X-102 - ‘Discovers the Rings of Saturn’
No. 40 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Techno is everything you haven’t imagined yet.” – Jeff Mills
In 1989, one of the great partnerships in the history of electronica began. A slight, soft-spoken DJ and drummer known as The Wizard was busting up the airwaves with genre mash-ups on Detroit’s WDRQ and WJLB radio stations, and had recently exited his industrial music outfit Final Cut. A mysterious bass player who recorded with funk legend George Clinton and Parliament, sought out The Wizard to help get his house funk experiments off the ground and onto the charts. The DJ was Jeff Mills, today considered the world’s top techno mixer and its most distinctive producer; the old Clinton hand was “Mad” Mike Banks, techno’s deep political conscience, a heroic incognito with a magical sense of melody and birdsong conjurations.
Their influences ran the gamut, from Grandmaster Flash and Jazzy Jeff to Meat Beat Manifesto, Phuture and Rush. Part of Detroit techno’s “Second Wave,” they competed globally with local producers, like Richie Hawtin (Plastikman, F.U.S.E.), Kenny Larkin (Pod, Dark Comedy) and Carl Craig (69, BFC, Paperclip People). But in contrast with their peers, Underground Resistance adopted an overt fight-the-system ideology. Unlike their later works which have explored more rarefied concerns and cultural strategies — from Mills’ filmic and symphonic projects like his Blue Potential live performance with the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra and his Blue Note collaborations with Tony Allen and Jean-Phi Dary as Paradox, to Banks’ key sponsorship of techno maestros The Martian and The Aztec Mystic — UR’s introductory phase was intensely local, social and political.*
Mills and Banks had watched Detroit decay following the city’s 1967 riot, one of the most deadly and destructive in American history. Grounded in civil rights, the pair at first struck a protest aesthetic, one inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and indirectly, the Black Panthers. “All the Black men you see in America today are the direct result of those actions,” Mills told Andrez Bergen in 2006. “All the freedoms we have, as well as the restrictions, refer back to the government and the Black Panthers in the ’70s. We make music about who we are and where we’re from. Of course there are going to be links — that’s why we had songs with titles like ‘Riot’. Because that’s indicative of the era we were born in, and the things we remember. As time goes on, naturally I think the messages will get further away from that. It’s not a coincidence. There is a reason behind UR and Public Enemy and these people.”
The cover of UR’s Revolution for Change, released the same year as UR’s X-102 Discovers the Rings of Saturn, proclaims it’s “hard music for a hard city.” But while their sound contained a bruising, almost militant energy, it was always tempered by messages of nonviolence and inner strength. In retrospect, one of the most striking compositions on the essential Revolution collection is ‘Quadrasonic,’ its female voice whispering “peace, love, harmony and divinity.” Musically it’s a perfect showcase for Banks’ liquid melodies, a rave beauty hinting at later classics like ‘Jupiter Jazz’ and ‘Journey of the Dragons,’ with a grooving strut that echoes deep in the bones.
X-102 was UR’s revolutionary experience at full force, building on their first album for Berlin’s Tresor label and club — X-101’s X-101 — which had channeled the sheer sonic glee over the fall of the Berlin Wall: their hard Detroit perspective fusing with Germany’s new hard-won freedom — its ‘Sonic Destroyer’ sounds like a galactic garbage truck gobbling up planets and asteroids, while 'The Final Hour’ seethes, ‘Rave New World’ broods and ‘Whatever Happened to Peace’ thunders. X-102 contrasts with X-101 in that it drifts, harries and soars. Its musical language is exploration and discovery. It’s the second ‘X’ expedition — farther, deeper.
“I like Silver Surfer,” Banks explained to Mark Fisher in 2007 for The Wire, discussing his own everyman role as an inner-city high school baseball coach, who was always drawn to the future and mystical figures. “I watched the movie. Silver Surfer was my guy, because he didn’t talk a lot, he just did what he did, he was real smooth. Other characters like Bruce Lee, when he was in the Green Hornet — I was like, ‘fuck the Green Hornet, I like Kato,’ because he was my hero.”
While Banks was the emotional fire behind Underground Resistance, Mills was its abstract navigator. In many ways he has taken a career path not unlike Miles Davis did with jazz, cutting his own uncompromising path into ever more challenging yet vibrant work. With Underground Resistance, he gave its early sound a focus, a line, an edge. “The producer has to transfer what he’s thinking about to his hands and then to the machine,” Mills, who almost became an architect, explained to Hari Kunzru in 1998. “The better the producer, the clearer the picture will be. It’s a translation from my hands to the machine. And that’s usually where it gets lost.”
