Occult jam

SCARY GROOVY Ghostly International’s Michna unveils a collection of rhythmically diverse beats.

“I’ve started buying a lot of ’80s freestyle stuff, and I was wondering how you think New York artists who were making that music are different from the South Florida people?” Adrian Michna asks as soon as he picks up the phone for his interview. “Like, how do Nuance and Hanson & Davis compare to Will to Power and Stevie B?” Never mind that we’re the ones who are supposed to be asking the questions—the query illustrates the 30-year-old’s inquisitiveness, a trait that serves him well on his debut solo album, Magic Monday. Michna, who goes by his last name only (he often spins under the Egg Foo Young moniker as well), celebrates the album’s release on Friday 10, when he deejays at the Lose Your Shit party at 12-Turns-13.

The new album is an exploration of sorts, with its melodic, glistening swirl of sounds ebbing and flowing through everything from electro and glitchy IDM to spaghetti-Western soundtracks and horn-fueled funk. It’s a fully instrumental affair, save for the occasional needle-drop snippet. (“A needle drop is basically adding in an audio blip off a record just by dropping the needle on the record for a second,” he explains.) It’s a sound that’s not far removed from the work Michna was doing from the late ’90s till 2005, when the South Carolina–born, Westchester County–bred producer was living in Miami and toiling as a member of Secret Frequency Crew with partners Matthew Brown and Matt Friedman. Secret Frequency Crew’s music, in turn, sounded a bit like a funkier version of the electronic down-tempo haze being released by a certain Scottish duo.

“We sounded a lot like Boards of Canada, sometimes,” Michna, who now lives in NYC, admits. “We were always afraid that people would nail us as just another version of them, so we would never mention them when talking about our music. But we did make that kind of sound, and then we’d just add a lot of stuff, like horns, on top.”

Derivative or not, the band had friends in high places—Diplo, for one. A fan of Secret Frequency Crew, he tapped Michna for production work on “Way More,” off of 2003’s Florida album. “I think he was a little worried about having some Florida cred,” Michna says. “He has that whole territorial thing going on, so he wanted to get some Miami kids involved with the album to add some bass or whatever.”

Another fan was Sam Valenti IV—the head honcho of Magic Monday’s label, Ghostly International—who put the Crew’s Forest of the Echo Downs album on his “Best of 2004” list. “They had a very evocative way of fusing genres,” Valenti says, “and it really wasn’t like anything else that was going on at the time. I met Adrian sometime after that, and I asked him if he could give me any music. He ended up getting me this great body of material that he had made, and I realized that he would be a great fit for the label.”

Though Ghostly has a wide-ranging ethos, many of the label’s artists—Matthew Dear, Solvent and Dabrye among them—have a sound, like Michna’s, which merges sometimes-gritty sounds with razor-sharp, pristine production. “I can use dirty sources, like a really crappy mike, and I think that’s where some of the grit comes in,” Michna says. “But editwise, I’m pretty precise, and often I wish I wasn’t. Listen to Madlib; that music sounds like it’s falling apart, which makes it sound great. I think I need someone to teach me to be sloppy.” Next up: a performance with a full band at a Ghostly International showcase at (Le) Poisson Rouge on October 25. “We’ll have a drummer, sax player, of course a trombone…plus a VJ and a light show and a laser show. I didn’t want to do anything half-assed, so we’re really going for it. We’ll be playing the album’s songs, but lots of different versions. Not too different, though—we don’t jam like the Grateful Dead or anything. At least, not yet.”

Michna deejays at Lose Your Shit Fri 10.