Talk | Jeff Mills & Tomorrow Comes the Harvest

About the Event

In collaboration with Metro, join us for a conversation with Detroit-born techno pioneer Jeff Mills about his prolific and wide-ranging output as a producer, DJ, composer, and artist. Moderated by Kiana Mickles—a music critic and editor at the vital electronic music publication Resident Advisor—the talk covers Mills’s creative practice that stretches across solo and collaborative efforts. They include the era-defining techno of Underground Resistance, the music collective he co-founded in 1990; soundtracks for classic silent films created with the filmhouse and archive Cinémathèque française; and his work with the 70-piece Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra for the album and film Blue Potential. In keeping with the cooperative spirit, Mills is also joined onstage during the event by his Tomorrow Comes the Harvest bandmates, Jean-Phi Dary and Prabhu Edouard, to discuss their current genre-expanding project, which performs that evening at Metro.

About the Speakers

For decades, Jeff Mills has been a relentless innovator whose cultural contributions extend across dance floors, cinemas, and gallery walls. Known early in his career as The Wizard for his virtuosic turntable technique, Mills cofounded the pioneering Detroit-based techno collective Underground Resistance in 1989. From these beginnings, across more than 200 albums and imprints, as well as experimental radio, live orchestral collaborations, and multidisciplinary projects, he has built a sonic template that continues to expand the possibilities of electronic music.

From the outset, he has drawn deeply on the ideas, concepts, and aesthetics of science fiction. To watch him perform on the Roland TR-909 drum machine is to glimpse a future where the line between human and machine dissolves into rhythm. It also runs through his work in cinema. In collaborations with the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and UFA Film Nights in Berlin, Mills has created soundtracks and cine-mixes—a live performance form he created to accompany films—featuring classics from Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929) to Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966). A cosmic sensibility continues into the present in his current project Tomorrow Comes the Harvest with tabla player Prabhu Edouard and keyboardist Jean-Phi Dary.

Mills’s work has been presented at prestigious cultural venues worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Louvre Museum (Paris), the Design Museum (London), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn). In 2017, he was named an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres—one of France’s highest artistic honors—in recognition of his contributions to the arts.

Jean-Phi Dary is a keyboardist, singer, producer, arranger, and songwriter. Born in France with Guianese roots, he has worked with African singers like Papa Wemba (opening the Peter Gabriel’s tour “US”), Touré Kunda, Omar Pene, and Alpha Blondie. His musical range is far-reaching and includes forays into jazz (Paco Sery, Greg Osby), reggae (Sly and Robbie), pop and electronic music (Phoenix, Troublemakers). For 20 years, he spent most of his time working with his friend, Tony Allen, who also appeared in the original Tomorrow Comes the Harvest line-up. Together recorded eight albums with artists including Mills, Damon Albarn, Ty, and Ernest Rangling.

Prabhu Edouard is regarded as one of the most versatile tabla players of his generation. A disciple of renowned tabla maestro Pandit Shankar Ghosh, Edouard has played with Indian music and dance stalwarts such as Hariprasad Chaurasia, Laxmi Shankar, V. G. Jog, and Astad Debu. His cosmopolitan nature and love for experimentation have led him to collaborations across the globe with artists like, among others, Jordi Savall, Joachim Kühn, Nguyen Lê, Jamchid Chemirani, and Jean-Pierre Drouet.

Kiana Mickles is a New York–raised music critic, editor, and nightlife columnist at the world’s leading electronic music publication Resident Advisor. Their criticism traces the history of electronic music subcultures, with a focus on music on the experimental fringe, Black and queer expression, and pop music. Office Hours, their nightlife column, centers untraditional queer spaces after dark. Mickles’s stories combine creative research and cultural criticism to unveil how sounds, people, spaces, and high and low culture shape the modern world.