Adam X - Studio B - New York City US - May 2008

Biography of Adam X

Adam X aka Adam Mitchell - In his DJ performances and track production, Adam X's sound is best described as hard, EBM and industrial inspired dance-floor techno & electro. Adam X penetrates, educates and infuses his audience with a real energy, often drawing from dark & sexual themes, through the mastery of the electronic music medium he has gained from a prolific career. Adam got started in NYC in the early '90s -an era of a burgeoning grass-roots music and club culture, which he himself had contributed to.

Following teenage years of aerosol art, underground club music & electronic creativity in the late 80s, Adam X & his brother Frankie Bones found their way to techno, a new and emerging genre. It was in April 1990 that Adam and Frankie founded the Sonic Groove label & retail outlet for electronic dance music, which has since served as a vehicle for publishing music and has been a staple for DJs globally & especially on the East Coast.

Around this time Adam X and his brother also hosted a series of underground warehouse events, the most famous of which are the legendary 'Storm Raves,' which featured up and coming artists such as Sven Vath, Richie Hawtin, Damon Wild and Lenny Dee. From their widespread DJ performances, support and promotion of fellow artists & contributions to live music and club culture, Adam X and Frankie Bones have become historic icons in techno and electronic music. It is often said that a techno event in the US cannot be considered 'official' without the presence of one of these two people in its line-up. In his career, Adam X has performed alongside artists such as Aphex Twin, Surgeon & Joey Beltram, and lately, the likes of Terence Fixmer/Douglas Mccarthy and Andrew Weatherall.

He's performed at thousands of events, raves and club nights globally including Mayday, Love Parade, DEMF, and Fabric. Adam's list of solo commercial releases and collaborative projects on CD and vinyl is equally impressive. A few of the many labels Adam has released music under are Wax Trax-TVT (Mastermix Series Vol. 2), Instinct Records (Adam X “On the 1 and 2”), Oliver Chesler's Things To Come Label (Sensory Deprivation) and many projects on his own aforementioned label, Sonic Groove. From his start in 1990, Adam has always stayed on the cutting edge of electronic music. Never restricting himself to just one particular style of techno, Adam’s continuously evolving sound has progressed from the darker moods of early Belgian, German, UK, and Detroit techno, to a harder, more uptempo and futuristic acid sound (often performed live with former partner Jimmy Crash).

By the time the acid sound had reached its peak in popularity in 1994, Adam had already moved on to a more stripped-down, minimal approach in his DJing and productions. Sometime around the year 2000, Adam was finding himself bored of the music coming out and critical of the direction that techno music was taking. Always anxious to discover sounds he’s never heard before, Adam truly realised what he’d been in search of through an ironic twist of fate that was perfectly timed: a style of music from a totally different music scene than he was used to that perfectly suited his personality and frame of mind – EBM, Powernoise and Industrial. From that point on, Adam’s mission is about bridging the gap between Industrial and Techno and crossing the boundaries between these two parallel scenes of music. Adam currently has a chameleonic approach to his artistry, playing at Industrial events like Maschinenfest in Germany, to playing famous techno clubs the next night like Rex Club in Paris. His own productions also combine the two genres, containing elements of both in a single track. From haunting minimal loops and deep, sexy basslines, to the pounding industrial teknoid beats that have become his trademark, Adam X's material reaches a deep and subconscious part of the listener, often evoking an emotional response which is especially visible on the dance-floor. Fifteen years in, Adam’s quest of producing, DJing, and releasing music has the same ideology as day one, that ideology being to continually break new boundaries within electronic music.