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We at Julie Tippex are very proud to work with JEFF MILLS! Pascal Tippex is handling the booking for the Symphonic Orchestra projects, live band, the Cinemixes, Art, Video, Dance, Performances and basically all the “Special” projects for Jeff. (Please note that Jeff’s DJ sets are booked by katty@kinetic-am.com )
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The DJ Jeff Mills, inventor of the Detroit Techno sound back in the late 80s, is one of the planetary superstars of techno. However, the man is more complex than he first appears, embodying an artistic ambition which reaches far beyond simple techno music and into electronic music, leagues ahead of his fellow DJs.
Part of the glorious history of electronic music, Jeff Mills is also fascinated by other forms of Art. The previous years saw him create music for films : “2001, a Space Odyssey”, “Metropolis”, Buster Keaton’s “Three Ages”, “Lost World”, “Fantastic Voyage”, “Berlin a symphony of a great city”, “October”, “Etudes sur Paris”, “Woman in the Moon” and more.
Other Art projects include the sound environment of the exhibition “Diaspora” at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, “Mono“, a sculpture-installation dedicated to “2001, a Space Odyssey” at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona, “Star Children” (New Form Festival, Vancouver), “Oneness” with Dancer Emmanuelle Huynh (Tokyo and Paris), “The Gateway” with dancer Raphaëlle Delaunay (Marseille), “Chronicles of Possible Worlds” (at Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence), “Man from Tomorrow” a film by Jacqueline Caux, the music to “Planet of Insects” a dance project by Akaji Maro, presitigious collaborations with La Cinémathèque, La Cité de la Musique, Le Centre Pompidou, Le Louvre (a five-month residency in 2015), La Philarmonie in Paris, The Royal Festival Hall in London during Meltdown Festival, the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, the Glasgow and Paris Film Festivals and a performance at the all-night contemporary Art event “La Nuit Blanche” before more than 20,000 people.
Mills – who now lives part-time in Chicago and Paris – is working on numerous new projects featuring film, video, dancers, installations, concerts with symphonic orchestras (Salle Pleyel in Paris, Barbican in London, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Melbourne, Eindhoven, Porto, Budapest, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Grenoble, Metz, Dublin, Sidney, Spoleto, Malmö, Belgrade,Katowice…), collaboration with the classical pianist Mikhail Rudy, the video artist Guillaume Marmin, “The Midnight Zone”, a Stanley Kubrick inspired piece…
Current projects include:
Jeff Mills with a Symphonic Orchestra: “Light from the Outside World”, “Where Light Ends”, “Planets”
In September 2012, Jeff Mills played a new version of this orchestral project, now called “Light from the Outside World”, to a sold-out Salle Pleyel in Paris with L’Orchestre National d’Ile de France, conducted by Christophe Mangou. “Light from the Outside World” includes Mills’ classics as “The Bells” or “Sonic Destroyer” adapted by Roussel.
All the performances for Jeff Mills and Symphonic Orchestras have always been sold-out shows.
Here is a video from Where Light Ends in Rennes, Oct 2013.
Close Encounters of the 4th Kind
Close Encounter Of The Fourth Kind is a full sensory experience that explores the sensation of entering and existing in another reality – a different time and space. Techno Producer and DJ Jeff Mills and Lighting Designer Guillaume Marmin team up to collaborate on a one-of-a-kind experience. The creation of a sound and lighting installation and dance event that explores the senses of being connected to “something” other than human.
“Seeing is believing”, so the concept is based around the various exotic designs of Marmin’s special lighting work. From light to dark and everything degree in between, his objective is to take the audience away from what they recognize into a new and different type of atmosphere. With music composed and designed especially for this event, Jeff Mills explores the various possibilities of the concept in 5 hours of live and DJ programming.
Close Encounter Of The Fourth Kind premiered in Paris in September 2016 to 5000 enthusiastic fans.
A Tribute to John Coltrane
Jeff Mills joins with Emile Parisien a young soprano sax player to pay a tribute to the great John Coltrane. Incredible mix of electronic and jazz music.
This project premiered in Paris in September 2016 for a show filmed by Sourde Oreille. Watch the film here.
