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Features Introducing NEM3SI$’s new label Infinite Resistance! Mindbenderz talk ‘Lord of the Rings’ and fishing, as well as the creation of their new album ‘Celestial Gateway’! Iono-Music artists One Function, Eliyahu, Invisible Reality and Dual Vision talk Robert Miles, kids, dogs and vinyl, while we chat about their current releases! Luke&Flex talk influences, the Irish rave scene, why Flex wears a mask and Play Hard, their new EP out now on Onhcet Repbulik Xtreme! Lyktum expands on his new album ‘Home’ – talking about his love of storytelling, creating new harmonies and the concept behind his musical works. Pan talks getting caught short crossing the Sahara, acid eyeballs and tells us Trance is the Answer, plus shares his thoughts on his latest release 'Beyond the Horizon' - all from a beach in Spain! Miss C chats about living with the KLF, DJing in a huge cat’s mouth, training her brain and the upcoming super-duper Superfreq Grande party at LDN East this Saturday, 16th September! NEM3SI$ - I Live for the Night – talks superficiality, psychopaths, and bittersweet success, ahead of a plethora of evocative, emotional, and passionate upcoming melodic techno releases! Psy-Sisters Spring Blast Off! We talk to DJ competition winner ROEN along with other super talents on the lineup! Blasting towards summer festivals with Bahar Canca ahead of Psy-Sisters Spring Blast! Shyisma talks parties, UFO's, and Shotokan Karate ahead of his upcoming album 'Particles' on Iono-Music! SOME1 talks family, acid, stage fright and wolves - ahead of his upcoming album release ‘Voyager’ on Iono-Music in February 2023! The Transmission Crew tell all and talk about their first London event on 24th February 2023! NIXIRO talks body, mind and music production ahead of his release 'Planet Impulse' on Static Movement's label - Sol Music! Turning the world into a fairy tale with Ivy Orth ahead of Tribal Village’s 10th Birthday Anniversary Presents: The World Lounge Project The Psy-Sisters chat about music, achievements, aspirations and the 10-Year Anniversary Party - 18/12/22! A decade of dance music with Daniel Lesden Earth Needs a Rebirth! Discussions with Psy-Trance Artist Numayma Taking a Journey Through Time with Domino New Techno Rising Star DKLUB talks about his debut release White Rock on Onhcet Republik! PAN expands on many things including his new album 'Hyperbolic Oxymoron' due for release on the 14th April 2022 on PsyWorld Records! Psibindi talks all things music including her new collaborative EP 'Sentient Rays' on Aphid Records, her band Sentience Machine and 10 years of Psy-Sisters!

Hey Micky! HF calls Michael James Reported by K8-e / Submitted 19-05-08 17:10 Michael James will be a familiar face to many in the Birmingham scene, working in a record shop by day and being currently involved in no less than twenty labels by night! I first heard of Micky early in 2007 when he and Riggsy launched their Nil By Mouth imprint - which turned into one of my favourite hard house labels last year, however he'd been running the long standing NRG label Nosebleed for a good while by then with Dion Lloyd. Taking an active role in releasing quality hard house tunes (on vinyl) whilst not DJing in the genre anymore is an interesting position to be in - I took some time with him to find out more. Hey! Welcome to Harderfaster. You are a familiar face amongst the Birmingham crew but for those unfamiliar with who you are let’s go back to basis: Name: Michael James DOB: That would be telling!! First tune ever bought: Tony de Vit - The Dawn Styles produced/played: I play anything from house through to techno Labels owned: Nil By Mouth, Mad Cow, Nosebleed to name a few That’s quite a lot of labels! Give us a little bit of info about one and how they are different and who you work with on them? They're just the hard house ones! I'm quite involved with other genres of music and put tunes out under various guises. I run or am involved in around 20 different label projects! Of the ones you know about though, Nosebleed was my first hard house label, this came about after a long end of the weekend chat with Dion and us deciding that we wanted a piece of the action and wanted to get a feel of what its like to pick and choose what goes on a label rather than having to send your tunes out to other labels and letting them decide whether your tune will ever see vinyl. At the time we felt that some of the tunes I was making with my partner in crime Riggsy were good enough to see vinyl but we were getting knock backs because we weren’t a "big" name so to speak. It did seem a little bit like no one wanted to take risks on these new-to-the-game producers, so after a long discussion we just thought f*ck it, we'll start our own label and can put out whatever we like. We only really have one golden rule with the label and that is both of us have to like the tune to sign it!! I started Nil By Mouth with Riggsy towards the end of 2006. We had been working together on tunes every week for about 3 years and it made sense for us to start a hard house label together as whenever you see my name on a record Riggsy's name is usually next to it. We adopted the same rule that Dion & I use for Nosebleed though, we both have to like anything that gets signed. Now Mad Cow is a solo project and only really came about because I found that sticking to our golden Nosebleed and Nil By Mouth rule meant a lot of tunes I liked were getting dismissed because Dion or Riggsy weren’t overly keen on them. I