Humans have always gazed up into Space looking for answers – analyzing other Planets as a way to learn our own past present and future. The future of Mankind may depend on, not only what we find, but how we use this information to capitalize on opportunities that might create vital stepping stones in our evolution. Each fixture in this cosmic neighbourhood awaits our arrival.
Planets was conceived and created to bring the space horizon a bit closer to our own World – to familiarize our vicinity in hopes of narrowing the distance that we sometimes perceive as unreachable or beyond.
The design, journey and observations of our Solar System are more than just scientific and artistic profiling. They are about the entitlement of nature, and what we inherited as living, breathing and dreaming things. This performance is full of unknowns or what we may be so lucky to discover and rationalize as we mature as a species.
The mixing of Classical and Electronic Music has also been a formula for extraneous consequences. Both known to produce a certain degree of emotion, whether it is physical or mental, these two genres are products of a modern society asking itself mosaic questions for surrogate reasons.
Though this production and performance is entitled Planets, it’s really about us. It’s about how we all share the same view, the same questions and the same conviction with something bigger and greater than ourselves.
– Jeff Mills –
It has been 100 years since the British composer Gustav Holst introduced his most famous score “The Planets”. An elegant musical tour to each one of our Planets in the Solar System, Holst brought forth imaginary visions of space that would survive many generations and decades after. As an important piece to the classical universe, The Planets is regularly played throughout the world every year, as it had been the most vivid translation of our cosmic neighbourhood until now.
The Electronic Music artist and producer Jeff Mills pays tribute to this century of incredible musical production. He embarks to compose a sonic journey to rediscover our neighbouring planets in a 18 piece suite that explores the nine planets, including the portions of space in between the Planets, the nine regions Mills calls Loop Transits.
Deeply inhabited by science fiction, Jeff Mills adopts its ideas, concepts, stories and aesthetics from the outset. For him, Space is an obsession and his music almost becomes a musical science fiction. Conquering space, his music embodies the future while both respecting the past and remaining well into the present. Mills takes the rotating principle of the solar system as aesthetics, concept and model for creativity. From the beginning, his first releases explore futuristic and science fiction topics and continue to do so to this day. For Jeff Mills, the future is a powerful creative drive which explains the artist’s ceaseless activity.
Since its creation and like the intention of Holst, each track is musically imagined to invoke the psychological effect, emotions and ideas of each planet. But unlike the year 1918, when the score was first publicly heard on the last week of World War I, 100 years later, we now have a more accurate knowledge about what each Planet is made of and what they look like. The piece should bring the audience closer to confronting each planet in ways that audiences in 1918 could only dream of.
With the French composer Syvain Griotto, the arranger of Planets and Mills’ previous work on the album and classical score about the NASA astronaut and doctor Mamoru Morhi‘s space journey in 1992 and 2000 from the album „Where The Light Ends”, Mills has created an electronic music album that have been translated for symphonic and philharmonic orchestras and will accompany them in their live debut and all performances. Starting to conceptualize and produce music for it dating back to 2005, Mills constantly worked on the project over the years to bring it to fruition.
All shows were sold out.
In July 2016 Jeff Mills has completed the last production stages of the Planets album at the world famous Abbey Road Studios in London. Recorded and will be released in 5.1 surround on the Blue Ray digital format, the soundtrack needed a particular high level of expertise that could only be attended to at hands of the renowned senior studio engineer Jonathan Allen. The expertise and quality associated with the legendary Abbey Road Studios is recognized globally and undeniably the most famous studio in the World. It is with acclaim from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or more recently Radiohead before him, that Jeff Mills will bring Planets at this legendary music institution.
The mastering sessions occurred on August 2016 with the acclaimed Mastering engineer Darcy Proper in Holland.
The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails.
– Gustav Holst –
Ticket to the Solar System…
Axis Records invites you to experience the most beautiful trip, an exotic interplanetary journey that will allow you fly to the nine planets of our solar system.
The trip starts with the thrust from our Sun. With this enormous force to our backs, we’ll visit and see Mercury, this small planet will amaze you with its resemblance of Earth’s moon, Mercury is probably the toughest Planet in our cosmic neighborhood. With its scorched surface, the planet survives in ways we could only imagine. Then you will discover Venus, which will dazzle you by its radiance, only be moved to approach so close that star that you know so well and which -who knows- sometimes guided you. What a strange feeling to fly over Earth, your homeland, and recognize its geography, continents and oceans. Mars will astonished you by its red color and its reliefs. Saturn and Uranus will reveal you their rings, hitherto imagined. And you will even approach Neptune and Pluto, the most distant from the Sun.
A dazzling and breathtaking journey, one imagined to be like no other in our generation.
You’ll travel in the best conditions of comfort and safety with our host Jeff Mills, who will be there to be your guide of this trip and unprecedented discovery through our Solar System his new forthcoming surround 5.1 album “PLANETS”.
Jeff Mills
Jeff Mills has collaborated with symphonic orchestras since many years and was the first DJ to perform and capture it on DVD for a wider audience. lt all began with the Montpellier National Orchestra, directed by Alain Altinoglu, in 2005 at Le Pont du Gard, Franca. The piece was called “Blue Potential” and had been arranged for orchestra by the young French composer Thomas Roussel.
ln September 2012, Jeff Mills played a new version of this orchestral project, now called “Light from the Outside World”, to a sold-out Salle Pleyel in Paris with L’Orchestre National d’lle de France, conducted by Christophe Mango u. “Light from the Outside World” includes Mills’ classics as “The Bells” or ” Sonic Destroyer” adapted by Roussel.
“Light from the Outside World” was also performed at Casa da Musica in Porto, OdeGand Festival in Belgium, Melbourne Festival. Several concerts are scheduled over the world in the following years.
ln 2013, Jeff Mills presented a new piece called “Where Light Ends”. French composer Sylvain Griotto is the arranger; the project premiered in St Brieuc and Rennes, France in October 2013, with l’Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne conducted by Darrell Ang. The piece was also performed with L’Orchestre National d’lle de France in Paris and lle-de-France region in November and December 2014 in a programme also including Tchaikovsky’ “Pathetic Symphony”. Both “Where Light Ends” and “Light from the Outside World” are available for concerts.
A third project, inspired by Holst, “The Planets”, has been premiere in at Casa Da Musica in Porto on July 2015.
Other than the performances with orchestra, Jeff Mills has had collaborations with classicaly trained artists such as Kronos Quartet (Bach for “Red Hot +Bach” compilation), Kathleen Supove for Debussy and most recently with the renowned classical pianist Mikhail Rudy, on the occasion of Jeff Mills ‘s residency at The Louvre Museum in Paris from February to June 2015.
All the performances for Jeff Mills and Symphonic Orchestras have always been sold-out shows. This shows the techno fans have been waiting for such opportunities, besides that fact classical audience can find new music.
We thank the Open-Air Theatre for providing us with this article!
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