Improvisation is at the core of so many musical genres, embraced by jazz musicians, progressive rock bands and classical music ensembles alike. Yet few composers in the relatively young genre of electronic music have risen to its challenges. As part of the techno pioneer's quest to incorporate this elevated level of musicianship into electronic music, in 2016, Jeff Mills teamed up with Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and jazz keyboardist Jean-Phi Dary to embark on a series of improvisational sets that entwined each artist's respective backgrounds and scenes.

Equipped with his un-synced Roland drum machines, Mills sought to advance electronic music by offering a human touch to the style, all the while accessing a higher spiritual consciousness through the project's intuitive performances. Measuring the success of a performance like this ultimately boils down to one thing, according to Mills: "You feel that you said musically everything that you wanted to say. And I think that's really the only indication that you really can have," he says. "Whether the audience liked it enough, that's a whole other thing." In 2018, these ideas were distilled into a collaborative psychedelic journey of a record, Tomorrow Comes The Harvest.

Following Tony Allen's death in 2020, the remaining members of the project have reconfigured the ensemble, which performs under the same name as that EP, to continue their shared philosophies. Currently on tour, Mills and Jean-Phi Dary work in Tomorrow Comes The Harvest in two iterations—one with tabla player Prabhu Edouard, and another with bassist Divinity Roxxx and flautist Rasheeda Ali. Ahead of the band's appearance at the Edinburgh International Festival, Mills speaks with RA about the art of making mistakes, the collaborative effort involved in successful improvisation and how, through the continuation of Tomorrow Comes The Harvest project, he aims to expand Allen's legacy.

Kiana Mickles: How does adding different musicians to the show's original format impact the way you all prepare?

Jeff Mills: It's a bit more than simply just a band to play, being that there are no tracks to learn, there are no compositions to learn. I had to try to convince the musicians that it would work. We invite you, you show up, we plug in and we can get to know each other. We can learn from each other simply by playing in front of an audience. As you can imagine, it takes a certain type of musician to be able to do that—they need to be able to improvise, freely, just all by themselves. That's really the only requirement that I'm looking for—and dually, players that have a lot to say. How I generally find out about that is to speak to them on video chats, communicate via emails and try to get to know them. Then when we all meet together. It's our goal to talk to one another as much as possible. When we take the stage, we're just elaborating and expanding on previous conversations.

Kiana Mickles: So improvising with an ensemble at this level clearly requires a high degree of trust, and also synchronization.

Jeff Mills: Yeah, it's a certain amount of courtesy. It's like, if you're in a conversation, and one person just doesn't allow anyone else to speak. [Laughs] That will play out in the music when you're performing as well. That's something to watch out for. It's going to shape and structure the way that the compositions are played out. In a quartet situation, you'll hear more flute, because the three of us are respectable enough to pull back. When she's done, we can carry on the conversation. It's based on community, and it's based on equality as well. The input of ideas are all taken at the same level.

Kiana Mickles: Something I noticed during your recent Delos performance with Prabhu and Jean-Phi is that, at one point, you made eye contact with Prabhu as you all began to slow things down in your set. Is that one of the ways that you can communicate with your collaborators during these live performances?

Jeff Mills: Eye contact is the main thing. There's some hand gestures but we try to keep that to a minimum because his hands are busy, my hands are busy, John's hands are busy. And because of that, we make a stage formation where we're facing each other. We're not facing the audience, we're actually facing inwards towards the center point in between all of us for that eye contact. That's important because we need to know when someone's going to solo, or when to pull things up or when to make things more climactic. And then, like I said before, that comes from learning more about someone and how they communicate when they speak. There might be breaks in the conversation where you can make a turning point. You have to watch and listen very closely to what they're doing. Then you might get the sense that this is summing up what they're saying and it's time to move on to the next thing.

Kiana Mickles: Does it ever get difficult to move the sound into a different direction, if you're so focused on watching other people?

Jeff Mills: It's not easy. The process of improvising freely is fun. I can't think of any more enjoyable way to deal with music other than playing what you feel. But it can be quite complex because you need to play but you also need to be thinking about what you need to do next. And that has to be right on time. When other musicians do certain actions, you have to count while you're performing to know when is the most comfortable time to do something.