And then, there was “Rob Noise,” the younger of the three, who bridged Banks and Mills’ music with a sense of almost religious purpose. His real name was Robert Hood, the father of minimal techno, pushing its rhythmic message in clean, wild and riveting new directions while keeping his musical phrases and percussions deeply human. Later a Christian preacher, he started by writing Underground Resistance’s press releases and declarations, before joining Mills and Banks at the controls. X-102 Discovers the Rings of Saturn represents the trio’s greatest work together.
“I see any form of music as ministry," Hood would tell Rolling Stone in 2016, explaining his spiritual journey. “It just depends on what you're preaching. When I'm behind the turntables, I'm at a pulpit. I’m preaching a message of love — it’s just coming through electrical wires and Funktion-One speakers.” But in 1992, Hood was dreaming less about Christ and more about Saturn. X-102 took the distinct personas of all three masters of techno into its rings, marrying music with science, with mystery.
It was as if they were floating in zero gravity off the rings of Saturn. In many ways East Berlin was an alien world, as was the dark dank basement of Tresor with its fog and strobe lights, pulsing on Leipziger Strasse in Mitte. The same could be said of the Motor City — Detroit — circa 1992, adrift and darkened by the industrial waves of machine time, its own Music Institute nightclub having burned so bright from its downtown ghost-town epicenter, from 1988 to 1990 at 1315 Broadway, where tumbleweeds would blow across the street while techno legend Derrick May conducted brainwaves of X-ray music through fog to one strobe light.
It was the common space of zero where dreaming souls crashed in a Second Wave onto the desolate shores of Tresor, its strobe light pulsing too from across the Atlantic to Banks, Mills and Hood. Sweaty, throbbing, slamming, fearless — the meeting of like minds and hungry bodies peering in the darkness at a flashing ball of fire. Envisioning a world they could all go to, a space they could pioneer, a future they could believe in, three Black men perceived and orchestrated a journey at the heart of Europe’s greatest implosion, echoing through time — the sound of a new experience.
“Imagine being in an atmosphere where all your God given senses are extinct…” said the album’s inner sleeve notes, a mission statement for a mission into the aural outer reaches of the Solar System. “Where your existence is but a mere fragment in a ring around a nucleus that glows like a ball of fire…” — and a ball of fire is what X-102 Discovers the Rings of Saturn becomes over the course of fourteen unstoppable blistering strobes of sound, beginning with Hood’s moody majestic strings.
‘Phoebe’ follows his ‘Intro’ with a warped thumping beat that seems to suck in and out with each pulse, inspiring the gravity pulls of The Advent’s searing space techno from 1995’s Elements of Life and onto their own sophomore effort, 1997’s New Beginnings. Sounding almost like the growls of a walrus, it immediately sets the otherworldly stage for an album of unrelenting power. Saturn truly is a perfect metaphor for Underground Resistance’s epic sound, the gas giant with its icy sweeping rings conveying the strange alien beauty of the universe.
Even the album’s cut grooves famously mirrored the rings and moon orbits of Saturn, its vinyl production inspiring the first looping locked grooves on a record. "How long a track should be was dictated by how wide the ring actually was on Saturn,” Mills told Jockey Slut magazine. “What the rings were made out of, determined the texture of the track. The way they were sequenced was linked to the concept and the color of the artwork is very similar to what it really looks like.”
‘Titan’ starts with an eerie tone that grows in its hum like a vibrating, resonating spaceship, before jumping into an urgent drumbeat, snares snapping, beats stopping, a synth suddenly zapping, the drums kicking back in, syncopating, electricity building, each element spaced from the other, perfectly weaving and overlapping, calling to mind the liquid rippling on the yellow surface of Saturn’s largest moon. Here one clearly could hear Mill’s emerging vision of inner peace within the tempest of a supernova — an existential cry booming from the heart of a sun.
His interlude ‘Rhea’ is a wild tonal lurch through the vacuum of outer space, careening like a satellite hovering over its namesake, Saturn’s second largest moon; which brings us to ‘C-Ring,’ Banks’ first composition on the album and one of its true weightless wonders, his facility and fluidity with bass notes pitched up just so into a swinging mellifluous melody of cosmic circularity, little eddies of orbit pooling around slight shifts and turns of movement, part groove, part soothe.
