Miles Mitchell, aka Mr. Mitch first emerged from the London instrumental grime scene that surrounded Boxed, the clubnight Mitchell co-founded, along with its associated record label, Gobstopper.
Following an early career that saw him making beats for the likes of Skepta, Mitchell signed to esteemed underground label Planet Mu and began developing a sound that was as much rooted in ambient electronics, R&B and experimental techno as it was grime or hip-hop.
Following the release of his last Mr. Mitch album, 2021’s Lazy, Mitchell took a break from his main alias. Despite the record’s critical acclaim and support from celebrity DJs including Thom Yorke and Cillian Murphy, the period following the album’s release saw Mitchell struggle with his musical identity – a situation worsened by the pandemic.
“Off the back of COVID and stuff, a lot of my shows dried up. It kind of made me lose a sense of identity,” he tells us. "I always pictured myself as a DJ and a producer. That's what I am, that's my identity. And it was like, okay, what am I without that stuff? I needed a bit of time away from Mr. Mitch to reassess that and come back with something new.”
At the same time, Mitchell made a number of other life changes, leaving his day job and welcoming his third and fourth children. In order to make money in the absence of live shows, he began teaching music production, which led to the creation of a new, more dancefloor-focused musical alias, DJ Cuddles.
"Doing that stuff, you're making all different types of music because [your pupils] want to try and make different things,” Mitchell explains. “From doing that, I realised, 'Oh, I'm pretty good at this, I can make whatever kind of music I want'. That's where DJ Cuddles came from. It was just like, I want to make this more functional music that works in the club space. Music that is a bit more fun and a bit less self-centered. Because Mr. Mitch has just been a pure expression of myself and whatever I'm going through at the time. DJ Cuddles was taken away from all that.”
A variety of factors inspired Mitchell to return to his best-known project this year, including a trip to Nigeria with friends that put him in a newly inspired mindset.
"It just took me away from the environment where my identity stemmed from, and put me in this new space where art is thriving,” Mitchell tells us. “It's basically a completely different environment to what I'm used to, and that got lots of things flowing in my brain.”
At the same time, the sad passing of his father after years of health struggles led Mitchell to reappraise his relationship to the Mr. Mitch identity.
"He'd always been a music man – he'd always played,” he says. “He used to tour with Mad Professor and he's played as a session guitarist for a lot of different reggae artists. But he always put that stuff on a back burner to be professional and to provide me with a life.
"[His passing] was just like a moment of like, what am I? What am I doing here? It was just like, Mr. Mitch is me – I'm Miles Mitchell, but Mr. Mitch is the artistic representation of me. There was just a moment where everything just aligned.”
The resulting album, The Lost Boy, was released earlier this month, and sees Mitchell further exploring the weightless, atmospheric side of his sound, layering melodic synths across sparse, bass-heavy beats and sci-fi atmospheres.
We sat down with Mitchell in London to discuss his musical history, the album’s creation and why removing ideas is a vital part of his creative process.
How did you start out in electronic music?
"I feel like I got into music in a similar way to a lot of people of my generation. I started making music from software from the back of a cereal box. I got Hip-Hop eJay I think it was, which is just like one of those bit of software where it's just all the loops, and you just chuck them in. That sparked my interest for making music.
"I had a cousin who had Fruity Loops, and he gave me a cracked version of, like Fruit Loops 3 or something. I was probably, like, 12 or 13 years old, and it just was amazing to me. I'd heard electronic music before, and I just never really understood how it was made.
"In my home, we kind of had R&B and reggae playing in the house, and there wasn't that much electronic music. But externally, I started getting into garage, and that was the new sound for me. I just didn't understand how it was made until finally I saw Fruit Loops and it was like, 'Ah, I can do this myself'.
"I think that's the same story for a lot of people of my generation – how we got into grime. Most of us that started making grime were using Fruit Loops. It was just so easy to have that step sequencer when you just throw in any sound and just crack on."
How much did you experiment with any new techniques on this album?
