
Jeff Mills and Mike Banks together on stage for an exclusive X-102 performance in the Netherlands!
The inspirational Jeff Mills and Mike Banks, legendary formulators of Detroit’s stripped sound and co-founders of the hugely influential Underground Resistance, will be together on the same stage for a single performance of X-102 Rediscovers the Rings of Saturn in The Hague at TodaysArt 2010.
This is a rare, unique honour for TodaysArt and one that we are absolutely thrilled to share! In the past fifteen years there has been only one previous on-stage encounter between these two great artists (Sonar 2008), so if you missed them then, TodaysArt 2010 may well be your last ever chance to experience a breathtaking audio-visual journey with these two masterminds of deep communication.
Join TodaysArt 2010 for this epic adventure into the far reaches of our universe. Stunning visuals of Saturn’s rings and moons documented on the NASA Cassini-Huygens mission will be projected large scale – Mills and Banks have been granted special permission to use the images sent back by Cassini, the first space probe to orbit Saturn for the groundbreaking X-102 Rediscovers the Rings of Saturn project.
Almost two decades ago in Detroit, Mike Banks, Jeff Mills, and Robert Hood made a spacey, futuristic album about the planet Saturn that mapped out new directions for the Detroit sound, pushing it into ever-deeper territory. The album became a landmark of Detroit techno. An early Tresor release, the tracks on 1992’s X-102 Discovers the Rings of Saturn were, “reduced to minimal levels, looping with a marginal BPM rate, spacey a nd sometimes entirely without beats. This was revolutionary: listeners had just become accustomed to the uncompromising Detroit techno sound that the three of them had defined as UR.”
X-102 was originally Jeff Mills (aka The Wizard), Mike Banks (former Parliament guitarist) and Robert Hood, and was a part of their X-10… series. After the three went their separate ways, X-102 (Experiment 102) was on indefinite hiatus until Mills was inspired by the images and new knowledge of Saturn, its rings and moons revealed by the Cassini-Huygens mission. After reconnecting with Mike Banks, the album was re-released with four new tracks in 2007. A live audio-visual X-102 show was presented just once, at Sonar.08, and only a very limited number of special screenings have been presented since.