UNKLE

For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture. Known as much for his highly eclectic DJ sets as for his production work with UNKLE, Lavelle has been lauded as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator. 

Lavelle’s ability to craft genre-spanning mixes translated from to the club to the studio, where he created contributions to several iconic mix series. After releasing mixes for Tribal Gathering and Cream, he produced the inaugural FABRICLIVE CD, and has gone on to release four critically acclaimed mixes for Global Underground, the most recent of which went to the top of the Electronic charts on iTunes. Pete Tong lauded him as ‘one of the most gifted minds in music’ when introducing his ‘mind blowing’ Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. 

He continues to produce albums under his UNKLE moniker, working with a myriad cast of musical collaborators including Thom Yorke, Michael Kiwanuka, Mark Lanegan, Massive Attack, Brian Eno and Josh Homme. The most recent UNKLE album, The Road: Part II / Lost Highway topped the Billboard Electronic Album chart in 2019. With UNKLE, Lavelle has won the MPG Award for remixer of the year four times in the past seven years and has reworked tracks for artists as diverse as Beck, London Grammar, Radiohead and Wu-Tang Clan. 

Lavelle also curates multi-sensory art exhibitions with his highly innovative and hugely successful series ‘Daydreaming With…’ and ‘Beyond the Road’ the latter of which NME described as an ‘album you can walk around’. 

March 2021 saw UNKLE release the first in a two-part mixtape project, Rōnin I, which featured the singles ‘Do Yourself Some Good’ and ‘If We Don’t Make It’, both A Listed at BBC Radio 6Music. 2022 will see UNKLE release Rōnin II, the second part of the project.