Jeff Mills emerged from Detroit’s fiercely competitive DJ culture in the 1980s. As “The Wizard” on radio he became known for fast, technically demanding mixes that compressed electro, industrial music, house and emerging techno into an intense broadcast style.

In 1989 Mills co-founded Underground Resistance with Mike Banks. UR treated techno as more than club music: independent production, anonymity, futurism and resistance to the conventional music industry were built into the project’s identity. Mills’ period with the collective became part of the second great Detroit wave that followed the Belleville Three.

After leaving UR, Mills founded Axis Records in 1992. Axis became the permanent home for an increasingly conceptual body of work, including records that explored space travel, science fiction, time, cinema and the possibilities of machine rhythm. Tracks such as The Bells became techno standards, while the Purpose Maker material connected stripped-down percussion with relentless DJ functionality.

Mills’ DJ practice is equally important. Three-turntable sets and live use of the Roland TR-909 became part of his vocabulary, most famously documented in the Exhibitionist project. The physical speed of that work turned DJing itself into a visible performance discipline.

His later career has moved far beyond a conventional techno template: rescoring Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, building the Blue Potential orchestral project, collaborating across jazz and contemporary art, and presenting electronic music inside concert halls and cultural institutions. The thread connecting it all is the same Detroit idea — machines as instruments for imagining another future.