Mike Huckaby is at the controls for FACT mix 192. And what a mix it is.

“I’m just vibing, man,” he told us over e-mail. “I’m just going off of a lot of my experiences that I’ve accumulated from DJing, clubbing, the Music Institute in Detroit, the Shelter in NYC, touring, and selling records. So this mix is another set of classics from the vaults of Mike Huckaby…”

Yes, Huckaby has real pedigree. He worked for many years behind the counter at the Record Time store in Roseville, releasing his first 12″ on colleague Rick Wade’s Harmonie Park imprint in 1995, the aptly named Deep Transportation Vol.1. Its four tracks were rooted in the Chicago house tradition, but their shading and sense of space owed a great deal to Motor City techno and its P-funk ancestry, its percussive swing a great deal to jazz – it’s no surprise that Huckaby today counts not just Larry Heard, George Clinton, Stevie Wonder among his heroes, but also Sun Ra. “Larry Heard is the sole creator of deep house, and Sun Ra possesses the entire realm of all possibilities within jazz,” he asserts. ”Jazz is the umbrella under which deep house resides.”

Huckaby released a second volume of Deep Transportation on Harmonie Park in 1996. Both records have since become part of the deep house canon, something which has come as no surprise to Huckaby, who was determined from the outset to make music that was future-proof.

“We made sure that our first releases behind our names would last, and stand the test of time.”

“We tested out our early productions in the record store religiously,” he recalls. ”We would test our tracks out on the system, while people were shopping, just to see if we could get someone to look up and ask us what was playing.  That’s one of the reasons why those EPs are considered classics, and are very rare to this day.  We made sure that our first releases behind our names would last, and stand the test of time.”

Another reason that Huckaby’s productions sound eternally fresh is that he’s not in the business of pastiche. Though he’s quick to express his debt to Heard, Ra et al, he doesn’t live in the past. Indeed, when it comes to music-making technology, Huckaby is almost aggressively forward-looking, always on the look-out for interesting new equipment and keen to master it. He’s generous with his knowledge too: he’s taught students at the Youthville centre in Detroit for the best part of 4 years, coaching them in Ableton Live, Reaktor and other music production technologies.

Since those early Harmonie Park 12″s, Huckaby hasn’t exactly flooded the market with releases, working instead on honing his skills, and remixing the likes of Pole, Vladislav Delay and Norm Talley. His process-driven way of working reached a conceptual apogee on 2007′s My Life With The Wave: an EP recorded using solely the legendary Waldorf Wave keyboard. “I challenged myself to see if i could do it. Now I feel like a boxer who has trained with ankle weights and removed them on fight night.” Huckaby being Huckaby, he also released a limited edition Waldorf sample CD for other producers to work from.

“I feel like a boxer who has trained with ankle weights and removed them on fight night.”

Having recently contributed a track (‘Mathematics From The Jazz Republic’) to a split EP release with Jose Rico on Downbeat, Huckaby is about to embark on a European tour. At Berlin’s Farbfernseher on October 14 he’ll be playing a Sun Ra classics set as well as special reel-to-reel edits set; at the Unsound festival in Krakow on October 22 he tops an incredible bill at Klub Fabryka that also numbers Shackleton, Kyle Hall, Actress and Raime. There are further shows planned for Holland, Croatia and Russia. and the final stop of the tour is Plex’s 4th Birthday Party at London’s Corsica Studios.

Huckaby’s FACT mix is, of course, masterful – rooted in classic house but wild, even a little unhinged at times, with a rare energy and sense of funk that works in tandem with, rather than counter to, its immersive depth. He’s asked us to delay posting a tracklist for one week, to test your knowledge and get you track-spotting [tracklist now below]. Once a record store guy, always a record store guy, eh?

See the next page for an illuminating Q&A with Mike which touches on his future projects, formative influences and frustration with groupie culture: “The definition of a groupie is praising or being entertained by another artist while he is making money doing what you want to do, while you’re talking shit, and not working as hard as he is.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.