Success, respect and a huge fan base is not something Michael Dodman needs to aim for anymore; he’s already there, whilst continuing to make some of the best British electronic music around. The man known as Huxley seems to have exploded into our eardrums and club scene over the past year or so, but the talented producer, remixer and enigmatic DJ has been making music since his late teens. First earning deserved credit as garage producer, he then heightened his skills to an early form of what we hear now, crossing over to a deeper and housier sound on the Cecille imprint in 2009 with gifted Ethyl. What we hear now seems to be an ingenious blend of his previous house and garage, a blend which has kept growing and is now at the forefront of the electronic scene also developed by other incredible artist’s such as Eats Everything and Julio Bashmore. Huxley’s released on a number of infamous labels including Morris Audio, Fear of Flying, Tsuba and his own imprint Saints and Sonnets. The now huge and delectably deep ‘Let it Go’ was released in February this year on Hypercolour and other deep house tracks can be found on 20:20 Vision Recordings, including the great Box Clever and infectious Atonement. Huxley really seems to have perfected his sound of deep and melodic house, driven by delicious bass and strains of garage, but owing to his history and talent for developing and crossing genres, we can’t wait to hear what he does next.
Since you first begun you’ve obviously experimented and developed a lot, how do you think the electronic music world has changed and developed – would you say it’s more accepting and experimental since when you started?
It depends really as I started when I was about 17 first releasing music, and about 10 years ago I was very much doing garage, and with garage you could experiment to a certain extent but really if you went too far… you wouldn’t get any feedback from it. But I think these days there’s a lot more scope for you to be a bit more..avante garde, or a bit experimental, definitely, because look at people like Four Tet or Floating Points, they’re getting booked for the same nights as Joy Orbison or myself.. Julio Bashmore..the crowd’s more open to not just having a night of one kind of music, which I think feeds back into the productions as well which is a good thing. I think it helps music not become stale…well hopefully. I mean everything goes in circles anyway, look at Garage, it’s coming back now and it was big like 10 or 15 years ago and it’s huge again now so it is a circle, but now it’s all a lot more open. Plus the internet lets people listen to music of all styles whenever you want, where before it was through releases, so I think that helps people understand different styles and stuff better.
Are you worried that this whole Garage revival might go the same way as it did previously…?
Yeah it kind of died. Well I think as long as you can still maintain….I mean look at the early garage, it was basically house music, it’s basically what house music is now to be honest, you hear a track like Nu-Birth – Anytime, and I play it in sets now, and people think it was made today. I think the thing is you just need to be careful that it doesn’t get saturated, that’s the problem, too many people start jumping on the bandwagon and that’s when the music gets watered down, I think it’s inevitable that at some point it will inevitably die off again because everything does, look at the past two years there’s been certain music that’s been huge and that seems to be on the way out which has given rise to the likes of myself and Julio, Dusky, Disclosure, those kind of guys. But the thing is where I come from anyway, my first house release was like a loopy-base tech-house thing, so I think as long as you evolve with the times and you move on and don’t stagnate then it should be ok. Hopefully.
Even when something’s revived it’s always developed in order to be revived, so this seems like a new kind of garage, a hybrid that’s moved into other things….
Exactly, I mean I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t have garage in my tracks because it would be ludicrous for me to say it but I still think that a lot of them come from a house base, which I think helps it a lot to maintain that kind of quality of track or whatever…
And I’ve noticed in your tracks and sets, it does have quite a big deep house vibe to it, and that, a long side garage has exploded in the past couple of years, thanks to 'current dance music trend/scenes and that kind of thing…but a lot of people say that the image which goes a long side this movement is very glamorous, almost too sexy, so in a way it..
~in unison~
Takes away, well yeah.. I mean it’s hard for me to say, I have to say because of what I’m booked for I don’t get booked for the same parties as the Hot Natured guys are on, but you go to some parties and it’s a lot of style over substance, but you can’t necessarily blame the music for that, and it’s just one of those things that happens when something gets popular, people jump on the bandwagon, look at R&B it’s the same kind of thing you know. I don’t know if you can blame the music too much but yeah I can agree that sometimes it’s a bit too much about how low your V-neck is rather than actually liking the music…
If you see the nipples…it’s too low.
(laughs) that’s it!
So not only do you produce and DJ but remixing is also a very strong forte of yours, is there any remix that’s meant a lot to your career or a favourite remix that you’ve done?
Favourite remix I’ve done….ah that’s a hard question….to be honest I’ve done so many that they’ve not all blurred into one, but kind of like they’ve become my own tracks if you see what I mean, I don’t necessarily see them as remixes anymore which sometimes isn’t the best way to look at things…but I guess the Professor Green remix was quite big for me because it was my first sort of commercial thing, I mean it didn’t overly set the world a light but the fact I did it means a lot to me, and as much as I don’t want to be a popstar, getting noticed by those kind of labels is never a bad thing. My favourite – god knows!
And you’ve worked with some incredible labels – is there anything that attracts you to specific ones, is there any labels where you’ve been like ‘yes I really want to work with them’?
