MP3 MIX: madox

With his debut album Urban Plastic fresh on the shelves, Italian breaks star Madox delivers an exclusive downloadable mix for your listening pleasure…

It seems that if you’re a producer and an Italian, you have an advantage over the rest of the music world. And that advantage is bribery – bribery in the shape of spiced, dried sausage. Well, it works for Stefano Miele anyway… “I played at Supercharged in Brighton and met Ashley Slater there,” says the Italian breaks DJ. “I got his mobile number and sent him a track to see if he’d sing on it. Then I brought him back some salami from Italy and we became friends…”

Before he knew it, Stefano had convinced the Freak Power vocalist to lend his voice to Plastic Fantastic, one of the funk-fuelled tracks on Urban Plastic, Mr Miele’s debut album as Madox. This alter ego has been knocking around the breaks scene for a while now, winning over fans such as Plump DJs and Rennie Pilgrem with tracks that combine a certain Latin flair with big, chunky floor-filling beats. Now he’s released Urban Plastic, and what makes the album really stand out is the somewhat unique combination of Brazilian-style festival vibes and dirty breakbeats. It’s not something many people do.

“I remember the track by Elite Force on the This Is Latinamyl EP on Fused & Bruised in 1997,” says Stefano. “That’s a breaksy track with Brazilian samples. I like to use a lot of those Brazilian sounds though. You find those tempos in house music a lot, but not so much in breakbeat. I really like those roots sounds though, and when I record under my own name I mix up South American sounds with hip hop and dub. All the roots sounds are really groovy, so I think it’s quite natural to merge those with dance sounds.”

The results win over the right people too. “When I put out my tracks Careca and Alemao in 2004, I got an email from the Plumps saying, ‘This is fucking amazing. We’ve never heard anything like this.’ Then they played it everywhere – and when the Plumps play a track, people listen to it. I was quite unknown at the time, so that really helped me to get more attention.”

It also helped give Stefano the confidence to put together an album that combines Latin flavours and breaks. He says it was a bit scary putting it out there, “but if you don’t try anything different… One of the main roles of a DJ is to propose new music, otherwise music will die. It’s very natural though, and that means you can’t be too nervous. And I really like to use the dancefloor to test my studio experiments. It took two years to make the album. I’m really into loads of different music, so it wasn’t easy to make a linear album. It took a long time to work in all my styles from the last few years. But the DJs seem to really like it – which is nice.”

Urban Plastic is out now on Mantra Breaks. Visit www.myspace.com/madoxdj, www.myspace.com/mantrabreaks and www.mantravibes.com

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