Maya Jane Coles

What a year 2011 was for Maya Jane Coles. Voted ‘Producer of the Year 2011′ by DJ Mag, named ‘Best Breakthrough DJ 2011′ by Mixmag, debuting at No. 9 on the Resident Advisor ’2011 DJ Poll’, scooping ‘Best Newcomer 2011′ at the Ibiza DJ Awards 2011, many magazine covers and the likes of Anja Schneider, Ellen Allien, Damon Alburn and Tricky all queuing up to offer their praise.

Well that was 2011 and this is most definitely 2012 where the bar is set to be raised once more for this rather unique 24-year old, British/Japanese producer; with Maya already scheduled to dj in over 20 countries in the first 6 months alone, some interesting release projects to be announced, some huge remixes and of course – the big one, the release of Maya’s debut album. This is the story so far…

An eclectic daughter of similarly eclectic parents; Maya was surrounded by a mixture of sounds from Dub to Punk to Soul and Jazz to World to Classical music around the house. Having learnt to play a few instruments and started to songwriter, production felt like the natural next step.

First producing hip-hop at 15; Maya was determined that she should be able to learn the skills to realise her own vision at every part of the process from production to performance. That’s why now, on a typical Maya Jane Coles record, Maya will have written, produced, engineered, arranged, mixed and performed every element of the track; sometimes she even vocals and designs the sleeve artwork too!

Driven by a constant urge to push herself and evolve; Maya migrated to dubbier sounds and eventually to drum’n'bass around 16; before a huge water shed moment in her life, Maya experienced good underground house! As a result, Maya started on her current journey as a house producer releasing on labels such as Dogmatik and Loco Supreme as well as chalking up DJ gigs at events like the BBC Electric Proms, Sonar and Bestival along the way.

Maya then created her live dub-electronica hybrid project, ‘She Is Danger’ alongside vocalist Lena Cullen. The band played at gigs from the world largest fetish club Torture Garden through to opening for The Orb with their tracks played everywhere from Radio 1 through to KCRW and Per Se.

In particular, She is Danger received a lot of critical and fan attention for their remixes of artists from Gorillaz to Groove Armada with an acclaimed dubby reworking of Massive Attack’s ‘Girl, I Love You’ included on the band’s ‘Heliogland:Deluxe’ album; picking up plaudits such, RCRDLBL ‘Track of the Day’, Qmagazine ‘track of the day’ and ‘Daily Download’ on NME.com and smashing the Hypemachine top 10 multiple times.