Jeff Mills says science fiction can change the course of dance music

Jeff Mills reckons science fiction and the themes around futurism and how the human race might react to alien life could shape the dance music world in the future.

Speaking to The Vinyl Factory about his new audiovisual experience, dubbed 'Close Encounters Of The Fourth Kind' — which aims to immerse the audience in an audio-visual experience that asks how humanity would react if an alien life form presented itself to us — Mills has gone into detail on how science fiction has influenced his latest project.

“Close Encounters tells of a situation where we don’t discover ‘it’, ‘it’ discovers us,” Mills explained to The Vinyl Factory.

“Humans think that we are intelligent and technology savvy enough that we would be able to detect something out there,” he continued. “But it’s probably more likely that we will be detected first by something else if there is intelligent life out there, which I’m sure there is. And when that happens what do we do? Do we submit ourselves to engage this thing or do we become defiant and try to have control of the situation? My hunch is that we will do the latter.”

Mills feels that whilst electronic music is steeped in futurism — owing to the fact that producers are constantly striving to use the latest technology — there's a parallel where dance music is far too backwards looking and stuck in the past in many ways.

“It’s my intention to pull the subject into electronic music since [the genre] deals with the subject of futurism so much,” Mills told The Vinyl Factory. “The idea is that you’re not going to have control over the night, and this music or this alien life form can do anything to you that it wishes to do, so what do you do? You become submissive or you try to resist it... or you come up and you tell me you want to hear The Bells.

“We present music too much in the same perspective,” Mills bemoaned about the contemporary clubbing format. “The scenario is always very festive, positive, but life isn’t like that. I don’t know a single person that wakes up every day happy and all problems are solved. Partying and dancing is about escaping, but there are many different ways to escape. We do ourselves an injustice to think that dance music and electronic music is only being played for this particular reason all the time.”

Check out the enlightening interview in full here.