Jeff Mills presents “Spiral Deluxe”, a live band
Please read below about the album Jeff recorded with this band and recently put out on Axis Records:
The first release from the Axis Audiophile Series. Jeff Mills has formed an electronic jazz fusion band and this 12″ is a recording of their recent performance in Kobe during the TodaysArt.JP Festival. Mills manages the decks, drums and percussion and is joined Detroit legend and Underground Resistance stalwart Gerald Mitchell (Los Hermanos/Galaxy 2 Galaxy), keyboardist Yumiko Ohno and bassist Kenji Jino. “Eventide” has the same kind of urban, uplifting soul as anything Kaidi Thatham or Mark de Clive-Lowe have made and isn’t bad at all! On the flip “Happy Gamma Ray” features uplifting keys and emotive chords backed by funk bass and one of Mills’ unmistakeable 909 drum machine workouts. It really seems that there’s no limit to this Motor City legend’s creativity which has spanned nearly 30 years and we’re excited about this new chapter in the Wizard’s sonic universe.
“Spiral Deluxe”, Jeff Mills’ live band availability: EUR in early October 2016. Contact Pascal
JEFF MILLS AND TONY ALLEN
This incredible double-bill saw the Wizard meet with the inventor of Afro-Beat, drummer with Fela in the 1970s. The first show took place in small jazz club in Paris and blew everybody’s minds of course. Watch the film here.
CINEMIX: “The Trip”
“Space is our destiny so let the punishment begin”. Jeff Mills presents “The Trip“. Fascinated by science-fiction cinema, Jeff Mills pursues his work on images started in 2000, and offers a sound and image mix, inviting the audience to a fully sensorial experience. “The Trip” explores the subject of how humans will endure the mental and physical constraints of traveling through Outer Space in order to discover the unknown. Mixing live more than fifty of science-fiction movie extracts (from 1920’s to 1970’s), following the sames principles than in his musical mixes, Jeff Mills invites us to enter a pulsating atmosphere of the abnormal… Psychedelic meets electronic.
In June 2014 Jeff performed a new version of THE TRIP to a packed Royal Festival Hall in London, during James Lavelle’s curated Meltdown festival.
“Life to Death and Back”
In 2015, Le Musée du Louvre in Paris gave a Carte Blanche to Jeff Mills: 4 different shows in the museum Auditorium. The most ambitious of these 4 nights was “Life to Death and Back“, a 45 minutes silent film (filmed by Mills in September 2014 in the Louvre Egyptian collection) featuring three Dancers/Pharaohs walking through the Egyptian Exhibition at Le Louvre Museum in Paris, from the Sphynx staircase towards Osiris’s crypt. This “walk/visual glance” film symbolizes Pharaohs’ descent from the stars to Life and Death – and back.
The final show at le Musée du Louvre in Paris and Lens in March 2015 was the showing of the film with dancers performing before the screen with music by Jeff Mills.
“When Time Splits”
Invited by Le Musée du Louvre in 2015, Jeff played electronic music with the renowned classical pianist Mikhail Rudy. An exceptional collaboration, unheard of. Mills and Rudy now collaborate with visual artists Arotin & Serghei.
“The Last Story Teller”
This is another of the projects specially created for Le Louvre in 2015: a spoken-word, film and music collaboration with French SF writer David Calvo inspired by the 1920 silent movie “Wunder der Schöpfung”.
