Numbers and vibrations will be the way humanity communicates in the future, says Jeff Mills. With UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE, he created in Detroit, New York, Berlin and Chicago one of the most experimental techno arsenals: AXIS SPIDERFORM/ But what's best in the world of techno emerges, Jeff Mills says, during a set and is unrepeatable.

AK: You said once that no new note is ever new in humanity's melody; there are only ever new sequences.

JM: You can't really say that something is totally new and has never existed before. That means that something new only goes as far back as I can remember.

AK: If you hadn't been a musician, you once said you would have been a lawyer or an architect.

JM: Probably. My father was an engineer, and there was this pressure to follow in his footsteps.

AK: There's a piece, X 102, that has to do with the rings of Saturn.

JM: We tried to describe in music what every single ring expresses, what it's made of. And as you approach Saturn on a journey, you pass through the individual rings and learn how each of them sounds.

AK: The same way a musical instrument is constructed?

JM: We analysed the structure of the most important rings. Some consist mostly of gas, others of ice or other particles, and we put these structures in relation to sounds and made an equation between the sounds and this material. So that means that on the path through the rings, which corresponds to the needle's path over the record, you hear from track to track how each ring could sound. That's all hypothetical, of course, because each track would have to be hundreds of thousands of miles wide if you make the analogy with the rings of Saturn.

AK: In another interview you talk about flying to Mars and say that you're inspired in these compositions by gravity, by acceleration, by everything you need to make it to Mars.

JM: With the progress of technology you would really have to be put in the position of feeling what it means to travel so far, feeling all kinds of impressions that we can't feel yet. I mean, I'm using music as a kind of vehicle to get to particular buildings and particular times, to travel through time and space.