Off to see the Wizard: Jeff Mills at Knockdown Center

The ascension from a bad rave towards an unforgettable view of a transcendental performance

I was unsurprised when the muscular man wearing Versace sunglasses tried to start a fight minutes after barging his way into the middle of my friend group near the front of the crowd. It was the inevitable outgrowth from a putrid party atmosphere, like how fungal fruiting bodies emerge from diseased trees after summer storms. If this were any other DJ, I would have left long before things escalated, but that night, we were at the Knockdown Center to see Jeff Mills and nothing short of a fire alarm would have pulled me away.

Mills has been playing techno music professionally since the birth of the genre. He started DJing at a Detroit radio station as “The Wizard” when he was only 18, breaking seminal tracks by local pioneers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May alongside records he sourced on long drives to obscure shops all over the Midwest. Upon leaving the motor city in the ‘90s, he began playing his own music while amassing club residencies in cities like New York, Berlin, and Chicago. During this period, he recorded some of the most iconic songs of the genre, including “The Bells”—which is the song that plays in most people’s heads when they think of “techno music,” whether they’re aware of it or not. In recent years, he’s transcended form and genre, collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists, playing to philharmonic auditoriums, even leading a jazz ensemble. Through it all, he’s continued DJing to sold out crowds all over the world.

Mills’s hands are in constant motion during his sets. He makes full use of three turntables (or CDJs) to layer multiple tracks over each other while occasionally adding live improvisation from a separate drum machine.¹ Each song blends into the next, with no single track receiving more than a few measures to shine alone. He does not call upon beat drops or bombastic chord progressions to whip up a crowd’s energy, opting instead for a more organic undulation from start to finish. The overarching effect is more fluvial than tidal, a continuous flow of sonic energy that bypasses the mind to directly manipulate the musculoskeletal structure.

This time, there was no festival to contend with. Every person in the building was here for Mills, and he had a new L-Acoustics sound system, multi-tiered stage, and revamped lighting rig to work with. One would think that this would make for a more attentive and supportive crowd, but that was not the scene I stepped into upon arriving at 2:30 AM, shortly after Mills took over from the opener. 

The air, already thick with wildfire smoke wafting eastward from New Jersey, was further fouled by a miasma of body odor, spilled drinks, and flatulence suspended in the cloying artificial fog that was doing its best to fill the cavernous former factory. The revamped stage layout put three tiers of dancers behind the DJ booth, adding a performative aspect to the whole party. Whether on stage or on the main floor, most of the nearly sold-out crowd was dancing. However, everyone felt out of sync with one another, more colliding than raving. Navigating the floor felt like trying to walk through a drive-in carwash: A brush of sweat-dampened cloth here, a spilled drink there, moist bodies colliding from every angle.

Cell reception was sparse, and it took a while to find my friend group by the foot of the stage. We greeted each other with hugs and exchanged trepidatious glances and whispers over the quality of the crowd—very bad, which contrasted starkly with the quality of the music being played—very good. The vibe of the overall room did not improve over the next half hour; however, more friends found their way into our little pocket of camaraderie at the foot of the stage. Things appeared hectic everywhere I turned, but by the time a dozen of us had congregated in our corner, I felt like I was able to breathe a little easier and give myself over to the music for longer stretches of time between being bumped by randos. But it’s hard to begrudge anyone for enjoying themselves to the extent that they lose spatial awareness. We should all be so lucky.

But the peace was not to last. One moment, we were dancing amongst each other. The next, a mountain of a man burst into our midst like the protagonist of a Kool-Aid commercial. Much of his face was blocked by a pair of garishly gleaming Versace aviators, but he bore a striking resemblance to Jason Mamoa, right down to the steroid-enhanced muscles bursting out of a white Versace muscle tee. Everyone instinctually backed away to give him space as he began flailing his limbs about, but the more space we ceded, the more he took up.

As soon as someone had the audacity to push back, he started a scene that took the air out of the surrounding area. I turned toward the commotion to his face and torso pressed against a much smaller man’s as he yelled about having had his personal space invaded. Without thinking, I stepped in between the two, imploring them to calm down: “No one wants to see a fight tonight.” The big guy then accused me of taking sides, and I had to clarify that I had no idea who this other man was. I felt my body tense as I wondered if he was preparing to hit me, taking in the fullness of his frame as the moist breath escaping his flared nostrils invaded my own. Thankfully, he decided to back off after a few tense breaths, and I thought that was the end of it. Surely, he would leave the scene out of shame. Except he didn’t.