I think more in the past it was about me wanting to be with the labels, but I was quite lucky our first release was with Cecille and we kinda just fell on our feet, which at the time that was the inform label which helped out me and my old partner Tim. These days I kind of have a bit of a base of the labels that I’m working with and I like that, like the Hypercolour lot, it’s more of just a group of mates going out and I think that’s quite an important thing if you’re playing with each other all the time, it’s a good thing to be out playing with your mates. But then a label like 20:20 when they come to you and ask you to do something it’s hard to say no because they’re like an institution. So I think these days I’m not really worried, I used to make music to try and fit on a label but now I make music and if a label doesn’t want it they don’t want it and I’ll go somewhere else.
It’s great to be in that position…
Yes I’m very lucky at the moment and I don’t take it lightly at all to be fair, I’ve worked quite hard to get here so.. it’s nice really, it’s good times.
And so far, has there been a particular moment in your career, say a night and you’ve thought ‘yes – I’ve done it!’…
Em I don’t really know about that specifically but a good moment for me was when I played at asylum and technique do these bank holiday parties in Leeds at the Faversham, its quite a big deal, and I played at the first one they did this year and I dropped ‘Let it go’, and I saw like 700 people just singing it back at me and it was like…not a moment where I thought I’d “made it”, but I thought ‘Fucking Hell…this is like…Goosebumps’.
Amazing…and also in the past few years we’ve seen this rise of the ‘super-star DJ’ kind of thing, like David Guetta and Deadmau5 who both started out quite differently to what they do now..would you ever be tempted , if you got that big and someone approached you who said ‘move to LA and we’ll give you all this money to do this kind of song’, would you do it?
Emmmm…..Not under Huxley….No I probably wouldn’t do it…..I don’t, um I couldn’t, em….Look it’s hard to say no to that kind of thing (laughs) but then I think the thing is yeah, you’re going to make a lot of money out of it, and don’t get me wrong, those guys are set up for life, but if my heart’s not in something I become very bored of it very quickly…it’s a catch 22 really. I would rather make good music and you can still earn pretty decent money doing what I’m doing now so it’s just…greed I think If I were to do that.
And I read recently you said it’s all about picking the right tunes for the right crowd, has there been any times when this hasn’t happened?
Oh yeah of course, loads of times, I think you can say to any DJ, everyone’s had shit gigs, whatever you play just doesn’t work, sometimes the crowd just want’s something completely different or you read it wrong or really you’re never going to get that kind of thing 100% right, it’s just impossible, even the big DJ’s will have shit gigs, so you can’t always do ‘it’…. but the plan is to do it as much as you can…
And is there a consistent crowd that you love to play for? People, city, place?
Not really, I’d say my sound is kind of ‘UK’ so it’s quite UK based. It’s different where ever you go really, but I’d have to say maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but the crowd seems to be getting younger. I think Dance music is cool again for younger people, and for a while it was all indie and shit, so I think it kind of missed that generation a little bit…although that generation is getting into it now..but now people of sixteen and seventeen are listening to dance music again like I was at that age.
And how do you differ your sets to play festivals, like Gottwood for instance?
Well I play a lot more party tunes!
Yep, last night was amazing, and you looked like you were having fun too – it makes a set much more memorable…and you closed with Armand Van Helden ‘You Don’t Know Me’…
Yeah the thing is you come to a festival because you wanna have a party, I’m all for educating people and playing new records but I think in this kind of environment you need a bit of fun – you want to have a good time and nothing guarantees a good time more than party tunes..
Is there a club you really want to play or have played?
Well the club that I really want to play for I have played once, is Fabric. I’m lucky enough to be doing it again on July 28th.
And would you like to take your style of music over to the States?
Well…. in the States people like Eats Everything and Justin Martin are already pretty big over there, but I’ve actually never been there to play…I think there’s a plan next year to do like a small tour or something, but nothing concrete yet.
And what’s up and coming for Saints and Sonnets?
We’ve got the third release out now which is kind of a deeper thing, which is like a chill out track the original and we’ve got two remixes by Benjamin from Rush Hour and Random Dial and just got loads of good music really, we’re signing loads of good stuff, we’ve got quite a bit planned and will hopefully do some nights – hopefully take it round the country, so that’s what we’re currently working on.
Last couple of questions, if you had to pick one track of the moment that you love?
Julio Bashmore’s Au Seve.
And if you were to put on a night in a club, you can choose any 3 DJ’s to put on, who would they be and what order?
Probably Dyed Soundorom, Carl Craig, and either Moodyman or someone like Dinky, or Luciano from a few years ago….
And finally if you had to pick a track that described you or what you’re all about, any genre or time….
Oh god that’s a fucking hard question….I don’t even know if I can answer that….um…..Mr Blobby?
And with that Huxley was off to his next gig, a hard-working and very talented guy who was a pleasure to chat with. MEOKO interviewed him after his set at Gottwood festival – which for many including ours was the highlight of the weekend, and we look forward to many more of these sets to come.
Rosa Devlin