get sent tunes now and I'll have a listen and think yeah I really like that, would suit Nosebleed, send it to Dion who replies "nah, don’t really like it" but instead of getting back to the artist with a "sorry, that’s not for us" I get to offer them the option of Mad Cow instead. There are tunes that I do pick solely for Mad Cow without even thinking about the other two labels though so don’t all be thinking Mad Cow is a label full of Nosebleed and Nil By Mouth rejects! As you've mentioned you've chosen some colourful names for your labels - care to expand on why? Haha! All of my label names have a meaning, maybe not to everyone else but to me they all have something that relates to something that's happened or something or someone around me! Mad Cow for instance is named after the missus. It was gonna be Moody Cow but I reckon I'd have been sleeping on the sofa for a week! You cite Andy Farley, Dom Sweeten and Paul Glazby amongst others as your influences, How did you get into hard house originally? I originally stumbled across hard house by accident! I was out with the missus in Birmingham and tried to get into some club but we were turned away because I was wearing jeans and a t- shirt! We tried a few places but got told the same thing, in the end I asked one of the doormen if there was anywhere in town that was gonna let me in dressed as I was and he pointed us in the direction of Pulse where Sundissential was at the time. We got in and I basically loved what I was hearing. Andy Farley was on the decks and I was instantly hooked to the sound he was playing. It was all new and exciting to me, I ended up going to every Sundissential that was at Pulse from then on and was hooked on hard house! Andy Farley has been a big influence for me and I was chuffed when he signed Follow Me to his Blue Cubed label. Riggsy & Michael James So when did you start DJing and producing - which came first? I first DJed around six years ago and started producing after I met Riggsy about a year later. Hard house lasted for about four years before I started working in the record shop I’d spent six years buying from! Before working there I only really knew hard house and it opened my ears up to many new sounds and genres. Nowadays I like anything from house to techno, I try not to pigeonhole my music but minimal techno seems to be what I’m buying most of though. I like my jackin US house and tech house as well though. Which do you see yourself as first and foremost: DJ, producer or label owner and if you had to choose one which would it be? That would be a difficult one. Even though I don't really play hard house anymore I still DJ and enjoy it to the max! Again with the producing, I don't just produce hard house so it's something fresh and exciting each week I go into the studio. I do get a lot of pleasure out of running the labels and there's nothing better for me than giving new / up & coming producers a chance to showcase their talent, where bigger labels sometimes wouldn't take the chance. It's a nice feeling when you get an email from one of them saying "Thanks so much for signing the tune, I really appreciate it etc etc". Knowing that you've made their day is good! So I'll go with the label owner if I have to pick one. So you take an active role in releasing quality hard house whilst not DJing in the genre anymore. That must be an interesting position to be in? It is yeah, I suppose I just don’t want to let go of my roots! Hard house is where it started for me really and it would be rude to turn my back on it just because I've found something else that I like. I'm very open minded about music and give anything a chance. I still download hard house DJ mixes from various places and have them on the iPod blasting in the car. There are still some good hard house tunes still being produced but the fun in hard house has been taken away for me, it's all gone a bit too serious and too many people these days turn their noses up at fun tunes which in my opinion is why hard house is in such a sh*t state! I know from one of my other projects that fun in hard house still works and there is still a market for it as a record I released in the last year sold 700 copies on vinyl and with the way vinyl is selling at the moment that is some achievement! Most label owners these days are DJs but I'm not in it to further my DJ career and I'm not in it for the money (if I was I would have retired ages ago because I ain't made a penny this last year! Haha!). I think the only thing keeping me around is that deep down I still have a passion for hard house. You and many others in the scene were hit quite hard by the demise of Passion and even penned a colourful tribute to Andy Moore (owner of Passion Records) with Riggsy, which was one of your first released on Nil By Mouth. What’s the full story around the tune and have you heard from Andy since? Haha! Yes the Andy (No)Moore - Passion (Still Lying All The Time) was a blatant chip at Andy Moore. The guy's a complete waste of space and to be honest I wish I'd never got involved with him or his poorly run company at all! The story around the tune is basically about a week after Andy went bust taking a whole heap of my money with him, we started a track for Nil By Mouth and were flicking through some accapella's and heard the "Passion, you're still lying all the time" lyrics in one of them. We thought this fits the bill nicely as every time you phoned Andy he would just fob you off and lie to you. Passion was his company and he lied all the time so it worked