Jeff Mills dances. That is maybe the revelation from my interview with the great man of techno, who I spoke to in Barcelona recently. I say this because I have never seen Jeff Mills dance and I’ve seen him do pretty much everything else musically: pounding techno, liquid house, ambient wash, orchestral noise, high art, concept-based electronica, jazz battles… the list goes on.

What I wasn’t expecting, from an artist with his attention so razor focused on the future, was a tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, a 1996 mix CD that has few peers for its intensity and invention. Jeff Mills, as I learned in the interview, isn’t nostalgic; and yet he chose to re-visit this pivotal album in a tour that has been rapturously received.

I wanted to know why. I mean, obviously I wanted to interview Jeff Mills anyway. He’s a producer and DJ who has been at the very top of electronic music for the last 35 years. But this anniversary tour added another interesting wrinkle. And so we met up when he was in Barcelona towards the end of February 2026 and we talked. 

I only had half an hour and I think Mills misunderstood a couple of my questions. But it was a fascinating experience nonetheless. Mills is not particularly big on small talk; but he’s incredibly polite, impeccably dressed and makes a very reassuring eye contact when he talks. He really thinks about what he is saying, too, as you might expect of one of the great brains of modern music.

The interview was released earlier this week in podcast form; here it is in written words. I hope you enjoy it. And if you want to read more, about Jeff Mills and music freedom, then you can do so here.

Ben Cardew: You're here in Barcelona because you're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Live at the Liquid Room. Why did you decide to celebrate that album?

Jeff Mills: Well, it was partially because of what people were saying - how they were influenced by the recording and when the mix came out. Many DJs today were really at the beginning of their careers and just starting to DJ, and they really used this mix as a reference. And so it came about from noticing how many people were actually commenting and responding to this mix. It just came out of the blue. I think maybe someone started a discussion about it and then it just grew and grew. So that's how I began to notice.

Ben Cardew: I was wondering, when you thought about doing this, if you had a goal in mind of something you wanted to achieve - I mean, beyond simply celebrating a vital piece of music. [NB I meant the anniversary tour but Jeff understood that I was referring to the original album and I was enjoying his response so I didn’t interject]

Jeff Mills: First I received the invitation from Takkyu Ishino and Sony Music. I think there had only been one volume [in Sony’s Mix-up series] before they had asked me, so they basically had a blueprint for what they were going to do. But then I started suggesting other ideas of what could be done. I could do it live. We could film it. We could record it with multiple microphones and the audience. We could really try to replicate not just the DJ mix but actually the whole experience of being inside of a club in a venue. 

They agreed very early. This was 1994 when we started the discussion and DVDs were not new but that format was not as widely used as it is now. And so the idea to put a DJ mix on a DVD, even with film and even in a surround-sound type of format, was still kind of unheard of. It was difficult to get them to commit to making that type of DVD. So we decided to just release the two-track recording but I kept all the parts of it: the film, the multi-track recording and everything else.

Ben Cardew: You're showing the film before you DJ on this tour. I'm interested - how have people been reacting to the film? As I understand it, it's a film of you DJing. Do people dance? Do people sit down and watch it?

Jeff Mills: They watch it because there's a lot of information. I was conscious that this film would be used in a scenario like that and so I really wanted to put a lot of information and context into the documentary and explain what Tokyo was like in the year 1995. 

You know, it was not really the "hype" yet, but it was really heating up. Many international artists started coming to Japan shortly after that time and it was the best place to play for many, many years. So I wanted the questioning for them to give an indication as to what Japan was like in 1995 in comparison to other places. That’s the main purpose. It was to show basically a snapshot of what it was like in that city during that time, with these international DJs that were coming and introducing a lot of music to that audience.

Ben Cardew: That's one of the fascinating things about the mix - Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, to give it its full name. I wonder how different it would have been if it had been, say, in Paris or Berlin or Detroit at this time?

Jeff Mills: It would have been very difficult to materialise and I know this because I was trying to materialise things in Europe. People only had the appetite to just party all night long and anything outside of that was really difficult to convince people to agree to. 

Japan was one of the places where I could materialise a lot of ideas. Liquid Room was actually one of the first more complex things. But after that, I would come up with very complex ideas and take them to Japan first because I knew they could materialise. Around 1995, I was already thinking about scoring music for films. I was already thinking about working with contemporary dancers and doing things outside of the dance-floor constructs. But it was really difficult at that time.

Ben Cardew: Are you a nostalgic person?

Jeff Mills: No, no, no, no.

Ben Cardew: So do you ever listen back to old mixes or records you’ve done, or is it always about the next thing?

