From the 21st

by Jason BirchmeierShortly before unleashing a flurry of similarly styled CD releases in 2000, Jeff Mills quietly released From the 21st exclusively through Sony Japan a year earlier. Given its Japan-only release, fans clamored for the album, which includes a total of 11 songs, none of which had been released elsewhere, not even on vinyl. Much like Mills' several successive CD releases in 2000 -- Every Dog Has Its Day, Metropolis, The Art of Connecting, and Lifelike -- From the 21st highlights the lighter side of his output. Rather than offer the Purpose Maker-style dancefloor tracks of tribal percussion and pounding rhythms, the nearly dozen tracks here are more in line with Mills' Axis output: ambient Detroit techno that often seems quite experimental and often challenging -- moody thinking-man's techno surely intended for home listening rather than dancing. The album's visually stunning packaging and multiple-page Japanese liner notes reinforce this notion, providing this futuristic album with a suitably conceptual context. The music itself, though, isn't really anything particularly exceptional when help up against Mills' staggering canon of work. In fact, you might even hypothesize that these 11 tracks are Axis outtakes, productions that Mills never included on his many vinyl releases but still thought worthy of release. The album itself is rather brief, clocking around 45 minutes, and is very consistent, without any obvious standouts. The final two tracks, "Violet (21 Counts)" and "M87," conclude the album in a genuinely experimental fashion, contrasting the straightforward ambient Detroit techno of the preceding tracks. Even if From the 21st doesn't tower above Mills' other work, it's nevertheless a fine, enjoyable album, particularly if you follow his dizzying artistic evolution, and, perhaps most fun of all if you're a collector type, its packaging and rarity surely make it a treasure.