It happens that it's all there, all (or almost all) the sense of this damn music is in those three segments that make up this record. The overwhelming and unstable sonic mass derails immediately off the tracks, tossed around on paranoid chemtrails. There was a cool guy from Detroit that night in the fall of '95 at the Liquid Room in Tokyo, a guy who knew what he was doing that night dealing with 2 turntables and a sea of vinyl stacked behind him. The techno: those who say it’s cold and robotic music mean they have never listened to this damn DJ set. Those who say it's a boring and flat genre have never listened to this damn DJ set. The first 35 minutes are destabilizing, Mills throws dozens of records on the turntables, extracting a minute or a little more from each of them, continuously changing them, creating a sound monster in its own right, creating music from music. The beats are telluric, the sounds harsh and magmatic, the level of frenzy created has nothing artificial, nothing cold or calculated, it’s an all-encompassing human warmth. As the minutes pass, the groove grinds relentlessly, the sound is dirty, muddy, at times clanking, every imperfection is left on record as it is, from the needles dropping on the records to the incessant crackling of the vinyls, a naked record, unadorned, essential. What happened at the Liquid Room with Jeff Mills is a ritual, physical before mental, human before mechanical, the electronic medium is just that, a means to reach something else. Techno is not cables, iron, and steel; techno is flesh, the new flesh.
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