Portugal-Bombay Express

>> DJ Miguel Graça does what he likes

by KRISTA

The story goes like this: local DJ Miguel Graça discovered his love for music at an early age, as a dutiful choirboy in his native Portugal. At age 10, his parents yanked him out of school and told him he was moving to Montreal.

"That was such a culture shock for me, because back than I didn't even speak English," he says. Graça remembers that at the sound of the lunch bell he would often leave the playground and just not go back for the afternoon session. "Ironically, the studio I have now is on the same street as my first school. I drove past it a while ago and suddenly realized why I used to skip so much. It looks like a jail."

Luckily, this harsh introduction to the Montreal way of life didn't thwart his talent. At age 17, he and two other boys (one of them being DJ Nikola T.) started an alternative rock/electronic band à la Depeche Mode, with Graça as the singer. "It was nothing to be proud of," he chuckles, "just a beginning."

As is the way with many a teenage rock 'n' roll dream, the three soon disbanded and Graça was left to his own devices... literally. "If you saw how I first started making tracks, you'd laugh. I had a sampler that could only take one sample at a time, an 8-track reel-to-reel and a sequencer. So basically I had to figure out the whole track before I did it. And if I screwed up, it was like, 'Shit, gotta start the whole thing over.'"

A year later he invested in his first real sampler (which he still uses). In '91 Graça released his first track on his own label, Front Records, which received radio play on London's KISS 100 FM. The same year, he teamed up with legendary Montreal DJ Robert Ouimet to form the group Red Light, with whom he won a Juno in 1994 for best dance record.

The tally of his releases, including his most recent Whatchalike EP, is a whopping 44. Whatchalike is on the Bombay Recordings label of DJs Patrick Dream and Nav, and it's paving the way for a forthcoming full-length, due for May.