Panthalassa: The Music Of Miles Davis 1969-1974

Panthalassa (1998) is a reconstruction. Bill Laswell, a New York producer who had spent the previous decade connecting jazz, dub, and hip-hop production, was given the original multitracks of Miles Davis’s electric period — In a Silent Way, On the Corner, Get Up With It, Big Fun — and asked to do something with them. What he built is not a remaster or a conventional remix. It is an argument: that Miles’s work from 1969 to 1974 was already electronic music, and that the distance between it and Detroit techno or drum & bass was mostly a matter of tempo and gear.

Carl Craig and other Detroit producers have named this record explicitly as a foundational text. That connection is not a stretch. Miles in 1972 was running a ring modulator through a Yamaha electric piano, using studio editing as a compositional tool, treating the recording session as an instrument rather than a documentation exercise. What Laswell did was surface that: rebuild those sessions to make the lineage audible, to show where some of electronic music’s architecture was actually laid.

Jazz and techno are not separate interests. Panthalassa is the record that makes that case without having to argue it.