Jeff Mills – Cycle 30

An essential EP for any person who is a fan of Jeff, Or if you are just discovering Jeff, Some of the locked Grooves on the A side are great drum loops that you can spend hours listening too. And Utopia on the B side has such a good, eerie buildup to the main part of the track. A 10/10 EP!!

In my opinion one of Mills's most important release. There is so much in there.

My copy is 1-sided (Ax-008) and came with a White sleeve - any idea?

Quite incredible that the last two reviews before this were six years apart!? This release started so much, you have no idea .... The previous comment says it all ... at the time ... "This record came from outer space" ... so true, that is REALLY how it felt. Crazy days ...

As far as Mills' releases on Axis are concerned, "Cycle 30" is where his music starts to lean heavily towards conceptualism. Various innovations with the vinyl medium, already tried out and successfully executed with his Underground Resistance partners in arms, on "Discovers the rings of Saturn", "Riot EP" and the Sonic Destroyer 12", are taken to new heights. This one contains nine locked grooves, which are five seconds long passages of looped beats on repeat, so to speak, and each of these starts at the exact same point where it previously ended. It's like the needle was stuck between two grooves and could not advance unless you manually moved it.
These were conceived by Jeff, and were meant to be used by DJs as mixing tools. It wasn't long before every self respecting DJ/producer had at least two of these per release...
The title hints at thirty year cycles of solar revolution, a full circle which enables every new and coming generation to relive a cultural revolution, with techno music being merely one of its variations. It was a theory he had which could have explained inevitable changes in music.
In an interview, Jeff Mills evoked the thirties of the previous century, stating how it was a great time for innovation, with the World Fair taking place in New York, and inventions for making the daily life easier; the washing machine, the toaster and crepe pan... He then jumps to the sixties, claiming it was a time when new paths and ideas got explored in music, a time when artists were thirsty of new knowledge. During the beginning of the seventies, he says the music started to sound very clean, noble and perfectionist. Advancement in technology enabled the production quality to become so slick it had no soul. In those years the pinnacle of accuracy in music production had been reached. To conclude, Jeff thought how today we are figuratively at the same point where we were thirty years ago. Technology has come to a state where it supplies all music with the means to be perfect, technically, not musically. Convinced in these cycles, Jeff's projection for the future implies that the era of minimal techno (which in his eyes is an echo of the minimalistic art of the sixties) will take a back seat and get replaced by some kind of abstract expressionist breed of techno, and the figure of the producer will gain in importance.
As for the music, Man From Tomorrow and Utopia just about sum it all up. Both are futuristic, eerie and orchestral forays into the unknown and exciting corners of space, and to this day remain Jeff's earliest yet most memorable ventures into sci-fi techno. Man From Tomorrow is a completely beatless, psychedelic and timeless piece, while Utopia starts as though a flying saucer was hovering over your house, and then suddenly dropped a killer beat and burned it in flames. It's the track he used as the set opener on his classic Liquid Room mix.
It may not be his finest moment, and there have been plenty other spacey Mills classics afterwards, but for historical purposes and so on, this is an absolutely compulsory listen.

This was so ahead of itself at the time of release that the first time I played it I had an information overload. A friend of mine had brought it round to my house, we listened to it and inspected the vinyl with furrowed brows - as if it had just fallen in from outer-space. Lock-grooves? what the fuck?!! Techno was never gonna be the same again.

The composing idea behind the locked grooves is great, but some are a bit crunched. Loop No. 8 is absolutely not usable(the one which became the track on purposemaker.)

Thoughts of phutura is a great track, simple but good and Utopia is the greatest. My copy has a few scratches in the beginning of Utopia :( . Other copies in the store had that too so I had no choice. Although, I'm still glad I have this vinyl.

Forget the locked grooves track called 'utopia' is the one for me, showing what Mills does best...atmospheric soundscapes, killer drum-pattern and bassline !

funny thing, that one of these loops became the track tango on mills' purpose maker-label...

When it came at this time the scene was just wondering about the loops on A-side which were digitally produced. No one needs an expensive 303 and such analog producing equipments to make fine electronic music. Start of a new way of thinking for many people.