Another moon, ‘Tethys,’ named after a Greek mythic titan, once again swerves out into oblivion in long looping notes, like a bolo picking up speed, going faster and faster, a drum beat accelerating its thrashing tempo, dancing with the tonal clusters of the circling fleet, tighter and tighter, and then, disintegration into nothing. So comes Robert Hood’s second track, ‘Hyperion,’ the first irregular non-round moon to be discovered and the first X-102 song to use archetypal rave stabs, chaotic hyper synthesized samples and waveforms that reigned the era, all mutations on Igor Stravinsky’s staccato strings from ‘Firebird Suite,’ first patched as a preset in a workstation synth-sampler, 1979’s famous Fairlight CMI.
Shot through with one of the album’s straighter beats, it exhibit’s Hood’s love of minute variations over a more stripped down rhythm, evoking the erratic orbit of Hyperion and its sponge-like rock surface. “My grandmother, watching her play the tambourine in church, she beat the tambourine like you wouldn't believe,” Hood told Elias Leight for Rolling Stone. “That's where I got a lot of my rhythm from. What she did with that tambourine would put Prince to shame.”
Which takes us into ‘Dione,’ another Banks beauty that rejoices in more sub frequency modulations, burbling along, calling to mind the moon Dione’s co-orbital sub-moons Helene and Polydeuces, with its little chirps and twangs of melody, swirling and even talking to each other in a sweet ramble and rhyme of winsome tones, a Stravinsky staccato stab here and then there, then tipsy again in a higher register — an echo, precognition and ocean of infinite possibility that previews the triumph of his wily immortal masterpiece, ‘Jupiter Jazz,’ which he would release soon after X-102.
‘B-Ring’ by Hood brings back a more club-friendly profile, its hi-hat house rhythm displaying his more functional and down-to-earth spirituality to Banks’ sensual almost Aquarian romanticism and Mills’ percussive psychedelia — a bent that comes more to the fore with Mills’ ‘Enceladus,’ the geyser moon of Saturn, building up with his own Stravinsky rave stabs, lower in pitch, more sub-aquatic, lapping under tweety bird singing synth arias and funky warbles, more ethereal stabs rolling overhead, its starring riff pulled taut as he plays its strings like rings around Saturn.
“It was there that I realized how impactful music can be, if used in ways that can universally speak to people,” Mills told Fifteen Questions in 2021 of his Motor City upbringing. “As an electronic musician and to produce music, it is not uncommon to take on all of the musician’s duties and instruments in the programming and playing, but it is through the usage of percussion where I’ve been able to better understand other instruments.” A drummer by training, this is the key revelation in his decades-long search through time and space: “Most instruments are percussive in some fashion, so working on perfecting my own human rhythm made more sense.”
Like twin moons, Mills and Banks orbit each other as ‘Mimas’ arrives at the album’s last inflection point. The smallest rounded moon known to humanity, Mimas is a nice metaphor with its one big crater resembling an eye. It is a reflective composition with light drumming and a gentle nature, its slow spinning melodic loop speaking of dream drifts into deep space, and its strings of life painting a warm sunrise as it comes out of Saturn’s shadow eclipse. ‘Iapetus,’ named after Saturn’s third largest moon, an icy and light-to-dark hemisphered orb, follows with a poignant ambient grace, as if Banks himself is looking out over Saturn from his frosty cockpit and its doorstep.
“I play gospel music,” Banks explained to WDET’s Detroit Public Radio. “I also love grunge music. I like Danzig and Black Sabbath. I love it because I’m a myriad human. I’m both. If you make music, just twist it and kind of distort it, and warp, I can feel you on that, as long as we can feel it — it’s got something unique about it. Me and Jeff was always attracted to it. We thought it was fair to represent both entities.” An appreciator of all music, Banks was attuned to all frequencies, peoples and worlds.
“When we went with the Rings of Saturn, we thought about that other stuff,” he continued. “We thought about what would it sound like for a probe to come through those rings and get into the planet? And what would those sounds sound like? So it wasn’t just hood rap oriented inspiration. We were all off into Star Trek and different kinds of voyages. When you’re scared to go across 8 Mile, you basically imagine a whole lot of different stuff.”
You can hear that fear and wanderlust in ‘A-Ring,’ the only track on Discovers the Rings of Saturn where Banks, Mills and Hood are credited together as songwriters — a twisting and warping interlude reminiscent of the Voyager probes, with their hands on its navigational controls, all three steering it in unison; its high frequency tonal sweeps call back across the Solar System, the chafe of the atmosphere of Saturn growing as it approaches its descent. That push through darkness and great distances in many ways paralleled UR’s own journey. Mark Ernestus, who founded Berlin’s Hard Wax record shop and distribution arm and would go on to co-found the Basic Channel techno group, had urged UR to take a leap of faith into another world.
