that he agreed for his first official live mix to be a test balloon for Mix-Up, a new series from Sony Japan intended to capture the exponential growth of the club circuit. Until that point, Mills had appeared only on 1993’s Techno-Trance, a niche German tape pack, in which he shelled hard trance and was called “Geoff Mills” in a humiliating misprint on the packaging. It is not considered canon. Mills remains commendably abstemious when it comes to platforming his own work. He hasn’t recorded an installment of DJ-Kicks, nor a Fabric mix, and you won’t find him on Boiler Room (I was one of the bookers there for five years and Lord knows, we tried). Yet he did agree to Mix-Up, a series that ran for all of five editions and then was never heard from again.

Decision made, Liquidroom was sought as a staging ground for the recording. From opening in July 1994 to relocation a decade later, the original space became a favorite of wayfaring jocks like Laurent Garnier and DJ Shadow, as well as a regular host for beloved ’90s Japanese outfits including Melt-Banana, Boredoms’ Yamantaka EYE, and mercurial psychonauts Fishmans. “To say it looks futuristic is valid,” Mills wrote in Liquid Room’s liner notes, “but only if you have seen the future.”

On the big night, a dozen ambient mics were strategically placed around the venue with the intention of preserving a spatial topography of the club within the mix itself. Though this proved too complex to pull off, the idea was decades ahead of its time: In 2011, Four Tet’s FabricLive 59 took a similar approach to mimic the sensation of navigating the London superclub’s multi-level floorplan. Besides, there are moments on Mix-Up Vol. 2 Featuring Jeff Mills – Live Mix at Liquid Room, Tokyo (to cite the Japanese release’s full, and quickly truncated, name) where the audience responds with such deafening affirmation that only left and right in the stereo field was needed.

Taking apart the schematics of the mix reveals how brazenly Mills thumbed his nose at orthodoxy. Selections are afforded little time to settle as the speedometer flickers past the 150 bpm mark. During one showstopping move, Mills pumps the brakes and decelerates into an audibly worn copy of what was then Detroit electronic music’s de facto national anthem, “Strings of Life.” (Its standing has been complicated by the gravity of allegations that broke against the song’s co-creator Derrick May in 2020.) Despite a major tempo collapse, “Strings” is still pitched up as far as the Technics 1200s could handle without intervention. Where the mystique of 20th-century discotheque kings like David Mancuso, Danny Krivit, and Larry Levan was built on extension—either by getting hands-on with splicing tape in order to fashion boutique edits for the dancefloor, or letting the 12" run out in full splendor—here Mills revs in the opposite direction, fixated on dissolution, constantly asking: What’s the fastest I can get a song in and out while still unlocking its integral value?

Seventeen of Mills’ productions make up the backbone of Liquid Room, aired alongside key artists from the golden age of club music: Richie Hawtin, Robert Armani, Ken Ishii, Joey Beltram, Claude Young, and Surgeon. Yet some of Mills’ inclusions were still receiving tweaks mere hours before he caught his flight to Japan, with the crowd reception intended to guide their final form. In Segment 1, the overdriven bass and stacked sirens of an unmastered “i9” submerge the audio in tar thick enough that the crisp rave stabs from “Changes of Life” must scythe through it like a power hose. It worked a treat, so Mills knew the former was done.

Liquid Room also features so many instances of records getting spun backwards and forwards that you might assume there’s a zipper trapped under the needle. Not quite. Unlike club music derived from soundsystem culture—where wheeling up a record is an endorsement of the tune’s popularity and a way to spike energy levels, as much as the functional act of starting over—self-serious house and techno has long treated rewinds like muck tracked all over the floor of a polished blend; verboten except as a last resort. Liquid Room contains dozens of them, all dramatically on the money.

Two passages in particular leap out. First, head to the beginning of Segment 2 and try to picture exactly what’s going on. The Advent’s “Bad Boy,” already a livewire of a tune, is harried constantly from something off DJ Skull’s Met“L”gear EP; as both “Head Basher” and “The 187 Skillz” possess a near-identical growling synth at different speeds, no one can definitively agree which side is in play. Mills punches the faders up and down like a piston to stab in Skull during the fractional gap where the Advent ducks out, deploys a rewind for flair, and repeats the trick again. After six interventions, Mills resets DJ Skull on the platter, scribbles along the edge of the record to locate a different portion that might compliment “Bad Boy” post-breakdown, aligns an appropriate balance of high, mid, and low frequencies using only the left cup of his headphones cued to the mixer, relocks the tempo (the Advent has sped up during all this), then finally throws the channel up again and scratches “Head Basher” in for good, kickstarting another brawl-as-transition.

On a 2024 club-standard set of Pioneer CDJ-3000s with digitized, quantized, tagged, auto-looped, and scrollable audio files that have a visual waveform for good measure, this entire sequence might take a good DJ somewhere around four to five minutes. Mills achieves it on turntables in 97 seconds.

