Mick Chillage

Born Derby England, 1968. Family returns home to Dublin in 1974. Parents are both heavily into traditional irish music. Mick makes no connection what so ever with this awful racket & from an early age is exposed to John Barry's soundtracks while Pink Floyd, the Radiophonic Workshop's Dr Who soundtrack & Vangelis's “Chung Kuo” are on the run, to name but a few... The early eighties was a bleak period for Mick as he was forced to listen to his older brothers taste in music due to the lack of income & not owning his own music system. Dodgy metal bands like Saxon, Judas Priest, Motley Crue : ) etc were played at ear bleeding levels in the shared bedroom.. Mick's brother once found a hidden cassette of The Pet Shop Boys “Please” and warned him that if he ever found that synthesized homosexual shit in his cassette deck, he would be murdered! The late eighties improved somewhat for him as he left school, became employed and was now able to purchase cassette albums & vinyl releases every week. His favorite artists at this time were Kraftwerk, Prince, Pet Shop Boys, Cabaret Voltaire, The The, Public Enemy and of course early detroit techno & acid house which were just arriving into europe at this time. Then came along Stakker's “Humanoid” & his music buying habits changed forever... Then the 90s arrived, dance music erupted & Mick discovered an underground club in Dublin called Sides,where you could hear tracks from 808 state, LFO, Orbital etc and he bumped into old school pal Paul Byrne in the club & discovered that they now shared the same interest in music. The friendship was reborn & they both start to work in DV8 shoes, a very trendy shoe store in Dublin's temple bar, where they are given control of the music policy : ) By 1993 the electronic music boom hits, Intelligent techno or IDM, Ambient, etc labels like Warp, Rising High, GPR, Fax, R&S etc are emptying Mick's wallet every week, buying 2 or 3 cds every week.. He starts creating Chillout mix tapes using a Kam dj mixer & two portable CD players with no pitch control, painstakingly working out the mixes. When the mixes are complete he writes 'mixed by The Chillage Idiot' on the tape and friends listen to these mixes in far away places like Australia, Ibiza, etc. In 1995 Mick & Paul attempt to create some music in a friends local studio. The guy who owns the studio knows someone who djs on Dublin's XFM and they end up getting a test slot on the station. XFM are worried that they are just more fuckin' dance djs but eventually like the selections & the 'Chillage Idiots' are born. After much wasted time and money in the friend's local studio, Mick decides to buy his own equipment, which he did in 1996. By 2000 Mick had most of the gear he needed to create the kind of music he wanted, so in the same year he released a compilation called 'Various Projects' under the name Mick Chillage. The CD was a very limited CDR which was poorly mastered from minidisc and was only available in a local infamous local independent music store called Big Brother records. The cd covered a wide range of styles in the electronic music genreand Mick managed to sell all the copies, which wasn't too bad considering the shop sold mostly vinyl. Other releases included a compilation featuring Irish alternative music called Saccherine and featured the track 'A good night's bleep' under the alias Michael Moog. Then Mick Chillage was featured on the Neuromantek CD compilation which was given free to promote a popular electro club night and also featured artists like Decal and Skkatter. Later on, he also submitted two tracks for the D.E.A.F. mp3 downloadable compilations, which are still available to download. In 2005 Mick started performing some live sets, the most memorable being at Electricity, Dublin's premier techno & electro club night which has hosted the finest techno producers & djs like Speedy J, Laurent Garnier, Ritchie Hawtin etc. 2007 saw the release of his first EP "Soundescapes" on Herb recordings, a digital release which has been available from june through september & featured various strains of electronica recorded between 1999 to 2006.

links:
Myspace
XFM Dublin

releases:
TUP003 - Eye on the City EP