“He wanted a sound that could unify people from two completely different things,” Banks recalled to Torsten Schmidt for Red Bull Music Academy in 2018. “He’s trying to explain it to us, and we are like, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But he found the right guys, because we weren’t scared to go into East Berlin, we weren’t scared of nothing, because that’s what we come through. None of them guys in Detroit are scared of much, if they’re really from Detroit. OK?”
Sampling narration from NASA’s 1979 Voyagers documentary on Pasadena, California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes’ progress across our Solar System, UR’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ from the first X-102 E.P. describes the strange moons, rings and physics of Saturn: of moons frozen through, of moon remains tumbling in a chaotic orbit, of enormous craters, of ice moons that reflect the Sun’s light with intense brightness, of a moon with internal heat that also melted its surface, and the only moon known to have an atmosphere.
“The moons of Saturn have a direct influence on Saturn’s rings,” the narrator’s voice echoes. “A natural tendency of rings material is to spread both toward and away from the planet. But the moons and the complex interplay of gravitational forces shape the rings and define their structure.” In many ways, it’s not that far from describing the alienation and beauty of Berlin and Detroit at the end of the millennium. Both the narrator and the music speak to the Black-White divide in Detroit and elsewhere, echoing the West and East Berlin divide after the fall of the Wall, of the chasms between rich and poor, of war and peace, between our past and future.
And so the closing ‘Groundzero (The Planet)’ arrives with great anticipation. It does not disappoint. Written the same year as Banks’ infamous ‘Death Star,’ X-102’s touch down on Saturn is equally merciless in its driving groove, taking no prisoners, blazing in a storm of sonic winds that strip down to the bone and the bone down to the ghost. Its Stravinsky stabs morph and attack in full-on techno-bass fashion, its riffing blasts rapid firing over the gusts and the thrusts, rocking to a funky bedrock rumble: finding terra firma on the gas planet, breaking ground into the common ground. It takes L.A. Style’s classic ‘James Brown Is Dead’ and Technotronic’s ‘Pump Up The Jam’ out to the interstellar woodshed and ejects them into infinity, like firebirds into sparks…
“I’m a guitar player. We would study different frequencies. I would play some gospel chords some times and Jeff would stop me and say, ‘What’s that chord? What’s that chord? That’s a deep chord.’ It would be ‘Precious Lord.’ It would be a particular chord. And I would say, ‘That’s the part where everybody cries. Jeff, you play it when they’re about to close the casket, that’s the chord you get, when they’re about to drop the lid on the guy.’ Jeff would be fascinated with that chord. We would find the root note of that chord. We found out that chord evoked memory in people, a strong sense of memory. So we started investigating frequencies transposed to emotion.”
The gospel hymnal ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord,’ was most famously sung by Mahalia Jackson as well as Arethra Franklin. It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite song and was sung at his funeral. As Banks explained to WDET’s Liz Copeland and Clark Warner in 2004, he and Mills were cracking the code on a more universal yet fierce gospel for our techno world. They intentionally played in places that “‘ain’t particularly happy,” like Dresden and East Berlin, including a dynamite factory in Switzerland that had supplied explosives to warring nations in World War II.
“Places that got fear in them, where some fear went down,” as he put it. In the early 1990s, people wanted a part of Detroit, but “you can’t expect to see us where Mary Poppins would play,” he said. So they took the notes and chords of ‘Precious Lord’ and the “two entities,” both sides, “the duality of man” as Banks would say — hard, supple, mean and kind, light and dark — and unified people from two completely different things, spinning them into the outer reaches of human ingenuity.**
The three old friends would take that velocity into extraordinary new directions. Banks would co-found Submerge, a cornerstone of Detroit techno and independent music. He would pen masterworks like ‘Amazon,’ ‘Hi-Tech Jazz’ and ‘Cosmic Traveler.’ His ‘Jupiter Jazz’ alone would inspire a whole generation of producers. Championing artists like Drexciya and Suburban Knight, leading the charge on UR compilations Interstellar Fugitives and the Depth Charge series, Banks brought Detroit to the greater techno faithful year after year. Touring the world, he also assembled the Galaxy 2 Galaxy live band, performing throughout Europe and Japan. In a way, channeling Silver Surfer, he was out there somewhere always keeping watch.
