After garnering international critical acclaim and selling over 14 million records worldwide, experimental electronic music artist Robert Miles has returned with his new album Th1rt3en, scheduled for US release in February 2011 through his own indie label, S:alt Records. Implementing a progressive blend of electronica, alternative rock, and jazz compositions the album’s reflective experimentations break new ground and are a sonic leap forward from Miles’s previously critically acclaimed predecessors, Organik and Miles_Gurtu. Guest artists on Th1rt3en include Robert Fripp (King Crimson), Dave Okumu (The Invisible), Mike Patto and John Thorne (Lamb).
Th1rt3en weaves keyboard atmospherics and percussive polyrhythm’s into a full length guaranteed to rub shoulders with the ambient considerations of past greats like Vangelis, Pink Floyd and Aphrodite’s Child.
His career was enhanced by a deal with BMG and the release of his debut Dreamland, an album that racked up 16 platinum and 12 gold discs in 21 countries around the world. Robert Miles is best known for his global 1996 dance hit “Children”, which shifted over 5 million units and charted in 19 countries.
With success came exposure, however, and Miles quickly became uneasy with the trappings of fame, feeling it detracted from the music, so much so that he requested to be represented on his releases as a black silhouette only, “to suggest the insignificance of image - music above everything else”. Not one to sell out then, Miles’s subsequent careers found him gradually redefining his artistic freedom, traveling the globe working with like minded artists - including early influence Bill Laswell, as well as contemporary composers such as Nitin Sawhney, Trilok Gurtu and Robert Fripp - winning a Brit Award and a World Music Award, having videos banned from MTV for being ’potentially disturbing’, sculpting sounds for over 100 TV and Film pieces as well as releasing a further three albums.
Th1rt3en, then, is the logical conclusion to Miles’s prior experience, a relentless combination of his unerring attitude to work and constantly progressive output. “I have been working hard since 1996 to define my sound, and learnt a great deal about life, music and the World. Now I feel ready to move to a new phase of my creative life” he says, and that phase coalesces on Th1rt3en into an album that evokes Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Squarepusher’s skits and John Carpenter’s lucid dreams, but, like any Miles release, rarely sounds exactly like anything else. Never one to shy away from taking chances, Miles's latest one looks set to be his most rewarding one yet.
Robert Miles will be DJing on Select dates through out 2011.
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