Being a DJ helps greatly because I've spent my whole career putting two tracks together and making them fit in a way that feels comfortable for the listener. So I'm probably counting more than anyone else. I'm sensing how long someone has been soloing and that because of what they've been doing, maybe it's interesting that this person goes next. All that is happening while we're performing, while we're looking at each other, listening to one another and feeling what other people are doing. Because I'm controlling the percussion and the tempo, I have more freedom to decide when to break it down, when to stop things, when to change directions.

Kiana Mickles: That's interesting, because such a large part of being a good DJ is being able to read the crowd and sense what needs to happen next in order for a performance to excel. When there's less structure involved, how do you gauge how well you've played after a performance?

Jeff Mills: That's hard. Even as a DJ, it's hard to know because you're not really in the audience, and you're not taking statistics [laughs]. Mistakes happen all the time. I'm always trying new things, and that's why I'm always making a lot of mistakes [laughs]. You just don't know, I can't answer that question. But you feel that you said musically everything that you wanted to say. And I think that's the only indication that you can have. Whether the audience liked it enough, that's a whole other thing. But from a musician's point of view, that's the only thing that you can measure—whether you did something that might be useful to the audiences, whether you think you've exhausted all the ideas, or whether you did something at the right time. That's all that you can truthfully do.

Kiana Mickles: I think that was a good way to answer a difficult question.

Jeff Mills: If you ever hear a musician or DJ say that "I totally rocked the place," there's no way that you can really know. Some people in the back could have hated it, you know? You just hope that the majority of people enjoyed it. But you never know. That's part of being a musician and projecting music with no real reply back from who you're projecting it towards. At the end, people clap. And they cheer. That's a little bit of an indication. But you might hear boos.

Kiana Mickles: Have you ever heard boos?

Jeff Mills: Yeah, of course! I've heard almost everything that you can imagine [laughs]. Because as a musician, or as a DJ, you're projecting with no real expectation that you're going to hear back from who you're projecting on. In the music industry, we look at sales. We look at how many albums sold to know whether this was a good or a bad album. Or if you're invited back as a DJ, you know that you did something that was more positive than negative. But that doesn't mean that everybody in the room was happy. So you just have to live with that. And that's part of the career of being a musician, DJ or producer. You never really know.

Kiana Mickles Where you're playing Thursday, at Leith Theatre in Edinburg, seems more intimate than your average festival venue. Having played in Scotland before, what's your perception of the music scene there?

Jeff Mills Well, Scotland was the most exciting place in Europe at one time. 99.9 percent of the time that you played in Edinburgh was probably going to be one of the most exciting parties that any DJ would ever play. This type of attitude still lingers in Scotland and it doesn't take much to ignite the audience there. I think that they start preparing for it long before the party starts. By the time the first beat drops, it can be complete chaos. So there's that to be concerned about, because it's a live performance [laughs].

Kiana Mickles Looking at some clips of this project playing live, I've noticed that the crowd gets very enthusiastic very quickly. Is that something that you find gets in the way of your performances sometimes?

Jeff Mills Yeah it can. I've had some really interesting situations with that. Especially when playing with a classical orchestra, and the audience gets so excited that you can't hear the orchestra anymore. Or the musicians are so shy that they can't play anymore! They're so disoriented, and then the whole performance goes in another direction. But in this case of having flexibility, we should be able to adapt to anything. I'm less concerned about Tomorrow Comes The Harvest because of the nature of it. But yeah, the Scots are ready for sure. I appreciate this readiness that they have. A lot of exciting things can happen.

Kiana Mickles: Now, with Tony gone, how do you hope to expand his legacy through the continuation of this project you created together?

Jeff Mills: I think we both understood that handing down ideas is really the most that a musician can do. To create something or to show someone something so that they might have some idea of how to expand upon that is the most that we can do. And I expect that even when I'm not able to carry on with it, it will be carried on by someone else.

It never seemed to be a problem with Tony that I was not a drummer. What he was most concerned with was that I understood that the one of any pattern can be anywhere. He was more interested in knowing I was open to that type of theory—and that there is no such thing as mistakes. That the way we should deal with music is basically the same way we should deal with life.

Every day is not going to be perfect and the sun is not going to shine every day. And when you're listening to musicians play music, you should not expect for it to be perfect all the time. It really depends on how you look at that rainy day. Perhaps you prefer that type of weather, rather than sunny. Perfection is in the mind of each person. Our job as musicians, with Tomorrow Comes The Harvest, is to propose these types of ideas so that people can digest them and do whatever they want to do with them, in any way that they want to.