Jeff Mills: Metropolis Metropolis Cinemix
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, US
Jeff Mills’s performance of his Metropolis Metropolis score, which he mixes in real time alongside Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, takes place as part of Unabridged: Detroit Incoming, a year long celebration of Detroit club culture in the Bay Area created by local promotions company As You Like It.
The evening begins with Mills talking to KEXP DJ and host Sharlese Metcalf about his homage to Lang’s science fiction epic and his career as a whole. He tells how he composed the original version of his score while living in East Berlin, working with a VHS tape rented from Blockbuster. After releasing Metropolis on his Axis Records label in 2000, he began performing it at events around the world, and credits the description “cinemix” to an anonymous French journalist.
UFA Studios, which owns the rights to Lang’s film, was initially apprehensive about what Mills jokingly admitted was his “bootleg” version. But the two parties eventually built a collaboration, and UFA asked him to create a new version when it premiered a restored version of Metropolis at the Cinémathèque Française in 2011 — a version which apparently has never been publicly released.
For this performance, Mills utilises a third version of his score, Metropolis Metropolis, released on Axis in 2023. He explains that he sought to capture the inner lives of the characters in the film, adding, “My approach with this soundtrack is not to reflect what you see on the screen.” He also notes the contemporary relevance of Lang’s film, which depicts a princeling, Freder, falling under the spell of Maria, a kindly spiritual figure, and rebelling against his industrialist father who foments inequality by having the city’s populace toil underground for the benefit of a small group of oligarchs. “There is a need to show this film and remind people about this crazy world we’re living in,” says Mills. “Some of us don’t believe that we’re all soldiers, and we can’t just sit on the sidelines.”
However, the pleasures of the evening lie mostly in hearing Mills unfurl his soundtrack on three Pioneer CDJ-2000 media players and a mixer. He introduces sharp techno keyboard stabs when the demonic machine Moloch appears, then builds drama with repetitive chimes and melodies while shifting percussive hi-hats underneath as Freder and Maria talk and embrace. The Axis Records version of Metropolis Metropolis is only an hour long, but on this night, he has rearranged and blended its parts to stretch across the two-plus-hour film and end credits.
Belying his reputation as an innovator of pummelling and percussive techno, much of the music is decorative, beatless and attuned to the characters’ emotions, revealing ideas not necessarily reflected on screen. At times, one can tell that he’s repeating musical sequences like an arpeggio, especially during a terrifying cave scene when Maria is chased by The Thin Man, a thug enforcer.
The Metropolis Metropolis performance is magical, a unique expansion of Detroit techno’s creative possibilities.
Mosi Reeves / HUMTRUSH
The Wire Magazine UK, June 2026.