"There's always going to be a sense of me. Kind of unintentionally, it's going to sound like a Mr. Mitch record. But the way I do things and my practices are always changing.
"If I will go back to a project that I started in 2018, or something, there'll be a lot of techniques that I was doing back then that I was a really big fan of, and then I'll open another project that I've made this year there will be a whole bunch of different techniques.
"A lot of it I forget, actually; I forget about how I used to do something. I'll just keep slowly moving on and trying different techniques. Now I'm in a whole new space where I'm making music that sounds like this. I think, with my music the context comes afterwards. It's like, you just make the music because it's flown out of you, and then once you've got it there in front of you, you're like, 'Oh, this makes sense.'"
Has social media made it harder to be an independent artist these days?
"I think as an artist, you have to play the game a lot. That's always been the case, to a certain extent. But right now you have to be good on social media and be very present all the time. The music is important and I think it always will be important, but it's how you're presented that is super important right now. If you're not playing the game of making all these cool TikToks and doing live streams as a DJ all the time, it's going to be hard.
"If you're not playing the game of making all these cool TikToks and doing live streams as a DJ all the time, it's going to be hard."
"I know a lot of people really thrived over lockdown from doing a lot of DJ live streams, and it's great, I'm not dissing that approach at all. It's just something that I personally can't sustain and struggle with. The way I make music is like, a Mr. Mitch album will take two to three years because I'm experiencing life and living it through the music. So it's not necessarily something that I can just make a cool little Reel about and show you, 'Oh, look, this is how I made this song in 15 seconds'. It doesn't translate to that format, and I haven't necessarily found a way to push it in this new way of presenting music. It's a hard game to play."
How do you approach writing and mixing tracks that are often incredibly minimal?
"Minimalism comes naturally to me. But it's something that I've developed over time. My way of producing has always been to put everything in and then just take it away. If you look at a lot of my projects, there's a lot of muted tracks. I'll just have so many different ideas, and I'll put them into the track, and then go, 'Ok, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work...' And I'm just left with maybe four key elements that just work really well together.
"It's something that comes easy to me now. I speak to a lot of different producers, who will ask me how I make it sound so full, when there's hardly anything going on in it. I don't really know.I think it just comes down to that technique of putting it all in and then taking things out until it sounds right.
"When you've got a lot of different melodies going on, you run the risk of them clashing. It's a pain to mix as well. When you've got only a few key elements, it's a lot easier to mix, and you can make it sound really big with just a few different effects processors to fill the gaps."
Do you think that, post-pandemic, it's harder for scenes to emerge like the instrumental grime scene that sprung up around Boxed in the early 2010s?
"I feel like there are still these micro scenes happening, but at the moment they exist more online. What it takes for all of these is for someone to take the initiative to be like, 'Okay, we all like this thing, let's bring it to the real world'. That's what happened with Boxed. If it wasn't for Slack, to be honest, I don't think Boxed would have ever happened.
"He's an action guy. I feel like, in a group, you always need one person who's the action person. That's not me. I'm kind of an ideas person, but I will never action it. You need that person to be like, 'Well, let's do this then'. With any micro scene, it just takes the action person to bring it into a physical space and make it real.
"Clubs are dying as in, like, they're disappearing, but I don't think music scenes will die. I don't think these micro scenes and these different genres and these different sprouts of things will die. I think it will just get a new life and a new way of presenting itself. I don't know where that is yet, but someone else, some other action person, somewhere else, is going to figure it out and bring it to a new space."
As someone who's taught production, what's your best advice for aspiring producers?
"The number one thing that I realised from teaching people production, is that the main thing holding people back is that they don't believe their music's good enough, when most of the time it is. I think that it's hard to put yourself out there, especially when you're so emotionally tied to the music. That's the scariest thing, actually letting people hear your music and receiving criticism in a public forum. It's hard and it's scary, but I think it has to be done. You will improve though, and your music will change over time in the public forum."
Mr. Mitch – The Lost Boy is out now via Gobstopper Records
Special thanks to The Qube for hosting this session. Find out more about their London studio spaces.
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