Instead, he resumed his chaotic moshing from only a few feet away and it wasn’t long before he was yelling at another man for getting in his space. Recognizing that this wouldn’t be the last time, I went to the bar hoping to flag down venue security. The bartender told me to wait there, and after a few minutes, a short man in a black down jacket and beanie arrived on my side of the bar. Upon hearing my account, he mumbled something into his radio before telling me to wait. “We need backup,” he explained. 

Backup arrived a minute later in the form of a man who looked to have recently been an American football offensive lineman. He was easily taller than me (at 6’2”) and must have weighed close to 300 pounds. In a baritone deadpan that sounded more like a command than a question, he said: “You can point him out?” I nodded. “I’ll follow you.”

The formerly recalcitrant crowd parted readily for the security staff, and I felt like a suckerfish swimming alongside whale sharks as I led them to the man’s location. When we arrived, it was obvious who the problem was, just by the look on everyone’s faces. Before I could even gesture in his direction, the larger guard grunted from behind: “White shirt, sunglasses.” I confirmed it, and they sprung into action.

The shorter guard went first, approaching Versace man from the front. “Is there a problem?” he asked. At this slightest of provocations, Versace man aggressively got in the guard’s face, yelling about how everyone around him was disrespecting his space, oblivious that the larger guard had flanked him from behind. Having seen enough, the larger guard wrapped his body around the Versace man’s torso and grabbed his arms with his hands, like an amoeba absorbing its prey. As he stated, “It’s time for you to leave,” three additional security staff emerged from the crowd, forming a phalanx around the belligerent as proximate onlookers began applauding for his impending ejection. Then, as if on cue, the eponymous bells from Mills’s “The Bells” rang out from the speakers as the whole crowd of 2,000 people erupted in cheers while the Versace man was escorted off the dance floor for good.

---

Initial relief gave way to unspecified anxiety as the residual cortisol and adrenaline from the encounter grated against my psyche like the unexpected effects of a spiked drink. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, nor could I relax into the music. So when my friend D mentioned they wanted to try their luck at the top of the stage, I figured there was nothing to lose by following along. The people on the stage were much more respectful of shared space, and we made our way up the stairs with ease, settling into an unobstructed view of the decks from directly behind the booth monitors.

The magic of DJing is not an illusion that suffers from a peek behind the curtain. If anything, watching the spells get cast only strengthens the enchantment. We danced as we gawked, mesmerized by Mills’s arachnidic hands floating over the controls, pinching a knob here, striking a button there as his hips sashayed in response to the manipulated sounds, accented by a fluttering streak of silver fringe running down the left side of his chest. The expression on his youthful visage was not that of a 61-year-old man at work but rather of a child at play, exploring the boundaries of possibility to satisfy his innate curiosity. He would just as happily be doing this alone in his studio if he weren’t here in front of a crowd. 

This feeling of playfulness was at the fore when recorded tracks gave way to his live improvisations on a Roland TR-909 drum machine. His fingers would flutter all over the knobs and switches with the expression of a jazz pianist and the precision of a watchmaker, his face alternating between placid moments of deep concentration and an ear-to-ear grin when he hits the sequence just as god intended (he is god). [An extended video of one of these solos awaits paid subscribers at the end of this review]

D and I made dazed eye contact at the end of Mills’s first solo, unable to comprehend how we’d been treated to such a profound view through so little effort. The others would have to join us. We agreed that they would stay put while I went to retrieve the rest of our crew. But first, I sent a text accompanied by a photo:

“leave the bad rave and ascend to valhala.[sic]”

It was now past 4 AM, and the crowd was beginning to thin, making it much easier to move around. Returning to our perch behind the booth with friends in tow, I felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning the communal experience below, but giving up on the bad rave was what finally allowed me to sink into the transcendence of Mills’s performance. From up here, all the people I’d found irritating while I was among them were nothing but a canvas for an extravagant light show they couldn’t even see. 

We stayed until the end of Mills’s last solo, a bit after 5 AM, gathering our coats as the encore continued apace for a few more minutes. We filed out into the pre-dawn darkness as the last measure faded into silence and parted ways towards our disparate homes, arriving as the sun made its first fuschia advances towards a sparsely clouded horizon.

Paid subscribers will find an extended video of one of Mills’s last TR 909 solos of the night below: