Interview: Mella Dee

Mella Dee's UK Minimal Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are out now on vinyl via The Vinyl Factory.

Ryan Aitchison has spent years playing to crowds of thousands. Now, the Doncaster producer and DJ, better known as Mella Dee, is deliberately making himself a little harder to find.

Emerging from the UK bassline scene in the mid-2010s, Mella Dee's profile blew up with "Techno Disco Tool", a 2017 club staple that sampled Sister Sledge's "Pretty Baby" and was played worldwide by the likes of Annie Mac, Pete Tong, Bonobo, Floating Points and more.

Ultimately certified silver, the track propelled him into headline slots, and his imprint at the time, Warehouse Music, won Best Breakthrough Label at DJ Mag's Best of British 2017 awards. "I ended up on bigger stages and doing bigger shows, in a more commercial-leaning world," Aitchison says of the subsequent years.

"It just never really felt comfortable for me. I never felt at home there."

‍

It's a sentiment that can be heard increasingly often across dance music. Many DJs, producers and fans alike want to pull back towards smaller rooms and sweaty basements, seeking community beyond faceless streams and commercial spectacle. While plenty talk about feeling alienated from the world they find themselves in, Aitchison's solution is to move away from it to work out what he really wants.

"I just decided, I don't care about all this," he continues. "I spent a lot of time readjusting where I want to be, starting to play the parties I wanna play and be able to play the sound I wanna play."

His answer was to create Nothing Stays The Same, a new imprint, which launches with two debut EPs, UK Minimal Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, out now on vinyl via The Vinyl Factory.

The name UK minimal functions as something of a manifesto for this change, and Aitchison is careful about how he defines it. While minimal tends to bring to mind the raw sounds of '90s Detroit, here the sound is firmly wedded to his home country. "It just means filtering in different parts of UK music," he explains. "The word 'minimal' to me doesn't mean it's gotta be stark. It just means that it's a refined version of all these different flavours of UK sound together."

Mella Dee at The Vinyl Factory in Hayes, London

Those flavours go all the way back to his childhood. Growing up in South Yorkshire, Aitchison absorbed his dad's Northern Soul records and his sister's happy hardcore tapes. Getting into skateboarding at 12 opened him up to Sheffield's club scene, and his first real love became bassline, the heavy, dubbed-out sound that soundtracked every rave in Doncaster.

"I'm from where bassline sort of became a thing," he says. "Going to Niche and playing bassline every week, going to different bassline nights. Bass is a driving force of it."

From there, soundsystem culture got under his skin and shaped how he intends for his music to be heard to this day. "Times at Leeds West Indian Centre listening to Mala and DMZ playing on a dub sound system, in the backroom listening to drum and bass on Sweet Potato Sound System," he recalls.

"These UK sounds are being played on dub sound systems. I think that just leans into the way that I think about music." With his deep nostalgia for the palpable community energy of British soundsystems, it makes sense that he's seeking to recapture it now with these new EPs.

UK Minimal Vol. 1 came together in the direct aftermath of a 30-hour SlapFunk party at BRET, and that energy runs throughout — relentless and body-focused, designed for the kind of night where everyone's locked in and no one wants to go home.

‍Vol. 2 pushes deeper into dub territory. "I took that exploration further and started honing in on the idea," he says. "It touches on my dub influences more. I really started to refine the sort of basslines I wanted to produce." Where the first volume is direct, the second is atmospheric, spacious and dubbed-out, built for the best soundsystem you can find.

‍

The label name captures exactly where his head is at. "The initial idea was just me drawing a line with what's come before," he says. "It's always forward. You've always gotta be moving forward." For Aitchison, forward doesn't mean bigger, however. "The aim is for me to make club music. I don't care about huge reactions or loads of streams. I just care about good times, good music. I come from the dancefloor as a raver, and that's number one in dance music for me."

Pressing to vinyl felt like a natural extension of that desire for more intentional music, and it serves a practical purpose in his sets too. "It's so easy if you're just buying digital music — everything's just £1.50 or whatever," he says.

"You can end up just having so much music, you don't even know what each record is. You're looking through and you're a bit lost. The actual touch of a record when you're looking through. There's this instant sort of feeling, that spark when you see a record. You know what that record sounds like. You are so much more engaged with what you're doing."

A recent visit to The Vinyl Factory's pressing plant in Hayes to watch his records being made clearly left its mark. Aitchison talks about the experience with the kind of unguarded enthusiasm that's hard not to find infectious. "There's a quote from Alan Moore where he speaks about art being magic and artists being magicians, and I'm into all that stuff," he says.

"You start cutting masters, and you see the process of a record being born and being actually made. To hold it in my hand and be like, right, this is something that's come from my creation, then a team of people worked together, and now it's real."

Nothing Stays The Same will eventually extend beyond Aitchison's own records, with forthcoming releases from Huw Shipps and Alexandria in the pipeline alongside some artists from Manchester. Vol. 3, completing the UK Minimal trilogy, is set for later this year.

Despite all his plans and ideas, Mella Dee doesn't claim to be a genius or to have it all worked out, and that makes for a refreshing change in dance music's perpetual, definitive hype machine.

"The way that I see things is you don't know anything. Do you know what I mean?" he says. "I know nothing about music. Nothing stays the same because if you are always open-minded, you're always gonna learn something. Just bear with me."

Mella Dee's UK Minimal Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are out now on Nothing Stays The Same. Order them on vinyl via The Vinyl Factory.