Jeff Mills has been exploring techno’s outer limits since the late '80s. While distilling machine rhythms into increasingly minimal forms, he has simultaneously reached outward, creating futurist epics about time and space. On The Crystal City Is Alive, Mills turns his gaze from outer space back to his native Detroit. Joined by fellow techno veteran Eddie “Flashin'” Fowlkes and a handful of local musicians—keyboardist Amp Fiddler, percussionists Efe Bes and Sundiata O.M.—he reasserts techno’s place within the lineage of Black American music. At the heart of this effort is the Detroit poet Jessica Care Moore, who on “People” elaborates the connections between music and cultural memory: “Rhythm rains dreams from our pores… Movement becomes the language of the fantastic, particles in unison—proper agile aliens of funk.” Fusing classic Detroit techno pulses and Mills’ signature space-telescope signals with polyrhythmic drumming and free-flowing jazz improv, the album is an explicit declaration of Afrofuturist principles, even in its instrumental tracks: “When the Sun Loves You Back” is a love letter to Blackness itself, flipping a wordless meditation on skin tone into an expanse of limitless shimmer.