Mike Mitchell Blaque Dynamite

Mike, a Dallas native, is a drummer whom you'd swear has five arms if you've ever seen him play. He was part of Stanley Clarke's band and had done a significant apprenticeship with Derrick Hodge. In November, 2019 we recorded Mike, his high school best friend - bassist Max Gerl, and a gaggle of other young musicians at a new Los Angeles analog studio called Space. That session is still unreleased but more on that later. Mike is so different from other drummers we wanted to showcase that difference in the starkest light possible. Solo drums. In Spring 2022, Mike and his drum technician/friend/cool drummer himself, Dom McKenzie, rolled into Reservoir Studios. Watching Mike that day was like watching fireworks not in the sense that fireworks can sound like drums, but in the sense that each performance he did in the studio was like the most impressive and intricate light show, with each one followed by awed silence and expectation of the next blast. Mike, a flamboyant character with an at-times absurd sense of humor is easy to mistake as stylish while missing his tremendous substance. These are brilliant songs and compositions, each driven by Mike's indefatigable mind and limbs. We couldn't cut any of his pieces so we made it a double LP. Cover idea by J. Cohn executed to perfection by Mandel and Nathan Golub.