Despite Dery’s surprising initial oversight of Detroit techno, Jeff Mills’ extensive body of work – both his discography and his live shows – have come to be seen to occupy an important electronic strand in Afrofuturism and perhaps no aspect more so than his full-scale orchestral performances.īeginning a little more than a decade ago in a monumental performance with the Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra, Mills’ work with various world-class orchestras has allowed him to take his angular, full-bodied brand of techno and draw out its futurist themes on a grand scale. Artists like Afrika Bambatta and Sun Ra, Dery asserted, had established an aesthetic that was shaping ideas of black identity around space travel, cosmology and techno-utopias. In 1994 the American cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism’ to describe the way in which ‘African-American themes’ in music and literature were appropriating ‘images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future’.
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