quite nicely! Me and Riggsy actually nicknamed Andy "Your cheques in the post" as that’s all he ever seemed to say to us when we phoned asking when our invoices were getting paid. We have never seen or heard from him since Passion went bankrupt and to be quite honest I don’t really want to see him. The guy is a loser! Early Doors EP: Michael James & Riggsy Present: Andy (No) Moore Of course Passion going down the pan isn’t the only thing to have affected the industry in recent times, the demise of Amato and others have hit some labels hard with now even Vicious Circle pulling our from vinyl releases full time. You are fiercely pro-vinyl, what are your thoughts on the VC news and the state of the industry? The VC news is very bad but an honest statement about the state of the industry would be it's on its arse at the moment. There is no point trying to deny it. It's taken us (and I know a few other labels who are in the same boat) between 9 months and a year just to break even on some releases! We want to push vinyl as much as we can as I’m a big lover of it and would hate to see it fade out completely. Digital labels annoy me. They work only in the aspect that new producers can get some recognition. Big labels with Digi labels annoy me even more. They have the chance to showcase a track they obviously think is good but don’t want to take any risks by putting it on wax. For me if it's good enough to sign, its good enough to see wax! The CD world has a very big market at the moment though and can't be completely dismissed. We have made our labels' back catalogue available to purchase on CD single. We won't be going digital as we feel not enough of the £1 download fee goes back into the respective labels. The only way we would ever go digital is if we ran our own download site and could charge a fee that we as a company would see the whole of, not a crappy little percentage. CD singles can be found for Nil By Mouth, Mad Cow and Nosebleed at www.myspace.com/ourcdstore As you mentioned you are clearly passionate about giving new producers the chance to get their material out there - who are the ones to watch from your perspective and which producers tunes never leave your box? Yes, as I've already said I enjoy pushing new talent as I know myself how hard it is to get tunes signed when no one has heard of you! There are a few good producers pushing the boundaries at the moment, if Scott Fo-Shaw was around ten years ago I think he would of owned Tidy! Others that need a mention are Louis Fernio, Butcher Boy, Adam M, Tom Parr, Tim Stokes and Tom Urwin. As mentioned I don't really play hard house much anymore but if I did you’d see producer’s like Paul Maddox, Dom Sweeten, BK and Mik Cree in my box. On to your personal productions, what tunes have you got coming up we can look forward to and what are your studio plans for 2008? There are about 4-5 tracks that I’ve got either half finished or nearly finished for the labels. I've also got a couple of CD releases we've been working on forthcoming. They seem to be taking forever but they'll get there in the end! And what about the labels - what’s the release schedule looking like for each? I tend not to plan too far ahead with release schedules as tunes tend to get stale if they're on this DJs mix one week and that DJs mix the next week. The Nosebleed schedule is full for the next three releases and there are a few corkers on there as well! Other than that nothing is set in stone for either Mad Cow or Nil By Mouth. Producers get your tracks over to me, the next release could be you! What’s your current favourite hard house record and all time top 5? My favourite hard house record at the moment is Digital Kid & Bonzo – Take Me Up. I think this tracks got everything a hard house track should have, full of grit yet still very melodic and uplifting! It’s the type of track you could play in 6-7 years time and it would still work on the dance floor. My all time top 5 would have to be: Tony de Vit - The Dawn Andy Farley - Aspirations Beatniqz - Kick It Cortina - Music Is Movin' Gridlock 3000 - Fantastic Thing So what do you get up to in your spare time? Spare time?? Whats that?? I work five days a week for a Birmigham based record shop and 1 day a week in the studio. I spend my weekends with my daughter doing the daddy-daughter things like going swimming, feeding the ducks, board games and taking the dog out for a walk. I'm also a massive football fan and try to watch as much footy on the TV as I can. Me and the missus have recently just moved into a new house and fit whatever time we can into making it look nice, we've almost finished! If I knew how hard moving house was originally I would have stayed where I was in the first place - it was a nightmare! Other than that spare time to me is a myth! Thanks Micky! Photos courtesy Michael James, not to be reproduced without permission. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By K8-e: The One and Only Eddie Halliwell PunchFunk & Geushky Presents "Let's Make Rave" with Ian Void & Chris Vaux Cream @ Amnesia - Ibiza 2010 - Reviewed Pure Gold: Interview with Will Gold Turning the Corner - Interview with IAMX The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable. Comments: From: karl davis on 19th May 2008 21:37.55 Good stuff, putting out some stompers From: Olly Perris on 19th May 2008 21:53.04 Nil By Mouth is one of the best labels out there atm, big up micky! From: Gem Stone on 19th May 2008 23:36.24 wicked interview mate!!!

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