We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mischief & Reason a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Mischief &, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
I am at heart a restless creative – I can’t help but keep creating in all aspects of life. It’s all about keeping up forward momentum, and staying in a state of flow in all things. When I get into a flow state creatively, I can spend hours and often work late into the night perfecting a mix- fine tuning details, breakbeat chops and eq balance changes. For me, the creative process and the act of creation is the thing that excites me the most. I love to create art and put it out into the world– some would probably say somewhat irrationally, as the impact and results are less important to me than knowing that I put my best into the work and did everything I could to make it the best it can be.
In this age of social media numbers and comparison – it is freeing to focus on the art and the act of creation outside of the impact and results. My absolute favorite thing is creating physical artifacts of music in the form of vinyl records, even if there are only a few copies out there – the tactile experience of holding something you created and that will be playable by physical means hundreds of years into the future, in today’s world of ephemeral virality and two minute songs is a completely different feeling.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Mischief & Reason is an Atlanta based Drum & Bass / Jungle artist, creating up-front, bass-heavy underground sounds since the early 2000’s. Raised on old school and golden era hip-hop, breakbeat culture and old kung-fu films, I try to bring a unique sensibility and original hard-hitting sound that stands apart from the majority of today’s homogeneous DNB scene. To this end, I use a hybrid method of production, writing everything in real time on an Akai MPC Live and selected midi sound modules, run through an analog console, and then bounced into a DAW to arrange, process and finalize the mix.
My next release, the Geometry EP Vol. 1, out November 11th, is a body of work I’m really proud of. It will be the first in a series of EP releases that focus on forward-thinking breakbeat focused dark and deep sounds that are intentionally disconnected from the popular commercial sounds dominating the DNB scene at the moment. The intention is to create a unique sound through samples of found sounds, field recordings, and old-school traditional drum sample chops, combined with deep atmospherics and modern synths & sound design. The three song EP includes the songs “The Sound”, “Telemetry”, and “Zero Sum”, each touching on a different style but highlighting the distinctive Mischief & Reason sound.
The Geometry EP is available at our Bandcamp site, which is by far the most direct and effective way to support any artist today. A few sales on Bandcamp will literally provide any artist more than tens of thousands of streams on spotify or other platforms. The new EP and our entire discography can be found at: https://mischiefandreason.bandcamp.com. Limited edition lathe-cut vinyl of this release will be coming soon as well.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Developing a unique sound is, in my opinion, the most important thing for artists trying to make an impact in today’s saturated markets. For me, breakbeat culture, hip-hop, and old kung-fu movies provided a fertile ground to create a sound of my own, which was then fine tuned by years and years of practice, and thousands of hours of repetition in production, mixing, and DJing.
I started out in electronic music production trying to mirror production by DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, and jungle artists like the Jungle Sky and Rawkuts rosters based out of NYC in the late 90’s. This drive, combined with a love of audio production and recording history, led to a 30+ year love affair with audio engineering, recording and mixing, in addition to studies in acoustics, signal processing, and live sound.
To me, understanding how to capture sounds at the source, and the importance of starting with quality material is the foundation of music production. I was blessed to know an engineer at a large studio in Atlanta which provided me a chance to intern there, and at the time coming from a punk rock, DIY ethos, I thought that the attention to minute details and focus on quality in all areas of production was overkill – until I realized this was a means to creating true art.
My advice to anyone starting out in the music business is to make what feels true to yourself, and is truly art to you. There is so much noise out there, and so much sameness and drive to meet social media numbers. But this is not where true artistry lies, and not what will build an audience that will keep coming back for more. Be true to your sound, and yourself, and be open to being vulnerable and “not cool” at times, and your honesty and originality will shine through.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
In today’s world, where anyone can type a prompt into Chat-GPT or Claude and easily fashion themselves as an expert in all areas, I think it’s best to really lean into the areas that we truly know and feel passionate about. In this age of knowledge at the touch of a button, curation, true effortless style, and artistic intuition will be the most valuable assets.
Machines can emulate different genres of music, they can emulate different types of illustration, but they can’t emulate true creativity – this will always be a human pursuit, and in the coming years true originality and creativity will come back to the forefront as a highly regarded skill.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mischiefandreason.com
- Instagram: @m_r_dnb
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Mischief-Reason-61556630647548/
- Twitter: @m_r_dnb
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@m_r_dnb
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/m-r-dnb
- Other: https://mischiefandreason.bandcamp.com
