Tony Allen x Jeff Mills at Funkhaus Berlin / Wednesday, 26.09.2018

Red Bull Music Festival presents the collaborative duo of Afrobeat percussion master Tony Allen and Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills as the culmination of our day of Open Funkhaus events.

The two rhythm manipulators both aim to create a conversation with sound, with this show being no exception. Since their first union in Paris in 2016, the pair has introduced audiences around the world to their unexpected marriage of Afrobeat and techno and will release their collaborative EP Tomorrow Comes the Harvest on Blue Note Lab this September. Taking place at Saal 1 at Funkhaus, join us for an evening of unexpected dialogue in music.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M26OTacK-0Q

In his quest to liberate himself from the tyranny of the sequencer, Mills couldn’t wish for a better partner than the father of Afrobeat. Many consider Tony Allen to be one of the greatest drummers alive. In the last thirty years, his signature mix of Nigerian roots, polyglot jazz and no-fuss funkiness – delivered with both absolute looseness and absolute precision – has spread like a virus around the world, infecting the work of artists as diverse as Damon Albarn, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Moritz Oswald.

Jeff Mills is a titan of the electronic dance scene and a tireless innovator, who helped to give birth to the 1980s Detroit techno scene before going on to compose electro symphonies, soundtracks and sonic odysseys inspired by futurism and space travel, working with visual artists, choreographers, classical orchestras, even astronauts. His collaboration with Tony Allen is another rhythmic conversation in a long and well-established discourse, but a special one too. “We’re working together to achieve something bigger than the both of us,” he says. “It really is a pure collaboration, not just through music, but in our minds and spirit as well.”