Jeff Mills: No, it's always about the next thing.

Ben Cardew: One thing I find interesting about DJ sets is that, obviously, a lot are recorded, but the vast majority happen in a room - you’re there or you’re not. Do you enjoy that sort of temporality - the fact that you've got to be there in the moment, and then it's gone?

Jeff Mills: I began my professional career as a DJ working for a radio station. I used to produce a radio show all through the ‘80s and it was a scenario of me basically in a very small room, playing live six days a week for about 6 million people at any given time. That's really how I began. 

When you're not in front of an audience, you're very conscious about everything that you do - every moment, every second that goes by. It's different than being with an audience. This is really how I began my professional career. And then, of course, I was also doing residencies at that time, too. But this idea of focusing and concentrating on what I'm doing is more important than anything else.

The end result for me is trying to make the whole experience as interesting as possible. For that, it takes a lot of concentration and thinking ahead - not just one record at a time but maybe three, four or five records ahead of the audience. So my approach is more of a technical approach than just a"party maker" type of DJ.

Ben Cardew: I asked some friends for a question to ask. A friend of mine, Anna Jane McIntyre - a very good visual artist - asked a question which I believe you mentioned in an interview in an art magazine. The question is: "Is it difficult to do what you do?"

Jeff Mills: To be more specific?

Ben Cardew: How difficult is it on a practical level? You've been DJing for years and years but what you do is extremely technical. How difficult is it to do what you do in the DJ booth?

Jeff Mills: It’s not difficult at all. It’s not a contest or a competition of any type. It never was and I never feel any pressure because I understand music from perhaps a different perspective. And no, it’s never - I mean, production-wise, DJ-wise, collaborations or doing things with orchestras - it’s never any pressure.

Maybe it’s because I don't try to bite off more than I can chew and I don't pretend to be something that I'm not. So maybe it was easy for me to make a mix showing exactly what I'm doing because it's honest. I don't pretend to be a "great" DJ. I don't pretend to be a "great" producer. I do the best that I can do and whatever people think that is, is what it is. So, yeah, I don't find it difficult.

Ben Cardew: I find that fascinating because a lot of people would like to be like that, where they have that kind of understanding of who they are and what they do. Did that come to you early on? Have you always been like this, or did you have to learn to be…?

Jeff Mills: I think in anything - not just the entertainment business, but any job - discipline is necessary. You have to have a certain amount of discipline in order to do the same thing and improve or enhance it as time goes on. Again, early in my career, I was in radio. I was very young and you can't be late for radio. You cannot miss; you would be fined. And so, for me to keep this job on the radio, I had to shape my life so that I could be in the radio station every night, no matter what, always on time. I guess that carried over into other things.

In producing music, I can be consistent because I can focus and I can go all the way through the process from the beginning to the end and finish it. That’s quite important. When I finish it, I know that I can then begin to start on the next. I'm never on anyone else's clock or timeframe for producing music. You kind of work to try to alleviate and do away with the pressure points of being in the entertainment business.

Ben Cardew: I think you once said you make music every day. Is that still true?

Jeff Mills: I'm usually dealing with music almost every day, yeah. Either editing it, recording it or listening to it for research. Yesterday, I was listening to Devo and I just got some new samples in of some new albums. This morning, I was doing editing. I'll probably do some tonight. I'll probably play tonight and tomorrow. It's generally something to do regarding music.

Ben Cardew: Talking of new music, I was lucky enough to be able to hear the new Tomorrow Comes The Harvest album. I just wanted to briefly mention Rasheeda Ali, who plays flute, correct? The flute is absolutely gorgeous, particularly on the song Superstar. Is Rasheeda a new member of the band?

Jeff Mills: Rasheeda has been with the project for a bit over a year, almost two years now, and she's been on quite a few performances. I wish that she could be on more but she lives in the US, in Atlanta, and we are more frequent here in Europe. So, it's not as frequent as I would like yet. But for sure, I really wanted to add her on this album because she's been with the project for a while and she knows exactly what the project is about. She knows that it's an opportunity to be able to explore and to do other things. What she did on the album was just great because she has the freedom to do that. She's just incredible. I mean, the first time that I met her, I was convinced within seconds that this person is very unique.

Ben Cardew: I wanted to ask one thing, which I find very interesting to ask DJs and people who make electronic music: do you dance?

Jeff Mills: As a 62-year-old man? Yeah. I mean, I dance as much as a 62-year-old. Well, you have to. When I'm in the studio and I'm recording music, I have to feel it out. Sometimes, to better understand the complexities of certain sequences, you need to move to it to understand what the dancer would do, or an audience, or what people would do. 