“Chronicle of Possible Worlds”
This ambitious project debuted at the prestigious Fondation Vasarly in Aix-en-Provence in November 2013. A dance, music and art project based on Extra Solar planets, Chronicles Of Possible Worlds magnifies the discovery and existence of planets WASP 12b through WASP 17b. Each of the six galleries within the Fondation Vasarely was designated for performances of each planet (choreography by Alexander Roccoli). Conceptual rendition of each planet were installed in each gallery (created by Yoko Uozumi). The audience rotated the museum and each gallery along with the dancers. Sound systems were fitted into each of the dancers costumes (designed by Anke Bruns). The sound guided the audience through the performances (composed and played by Jeff Mills). The performance as a booklet/CD/DVD [making-off] available on Axis Records. http://youtu.be/jBWclOoZrJo
CINEMIX: “Woman in the Moon” by Fritz Lang
Jeff Mills, a self-declared SF fan and collector of classic pulp science fiction, composed an electronic score for Lang’s masterpiece “Metropolis” (1927) in 2000. “Frau im Mond” (“Woman in the Moon“), Fritz Lang’s last silent movie, is hailed as the first ‘serious’ SF film. The godfather of rocket science, Hermann Oberth, was consulted by Lang, who came up with the concept of the countdown (10-9-8…2-1-0). Scientifically spot on, the movie looks brilliant too. Lang used state-of-the-art (for 1929) modernist design for the scenes shot at the protagonist’s apartment and the launch of the Moon rocket is visually and conceptually stunning, using innovative modeling as well as crane shots.
All of the movies 164 minutes are set to newly composed music. Mills: “I think there is no better way to do a cine-mix than to start from the ground up by creating the music to apply a tailored result. The music is all original compositions and so far, can only be heard during this film presentation.”
CINEMIX: “Etude sur Paris“
Mills plays the soundtrack (with percusionist Cristian Sotomayor) to ‘Etude sur Paris‘ by André Sauvage. The film is a rare and astonishing film where documentary meets poetry on a trip around Paris in the early 1920s. Jeff Mills premiered the cinemix in June 2012 at the pretigious Paris Cinema Festival.
CINEMIX “Fantastic Voyage”
Rather than Mills’ usual forte of outer space or the distant future, “Fantastic Voyage” is set within the human body. The film’s crazy plot runs something like this: in the midst of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union develop technology to dramatically miniaturize objects or people for temporary periods of time. After an assassination attempt leaves a key scientist comatose, the US puts a group of operatives inside a submarine, shrinks them down and injects them into the scientist’s body to repair his potentially fatal blood clot. Breathtaking adventures ensue.
“In creating this soundtrack, there was slight tolerance for a dominating cold technological impression,” says Mills. “The human body, the most organic of all Mankind’s creations, far exceeds this realm. Early on in the production, it became apparent to me that what this film really needed was a sound scheme that is as unorthodox as Outer Space and as organic as the color pallet in the seas and oceans of our Planet Earth.”
CINEMIX “Lost World”
The Lost World is a 1925 silent fantasy adventure film and an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name. The movie featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O’Brien (an invaluable warmup for his work on the original King Kong). In 1998, the film was deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Jeff’s version premiered on the banks of the river Seine during Paris Film Festival in July 2014.
CINEMIX “Metropolis”
What has you learned from doing the “Metropolis” soundtrack?
“One of the first things I realized was that Techno and electronic music was being greatly understated in terms of its ability to expand beyond the dance floor—that its structure is perfect in relaying certain things about people’s concerns and visions about the future,” he explains. “This is an example of broadening the genre in a meaningful way.”
“Ce fut l’un des grands moments des derniers Rendez-Vous électroniques: Metropolis par Jeff Mills. Un monument du cinéma revu par un maître de la techno. Dans la grande salle de spectacle archicomble du centre Pompidou, le DJ et producteur de Detroit, enthousiaste et sans doute un peu mal à l’aise, présentait en première mondiale sa version du chef-d’oeuvre de Fritz Lang. Près de vingt ans après Giorgio Moroder, qui avait ressorti le film restauré, colorisé et doté d’une (redoutable) bande-son disco rock, Jeff Mills a écrit une nouvelle partition électronique et remonté (avec l’équipe de Pilot Pictures) le film en une version condensée d’une heure.” (Libération)
CINEMIX “The Cheat”
A society woman’s plans to make easy money backfire and she turns to a Burmese businessman for help. He agrees to give her the money she needs… for a price. Excellent melodrama that showcased Sessue Hayakawa’s talents to the world. A major smash hit in 1915 and the film that really put Cecil B. DeMille on the map as a director of premium entertainment. The first show for “The Cheat” by Mills was at La Cinémathèque de Paris.
CINEMIX “October”
CINEMIX “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City”
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