Mr. Mitch, aka Miles Mitchell, first emerged from the London instrumental grime scene that grew around Boxed, the club night he co-founded in the early 2010s. To pin his sound down as grime would be inaccurate though, seeing as it touches on influences from ambient, minimal club music and beyond.
Mitchell released his first album as Mr. Mitch, Parallel Memories, on influential electronic label Planet Mu in 2014. In the 10 years since, he’s released a string of acclaimed albums and EPs that have joined the dots between grime and hip-hop instrumentals and leftfield electronics, picking up support from Thom Yorke and working with MCs like Skepta and P Money along the way.
Following a few years focusing on his dancefloor-adjacent alias DJ Cuddles, as well as teaching production, Mitchell has recently returned with his fourth Mr. Mitch album, The Lost Boy. We sat down with him in London to talk about his creative process, and see how he revives half-finished projects and forgotten ideas to inspire finished tracks.
“I've got hundreds if not 1000s of tracks that I've started over the years,” Mitchell explains. “I'll kind of go back into them at different points and give new ideas to them over time. I think it's a really nice way to work, because you're always bringing a new part of yourself to it. You've experienced things throughout that time.
"When creating art, you need to bring your life experience into it."
“I think, when creating art, you kind of need to bring your life experience into it. Sometimes you can get to a certain point where a track is just as far as it can go, based on where you are in your life. But then you come back to it at a different time with a different perspective, and you can just bring something new.”
In our video session, Mitchell explores some of his old saved Logic projects, filtering through various ideas until he finds elements that could inspire him to build something new around.
“It's something I've done a lot in my new album, The Lost Boy,” he tells us. “There are some tracks on there that were made over the course of the last few years in different places at different times. They started off in completely different lives and turned out something fresh.”
What’s interesting is that Mitchell's saved projects contain multiple versions of ideas, which aren’t necessarily designed to go together. There are muted variations on basslines, vocal experiments and different drum patterns, each representing a different iteration of an idea.
“I kind of throw in loads of ideas and then I'll mute them,” he explains. “I never really delete stuff. That’s because when I come back to a project I often actually prefer the original idea I had.
“There's some of the tracks on my new album, one of them in particular, that two years ago I thought needed something else to make it a finished track,” he continues. “Then I opened it again this year, and I was like, this is done. This is the finished track. It didn't really need anything added to it.”
For Mitchell, stepping away from an idea and giving it time to rest isn’t so much a problem, as an important part of the process.
“I think it all comes down to where your head is at the time of making music. You could be in a state where you're just getting ideas out, and it's just all flowing. And then you get to a point where you’re like, how do I finish this? What does it need? And it's like, you don't have to have those answers straight away.
“I think quite often, you ruin the track because you're trying to force those answers out. I'm a big fan of shutting it down, coming back again when you've forgotten about it. I've got so many projects that I've forgotten about. Some of them, I’ll open and, yeah, it’s still bad, I'll close it. But then there might be some that it's like, ‘oh, this is incredible – why didn't I continue this?’”
Whether he finishes tracks in a single sitting, or over the course of months or years, getting it across the finish line is about capturing the right moment and mindset for the idea.
“It's just everything, all of you, everything that you've learned about making music, just seems to click at the right time,” he explains. “It just comes out, and it feels like an accident, but it's just because you have the ability to do it.”
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.
