The Extremist

Reynolds places Jeff Mills in a lineage of black scholar-musicians (Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Derrick May, DJ Spooky) who approach their instruments as cosmologists. The Extremist (1994) on Tresor makes this case most audibly: the tracks are something closer to a system than to club music, sequences that start and refuse to resolve, rhythms that feel simultaneously mechanical and urgent, as if the machine were insisting on something.

Mills came up through Underground Resistance alongside Mike Banks and Robert Hood, before going solo on Axis and then landing on Tresor. Founded in 1991 in the basement vault of a former East Berlin department store, Tresor was the physical space where Detroit techno’s European chapter was written. Reynolds is precise about this: “Berlin became a haven for many Detroit producers. Blake Baxter and Jeff Mills moved there for some time… Tresor subtitled their second compilation: Berlin – Detroit: A Techno Alliance.” The subtitle is an organisational description.

The Extremist is the coldest point on that alliance, before Alpha Centauri (2008) pivoted toward the cosmic. If you want to understand what Tresor stood for when it was building its identity, this is the record to start from.