So, yeah, of course. It's part of the process. You have to watch people dance and you have to dance yourself and you have to find ways to keep rhythm - whether it's tapping on a table or having drumsticks - you need to stay with it as much as possible. It’s not just listening to music, but listening to music in different ways. Listening to music to study it and listening to it to enjoy it are both important, but keeping in touch with rhythm in general is, I think, crucial. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, I listen to a lot of rock, I listen to things for the different styles of rhythm - from old rock and roll and rockabilly to gospel - studying for rhythm.

Some listening

Xylitol - Bowed Clusters (feat. The Leaf Library)

Xylitol’s new album Blumenfantasie is a world of wonder, which retains all of the prog jungle charm of Anemones, while nudging the producer’s sound on a tantalising touch. Falling is a fantastically rave-y Omni Trio tribute; Chromophoria has one of Xylitol’s greatest melodies; and on Mirjana Xylitol fulfils all of our Kraut jungle fantasies by chopping up the beat from Amon Duul II’s Archangels Thunderbird. 

But best of all is Bowed Clusters, with The Leaf Library, which finds Xylitol plotting the perfectly implausible route between Source Direct and Broadcast, tech-step moodiness co-inhabiting with folk-y swoon in a combination I thought could only exist in my dreams.

Alan Braxe and Fred Falke - Intro (Alan Braxe remix)

In which Alan Braxe takes one of the best French house tunes of the 2000s - Intro, obviously - plots a line that connects it to one of the best French house tunes of the 90s - Daft Punk’s remix of Ian Pooley’s Chord Memory - and still makes it sound totally fresh for 2026. The man’s a wizard, you know. As good as early morning dew and mountain waterfalls.

Ladytron - A Death in London

Ladytron always were dramatic - see Seventeen’s killer couplet “they only want you when you’re 17 / When you’re 21, you’re no fun” - but on Paradises, the band’s eight and perhaps best studio album, it feels like they have moved from vignettes to theatrical epics. 

The whole scope of the album is more expansive, from the widescreen strings that open In Blood to the brooding saxophone on album highlight A Death in London, a song that reminds me of Netflix’s Black Doves and the Pet Shop Boys. The songwriting, too, feels more expansive and filled out, full of mystery, mood and melancholy.

Some watching

The Eastern Gate

Belarus, Russia, Poland, Nato, casus belli… HBO’s 2025 spy thriller The Eastern Gate feels like it might be a little too close to the nail to be anything other than a panic watch.

But the series also introduces us to Ewa Oginiec - brilliantly played by Lena Góra and one of my favourite flawed heroes in many years - who is such a bad-ass spy that you will believe that she alone can sort out any sticky situation on NATO’s Eastern border and still walk away looking immaculate.

It makes for a very powerful series, a thickly tangled web of connections, lies, diplomacy and spies, in which the story is so elegantly laid out you’re never quite sure if you’ve missed something or the series is just teasing you with revelations. The Eastern Gate is a genuinely thrilling spy story that pumps the veins full of blood, even as it wobbles the legs and empties the stomach.

Things I’ve done

Anjimile - You’re Free To Go

“From a storm to a haven, a jolt to a caress”. Yup, I reviewed the new Anjimile album for Pitchfork and it made me all poetic. A really lovely album, with exquisite songwriting. “Not so much a return as a rebirth, You’re Free To Go is the sound of an artist sloughing off old skin and returning at his powerful best.”

Avalon Emerson & The Charm - Written Into Changes

It gives me little pleasure to say that the second album from Avalon Emerson & The Charm is a major disappointment after the band’s excellent debut. But hopefully this review for DJ Mag explains why. “It feels like everything has been toned down - or perhaps over-thought - 10%, from songwriting chops to production adventure, creating a heavy cumulative drag on the sparkle of the debut.”

All GORILLAZ Albums Ranked

In the latest of our tier lists, Johann Wald and I took on the Gorillaz catalogue, in an attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Stereolab book corner

Look, I promise I am going to stop going on about the Stereolab book soon. But it came out last Friday and there was a brief flurry of activity. 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Ben Cardew on The Pivotal Role of Stereolab’s ‘Super-Electric’

The Quietus ran an extract from the book’s first chapter, in which I talk about Super-Electric and propulsion.

Inside Stereolab: Their story told in 20 essential songs

I was a guest on the excellent Booked on Rock podcast, talking about - what else? - my Stereolab book! Check it out here. 

Line Noise podcast - A Stereolab book bonus 

To mark the release of my Stereolab book, I read 10 minutes from the opening chapter, in what is the closest you're probably going to get to an audiobook.

The playlists

On Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

On Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.