Tonight in Tokyo Jeff Mills will be debuting his latest project, 'The Messenger', at club Air. Will I be going? No. It's not because I am not interested, quite the opposite: I would really love to be there. But... tomorrow is a normal working day for me (and for basically everyone else). The party tonight doesn't open until 11pm and there is a support DJ, so I am guessing Mills would start at midnight at the very earliest, but probably a bit later. In addition, they haven't listed set times, which makes it difficult to decide whether to try going for a short time. I am presuming it is on a Thursday night because of scheduling issues for Air and/or Mills, and that is fine, I am totally ok with mid-week gigs. But... I don't understand why they have to schedule it at such a prohibitive time. Given it is a weeknight, why do they have to run it like a normal club night? Why can't they have it starting at a more reasonable time - say opening at 9pm, with Jeff starting at 10pm or something similar? And especially given this is a more of a conceptual event, an earlier time slot shouldn't matter. This is just yet another example of how difficult it is for us to think differently about presenting techno / electronic music. Why must it only take place in the middle of the night? We listen to the music during the day and evening on our ipods and at our homes etc., surely we can go dance to it at these times too? This is one of the things I like most about a place like Berghain, the fact that you can sleep through the night, wake up and go there in the morning or at lunchtime and have a dance. You needn't stay up all night long (even though many do). Admittedly, this is hardly a new frustration, but the reason I raise it here is because I have read in interviews with Jeff Mills where he calls for different forms of electronic music events and different ways of collectively engaging with the music. Yet here we have a new project of his, but presented in the exact format (in the middle of the night) on a workday. I am disappointed Mills and the club could not have been a bit more flexible or creative. And while the club might have had a preference for it being an all night event, the pulling power of Jeff Mills in Japan is such that I am sure it could have been at a different/earlier time, should he have desired. With tonight, so be it, I am sure Jeff will be great, and I will miss it because I have an early start at work tomorrow. But on a larger scale, I feel until we collectively start becoming more creative about trying to push electronic music out of the singular context of all night clubbing, it will continue to unnecessarily limit the way we engage with the music.