Hood kept on like a torpedo. From the gregarious ‘SH-101’ to the Marvin Gaye-spirited ‘Behind This Door’ to the zap-trance of ‘Alpha (The Beginning),’ he went from strength to strength. Moving with Mills to New York City in 1992, he helped set up Axis Records and innovated a tougher more minimal template, both starting with Tresor’s Waveform Transmission album series. He would next record his seminal minimal classics, Internal Empire and Minimal Nation, while charting a more soulful and variable sound on his acclaimed Nighttime World albums. Moving to Alabama, recommitting himself to a Christian mission, he kept his M-Plant label busy, and authored progressive visions Omega and Mirror Man with no signs of slowing.
Mills’ trajectory was just as relentless and cosmic. He started with his solo anthem ‘The Bells’ and then a slew of techno wonders, from the micro-tribalism of ‘Gamma Player’ to the spiraling Escher-groove of ‘Perfecture: Somewhere Around Now.’ His compilations Lifelike and The Other Day, and his From the 21st album of 1999 unveiled a highly sensitive intellect and an ambient emotionality like no other, essential listening for adventurous techno fans. His Every Dog Has Its Day brought a sweet more easily accessible style into focus, setting the stage for three decades of daring music.
Walking the line of high art and functional dance music, Mills’ oeuvre in many ways illustrates the bold futurism Underground Resistance set in motion with X-102. His excellent The Occurrence, The Power, The Jungle Planet, The Clairvoyant and his Zanza project, Wonderland, each profound, are just scratches on the surface of a deeper world that includes soundtracks, orchestral collaborations, live Afrobeat, interplanetary philosophy, his UFO-obsessed Something in the Sky vinyl series, reflections on technology, and his DJ masterclasses, including the Exhibitionist.
Immense is the only way to think about it. The output and influence of Mills, Hood, and Banks is overwhelming. They have lived full lives through the medium of sound. Their legacy is just beginning to be better understood. Like the Voyager probes, the three have orbited far and wide, and yet still intersect in stunning circles and lines (2008’s reunion album X-102 Rediscovers the Rings of Saturn for example), an interplay of gravitational forces only the brave could conjure and conduct moon-wise.***
As their impact reverberates through sound and soul like the rings of Saturn, Mills’ famous statement that techno is anything that has yet to be imagined echoes ever truer. The Solar System explored, the Earth wobbling, the next phase is clear. Next stop? The galaxy and then the universe — our moral arc within and without.
Track Listing:
1. Intro
2. Phoebe
3. Titan
4. Rhea
5. C-Ring
6. Tethys
7. Dione
8. B-Ring
9. Enceladus
10. Mimas
11. Iapetus
12. A-Ring
13. Groundzero (The Planet)
*Techno and electronic dance music have long been accused of being the preoccupation of hedonists alone. While there are other examples that run against this stereotype, Underground Resistance in fact destroyed that stereotype once and for all for anyone paying attention. Where that passion came from was Detroit’s milieu of economic disparity and industrial rot, combined with the deferred dreams of the African American middle class following the Great Migration and the devastating effects of Reaganomics on social mobility and minorities.
Inspired by the open-minded and culturally fearless musical programming of The Electrifying Mojo AKA radio DJ Charles Johnson, both the “First Generation” and “Second Generation” of Detroit techno artists adopted an uncompromising ethos regarding electronica’s roots and evolution. It was in this fiery furnace inside an abandoned downtown metropolis that Jeff Mills began his journey as an artist.
Banks was also deeply influenced by the ferment of the 1970s and ‘80s, The Electrifying Mojo’s promotion of Kraftwerk, Parliament/Funkadelic, and new wave songs like the B52’s ‘Rock Lobster’ mixing with the sounds of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Aerosmith, Brian Eno and so on. While Banks, a studio musician in the ‘80s, was mentored by George Clinton, Mills’ love of rhythm took him through jazz, funk, industrial and hip hop — especially Public Enemy.
“The hip-hop was just killing the game and that’s what really pissed Jeff off ’cause they wouldn’t let him play Public Enemy,” Banks told Red Bull Music Academy of the wall Mills hit that then spurred their push for techno and independence. “He’s on the main radio station in a mostly all black city, Latinos, and Arabs, and we can’t hear Public Enemy. So Jeff smelled a rat.”
“I already knew it from doing sessions that it was fraudulent,” Banks continued. “The whole major business, I’ll tell them right now, it’s a fake. You all are listening to fake shit. You’re listening to one-tenth of what music could be.”
