Michael Television

Mikee started his early musical interests listening to mixtapes on an old TV/VHS/Cassette hybrid device in his bedroom and his first immediate love was Pop Will Eat Itself’s ‘This Is The Day, This Is The Hour, This is …This’ - the thumpy, saturated plunderphonics of the opening track had him instantly hooked on sampling, re-sampling and smashed up tape-to-tape transfer.

Having absolutely no musical instrument experience, but an interest in recording, he started with some basic garage band musings with college friends before immediately moving onto recording and resampling. He enjoyed DJ-ing in the mean time and making up mix-tapes for loved ones and friends. For a while there was a lot of playing with a Pentium 1 and music software, making demoes on a Tascam 4 track before his first big purchase at the time, a Boss BR-8; a digital 8 track that committed tracks to zip drive. This device is where the first Interloper tracks were created and with a Zoom RythmTrak, the first real drum patterns were created and recorded alongside samples and bass guitar, which Mikee was learning and to this day continues to play poorly. As a fan of hip-hop, the outlines of demoes were created as drum, bass and vocals.

It was around 2000’s when Mikee met Misc, and with a keen interest in similar bands and making music, they started collaborating and working together, alongside Mikee’s housemate, Felix and the band were born as a unit, cobbling together ideas into tracks. The general spirit of the band was not taking itself too seriously, open to experimentation and a ‘no one way is the right way’ attitude to music, allowing them to sample anything and try anything to make a track. They played a number of gigs worked on tracks, got together and generally just shared an enthusiasm for trial and error approach to the music.

There was a hiatus where the band didn’t produce any Interloper tracks and Mikee made chiptune under the obvious moniker of Michael Television and was involved in the chiptune scene with two sites, noichan and ohmnohmnohm.

In 2024, they dusted off some old hard drives and said ‘shall we make more Interloper tracks?’ and that’s exactly what is happening right now.