So that’s when things go right. Yet it’s the moments on Liquid Room when things go wrong that give the mix its aura of invincibility. Segment 3 kicks off with Mills phasing between two copies of his track “Casa,” but in a flash they’ve gone massively out of sync—you could drive a Freightliner through the gaps in the kick drums. The same song stumbles over itself like a drunk teenager for what feels like eternity, a disorienting whorl of competing tones that you simply do not hear in professional mixes.

Mills refuses to accept defeat. In a moment of violent perseverance, he starts attacking the trainwreck with frantic reloads, not so much correcting the beatmatch as folding the flub into his rhythmic toolbox, like a blacksmith striking the same iron over and over until it finally contorts into the required shape. Where any other DJ might cut their losses, Mills opts to ride the riptide, then leaves it in for the world to hear. The payoff is mesmeric.

Listening to Mills’ run from 1993’s Waveform Transmission Vol.1 through 1998’s Purpose Maker Compilation today can raise mixed feelings. They don’t, alas, make them like this anymore. Mills’ work helped to nudge techno beyond select early-adopter cities: turning the head of British junglists, directly inspiring the next wave of European stars like Paula Temple, Adam Beyer, and Joris Voorn, and spawning hardgroove, an offshoot of low-bollocks, high-impact rippers captained by Ben Sims, one of the few DJs credibly spoken about in the same breath as the Detroit greats. There’s a reason why an idiom like “Dublin’s Jeff Mills” or “the grimey Jeff Mills” translates without supporting context: His name is not only a reflection of a certain skillset, it’s synonymous with dynamism and quality.

Another word to describe Mills these days is dependable. Even in full flight, shredding the TR-909 or using three-deck acrobatics to coax a football field’s worth of dancers to the edge of ecstasy, control is key. Gung-ho chops and cuts have been supplanted by discrete feathering as Mills prioritizes stealthy exits that are “mainly subtracting sound away.” The same principle guides Liquid Room—ditch the inclination to ID each song and give yourself over to the product as a whole—yet his set progressions rarely accommodate hairpin turns anymore. He starts spacey, then it’s deep, then “The Bells,” then it’s euphoric, then it’s spacey again, then maybe a bonus 909 solo to cap the show. That’s the Jeff Mills Experience. The formula rocks. His reputation as the high deity of techno is staked on it.

For a mix that should have been rendered obsolete by decades of upgrades, Liquid Room’s influence sustains in part because it effortlessly bridges two opposing DJ disciplines: the cultivated depth of techno and the thrill of hammer-time maximalism. That chasm feels as wide as ever. Techno has been suffering an identity crisis for years—it has become simultaneously larger, whiter, and shallower. The big-room-ification of a once proud subculture has resulted in wan approximations of communal escape scaled up to jumbotron levels, then miniaturized to fit the screens in our hands. Equally, for a scene rooted in the shock of the new, there’s profound insecurity among the old guard about fresh blood entering the genre’s arteries. Mills has sat on the top line of an indiscriminately broad array of festivals, including many corporate ones, for longer than today's generation of clubbers have been alive—so whether young audiences currently feasting on devil-may-care DJing regard him as an icon of rave’s radical heyday remains to be seen.

But which is the Jeff Mills we actually want? The one heard on Liquid Room, a capital-A Artist in the mold of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, with acuity of vision and flaws too? Or the realpolitik Mills, dropping “The Bells” every show, still hoping techno might be a curative for social ills, playing the game as it lays? Uneasy collisions between the two—a hometown reaction to The Wizard’s comeback so frosty he retired the alias, or the baffling recurrence of crowds who lob projectiles at him when he’s not matching their expectations—suggest people are settling for the wrong option.

In a recent campaign for fashion house Jil Sander, Mills was asked to expound upon a theme, “mid-’90s optimism”—with the unspoken “that we’ve lost” echoing not far behind. There’s no glint of awe in our collective eye when DJing’s premier cosmologist collaborates with NASA. It’s just a thing that happens. The idea that technology could be inspiring or even fun anymore has dissipated. Accordingly, the notion that techno might be a pathway to revolution has lost resonance. So many arenas and aircraft hangars have passed in front of Mills’ eyes now that, by his own account, he sometimes zones out mid-performance and begins to dream, instead, of the stars. To some degree, he stands as an avatar for a future forestalled.

Yet I’d encourage you to listen to the mix and consider the opposite: that this is the work of an individual who believed so unreservedly in the possibilities of what lay beyond that they gave up their best years attempting to tear open that wormhole. At the root, Mills told author Hari Kunzru in 1998, his spin on techno has always been “about making people feel they’re in a time ahead of this present time. Like if you’re hearing someone speak in a language you don’t understand, or you’re in surroundings you’ve never seen before.” More than any DJ mix before or since, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo makes a persuasive case for this music as an intercepted transmission from another realm, but the one commuting that message over a set of turntables isn’t a computer. It isn’t a chatbot, or an algorithm, or a self-learning system.

Machines can only take you so far, and what they explicitly cannot do is this. Because when the lights go up and the booth clears out, there stands only Jeff, human. And he’s playing the absolute shit out of those records.