Harvey McKay - Promo Mix - 2008

Biography of Harvey McKay

Harvey McKay is one of a school of new young artists to come out from Glasgow’s thriving underground club circuit. Music runs through Harvey’s blood. With a drummer for a father he was constantly exposed to rhythm even in his days in the womb and eventually began his own exploits in primary school at the age of 10. While other kids were busy learning Maths and English, Harvey was cutting about with all the wrong crowds and learning how to mix on his first decks. It eventually paid off when he earned his first residency in Tin Pin Alley at the less-than-legal age of 16. Since then his DJing career has been on the up, touring with Smirnoff Ice and M8 Magazine before he finally made the decision to turn his ear to production.

Making his own music came naturally to Harvey, who uses a set-up of Logic, Cubase, Ableton and Reason to compose his work. He was quickly picked up by Jon Virtue and had his first release on Virtue’s Artificial Silence label. Since then he has gone on to release on Perc Trax, Cubism, and now Soma. His influences range between Alex Under, Mark Romboy, James Holden and Soma label-bosses Slam. Ironically enough one of Harvey’s first attempts at production was attempting to recreate the sounds he heard on Slam’s Alien Radio album, in particular the deep techy bass frequencies.

His sound now is clean and crisp, but undoubtedly dancefloor-friendly. Often described as minimal, Harvey avoids this tag. Although his sounds and textures used are distinctly minimal in nature, Harvey deliberately swerves the minimal scene, choosing instead to pad his tracks right out to their fullest, falling somewhere in between techno and minimal in a genre that can only be described as minimal-not-minimal.

The skeletal clicks and beeps are all there but they’re mixed with some perfectly deep basslines, glitchy melodies, chunky kicks and terse snares, combining to a floor-shattering effect. These are all glued together by Harvey’s masterful touch and his keen knowledge for how to drive the floor into a frenzy. Drop any one of his productions at peaktime and the crowd will go off the hook.