A Damascus moment: August 1994, at a disused Minnesota Fabrics warehouse in an outer-ring Minneapolis suburb, the Detroit techno Jeff Mills gets on the decks, puffing furiously on a cigarette, plays about eight bars of turntable one and then, fast as lightning, cuts back and forth to two within another bar or two and then has the first back in its sleeve and the next one out of the box and back on, all in graceful, furious motion, with reflexes rivaling Bruce Lee’s. My mouth dropped. The music was furiously coiled, eminently powerful, minimalism with ice for blood belying its fully beating heart. It remains formative, my all-time DJ moment.

Another: Spring of 1996, I walk into Let It Be Records in Minneapolis and hear Mills’s Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, just out as an import on React. I identified the DJ pretty fast — it had to be Jeff Mills — but the source shocked me: Clear as a bell, I remember thinking, “DJ sets like this don’t come out on CD.” For three years, official DJ mix CDs tended to be smooth and made with ProTools and/or have fluffs edited out digitally. There were exceptions, but the advantage of a professionally made mix is that it allowed perfectionism. There was none of that here. The cuts were rough and abrupt; you heard the needle as much as you heard the records. That’s what made, and makes, Liquid Room so exciting — it’s hands on, in every sense.