**The Detroit-Berlin connection is oft cited but not well appreciated by the rave scenes outside Germany and the American Midwest. Not only did Hard Wax and Basic Channel forge a critical alliance with UR and other artists like Juan Atkins (who wrote the classic Skynet as Infiniti for Tresor) but set the harder template of techno that would influence generations of artists, from Modeselektor to Spain’s Pig & Dan — their ‘Liberate’ is a good example of the impact ‘Groundzero (The Planet)’ had on European rhythmic instincts, well reflected on their 2007 album, Imagine.
That sound was sparked by one track in particular, X-101’s ‘Sonic Destroyer,’ which set off a sonic earthquake through Berlin and beyond. As Banks would explain in 2018, it was designed “to rip off the head of any DJ in front of Jeff. ‘Cause they would always try to out-spin him, so it was to destroy the DJ. Also destroy record companies, corporations, anything we felt was trying to get ahold of us.” ‘Groundzero (The Planet)’ was its progressive echo, showing up in Spiral Tribe’s now infamous Castlemorton festival rave set, giving the hedonism a spirited backbone.
X-102 crystallized that social wave into a prism that exposed everything from house to trance to breakbeat to UR’s boundless vision, chain-reacting a both intellectual and muscular approach to sound itself. Practically worshipped in Europe and especially Germany, UR’s influence can be felt far and wide even when it’s stealth.
Taking Detroit’s DJ Rolando as another example of UR’s spacetime wave, also known as The Aztec Mystic, his ‘Jaguar’ from 1999’s Knights of the Jaguar E.P. captured the imagination of European tastemakers, igniting illegal rip-offs by major labels hungry to get in on the phenomenon. He would later hold a residency at Berghain.
***The body of work that followed X-102 is dizzying. Just following Underground Resistance’s continued output via Bank’s ongoing stewardship, its label and sub-label activities (such as Red Planet, the home of The Martian), and the Submerge store, both physical and online, it’s hard to keep up.
In 2008, Banks and Mills, still close over the years, reunited to revise, remaster and augment the X-102 project with X-102 Rediscovers the Rings of Saturn. It included a reordering of the album along with new material — the hypnotic ‘Daphnis (Keeler’s Gap),’ the disorienting ‘Descending to the Surface,’ the heady ‘Pan’ and more — combined with beautiful filmic visuals and a handful of highly anticipated live performances at museums and festivals like Barcelona’s Sonar.
Hood and Mills started Axis Records to release their solo work but also to continue their co-experimentation with sci-fi concepts and sounds: X-103’s Atlantis is itself a compelling document (released on Tresor), taking their interest in acidy and bubbly sounds into fascinating territory, a precursor to Drexciya’s own aquatic mythology. The vinyl version of X-103’s Thera E.P. (released on Axis) is home to a thrilling interpretation of ‘The Gardens,’ turning groove and melody into underwater mesmerizing sand clouds, vamping the sea floor again and again.
Mills, as was touched upon in the piece, is probably the most prolific techno and ambient artist of all time, next to Brian Eno and Germany’s Pete Namlook. His catalog of work is massive, and even spans into filmmaking, photography and sculpture. From his passion for the films of Fritz Lang to the comedy of Buster Keaton, the concerns of modern jazz and classical, his forays could be deemed as pretentious by lesser critics, but the quality and uncompromising intent is always inspiring. Mills also received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017 from France. Japan is also important to his arc: Live At The Liquid Room, Tokyo, in 1997, reflected a new beginning for Mills, a fruitful relationship with Sony, including a Sony executive and his future wife Yoko Uozumi, who has been a key partner in the management and growth of Axis and his career.
Kraftwerk also befriended UR when they met each other at Tresor — the iconic godfathers of electronic pop later asking UR to remix their ‘Expo2000’ — themselves encouraged by UR’s DIY approach to music, and buoyed by UR’s assurance that the new generation would welcome their return, helping set the course for Kraftwerk’s performance at Tribal Gathering in 1997, their global tours in the 2000s, and the exquisite Tour De France Soundtracks in 2003 — techno coming full circle.
Not mentioned in this piece but central to UR’s rise and the careers of its members past and present are the people behind Tresor: club founder Dimitri Hegemann and Carola Stoiber, who scouted and nurtured much of its talent. Without them, UR may have never reached their Saturn or beyond — a hopeful reminder that when people cross oceans, cultures, and racial divides, anything is possible.