They passed a laptop back and forth all evening: MPH and Skrillex made their first track together

MPH and Skrillex have released Mirage, their first work together. The track is out on Disorder/Capitol Records, and the Briton first aired it back in May at EDC in Las Vegas.

The release was covered by Beatportal.

At its base is a sample of "Shelly Ann", the 1996 dancehall hit by the Jamaican Red Rat. Over it the pair laid drums, bass, tilted vocal chops and a buoyant synth line.

"Skrillex would do some bits and pass the laptop to me. I'd do some bits and, pretty soon, we'd married our sounds together," MPH recalled.

One evening for the whole track

By the musician's account, "Mirage" came into focus in a single afternoon: the two simply ping-ponged ideas until a whole track fell out of it. In club music that is not so rare — what is rare is for a first collaboration between artists from different scenes to arrive that way.

MPH works mostly in UK garage; Skrillex came from an entirely different side of electronic music. "Mirage" sits exactly between them: the Briton's rhythm, the American's density, and a Jamaican voice from the nineties as the common denominator.

Where he is taking it

This autumn MPH sets off on the biggest tour of his career: it opens on 19 September in Copenhagen, then North America — Portland, Denver, Toronto and New York. Before that the track will sound at CRSSD Festival, and on 25 September MPH appears among the first announced speakers at Beatport Connect in Los Angeles.

Airing a track at a major festival four months before release is club music's usual test: if it holds a stadium stage, it holds. "Mirage" passed that test back in May and only reached the platforms in August.

As reported earlier by ONE//FM, Claptone took a similar route this week — his "Doing The Disco" is also built around somebody else's record, in that case a disco classic.