Techno titan Jeff Mills has teamed up with the father of Afrobeat, Tony Allen, for a collaborative album titled 'Tomorrow Comes The Harvest'. The
new project is Mills' attempt to " liberate himself from the tyranny of
the sequencer" as told on the new duo's Facebook page. “We’re
working together to achieve something bigger than the both of us,” says
Mills. “It really is a pure collaboration, not just through music, but
in our minds and spirit as well.”
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There’s a simple, age-old idea behind Tomorrow Comes the Harvest: Throw two luminaries from different worlds into the studio, roll tape, see what happens.
In one corner, find Jeff Mills, whose
credentials are unimpeachable — he co-founded Underground Resistance,
the future-facing electronic Detroit outfit that created reams of
charged, jazz-friendly techno and several house-leaning dancefloor
classics. In the other, meet Tony Allen, the longtime drummer for Nigerian star Fela Kuti,
who helped invent the commanding, endlessly adaptable afrobeat groove.
This is not the first such pairing — for example, Allen played with
German techno maven Moritz von Oswald in 2015 — but the scene is set for
a cross-generational, cross-disciplinary and even cross-continental
exchange; the potential energy is high.
The
results are more pedestrian, though. It’s a testament to Allen’s
indomitability that Mills largely defers to him. The drummer is
everywhere, kicking up a recognizable vortex of pitter-patter, but if
you didn’t know Mills was on this, his presence might go unnoticed. That
diffidence is a missed opportunity — Tomorrow Comes the Harvest would benefit from a sense of more productive addition, or creative friction.
“Locked and Loaded” comes closest to
this: Low-toned electronics bounce and decay, adding a threatening
undercurrent to Allen’s unrelenting pulse. This could lead to something
genuinely nasty, though they don’t quite reach that point on Tomorrow Comes the Harvest. “The Seed” has the most melodic development, with incessant bleeping giving way to satisfyingly big sheets of sound.
But mostly these four songs, four
edits and two remixes sound like an energetic drummer enhanced slightly
with the occasional squirting synth and percussive electronic chatter.
If the drummer wasn’t Allen, that would be more of a problem.
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Back in 2016, legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen approached techno
pioneer Jeff Mills with the idea of working together. A series of live
gigs and off-the-radar studio sessions followed, with the first fruits
of their joint efforts finally appearing on this must-have 10". As you'd
expect, the duo's collaborative work combines Allen's traditional
Nigerian polyrhythms, traditional Afrobeat instrumentation, and the
far-sighted, sci-fi inspired electronic futurism that has always marked
out Mills' work. The result is a quartet of cuts that could arguably be
described as retro-futurist Afro-tech - all delay-laden beats, basslines
and organs subtly sparring with gentle acid lines, Motor City
electronics, beguiling deep space textures and shimmering, 31st century
motifs. It's arguably Allen's stylistic contributions that dominate, but
that's no bad thing.
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