It is EMI’s post-Grammy party in Los Angeles and Miguel Migs is spinning his sweet deep house vibes for the attending glitterati. Actors Alyssa Milano, Tara Reid and Simon Rex are shaking it; Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Bonnie Raitt and Beck are grooving up a storm. But the scene, in all its official glitz, doesn’t overly impress Migs.

“A party like that, the music’s a bit more background,” he observes. “It’s more of a schmooze/cocktail fest, see who’s around to nudge your friend and go, ‘Whoa, there’s so-and-so.’ I’m thankful to be able to do stuff like that, but I’m definitely more about the places that really love the music. If you want to call them deep-house connoisseurs, that’s my favorite place to play, for crowds that really know the music.”

And for the house-music cognoscenti – especially those leaning toward the more soulful side – Miguel Migs is a name that earns deep respect. He got his start in 1997 and quickly became the flagship DJ/producer for the upstart Naked Music, which established itself strongly through the mix-CD comps, Nude Dimensions, Carte Blanche and Bare Essentials. Now distributed by Astralwerks, Naked has launched its latest series, Nude Tempo, the first volume mixed by Migs. Very much along the same lines as the Nude Dimensions series, Nude Tempo One focuses on the deepest house and includes gorgeous tracks from the likes of Blue Six (Basti & Vincenzo’s remix of “Love Yourself”), Kerri Chandler (“Atmospheric Beats”) and Migs himself (dub version of “You Bring Me Up”). A good representation of what Migs would play out, Nude Tempo brings that vibe home from the club.

Says Migs: “I’m not necessarily a full, crowd-pleasing DJ. I don’t play commercial club hits. I like to play what I feel and that’s what’s in my crate.” In the club, Migs prefers three Technics turntables, two monitors, one CD player and any rotary mixer (Rane or Urei) that offers separate extension EQs, which he can push in a large room. “I keep it diverse,” he says. “But whether it’s vocal, instrumental, track-y, very percussive, broken-beat or whatever, it’s always got to be soulful and have some type of emotional content into it for me to want to play it.”

Using his own name for more dancefloor-oriented tracks and the Petalpusher moniker for song-oriented material, Migs approaches his original productions with the same eclectic bent of his DJ sets. Coming from a more traditional musical background that includes playing guitar in a band, Migs’ style of writing switches between old-fashioned organic to studio-based electronic, but his productions are ultra-modern.

Migs doesn’t operate from a fully realized home studio, as he lives in space-cramped San Francisco. But his home operation does include a Macintosh G4 Powerbook loaded with Logic Audio, an Ensoniq MR61 synth workstation, a Roland JV1080 synth module and an E-Mu Proteus 2000 sound module. After writing the progressions and lyrics for his tunes, he seeks completion at another studio that includes Clavia Nord Lead synth, Korg Triton and Trinity workstations and a Novation Bass Station.

“I really love the Korg Triton,” Migs enthuses. “It’s such a great overall unit as far as diversity. There’s not much that compares. You have a lot of really nice synths, keypads and a lot of really good bass patches, even some really good drum sounds, some expansion cards where you’re able to get bits and pieces for melodies. It’s a very flavorful unit. That and the [Roland] JV-1080 or 2080, with the expansion cards in them, are really solid, too. Its specialty is not one particular area. The Nord is such a great analog unit, you can tweak it in so many different ways.”

The basics of his music, he says, still rely on the tried and true methods of his traditional background. “I definitely like simplicity,” he says. “There’s something about sitting down with a guitar and writing songs that I still really appreciate. [But] when I’m on the plane on long trips I can still create music on a laptop. You’re very limited because I don’t bring a full keyboard with me. I’m literally producing a lot of the stuff in the laptop, more sample-based. It can be cool because it pushes you and challenges you to use the limited stuff that you have possible to you.”

Not wanting to pigeonhole his work into a certain style or label, Migs has also produced music for Yoshitoshi, NRK, Large, and OM Records, plus he’s done remixes for projects on Guidance and Defected. Additionally, his Petalpusher artist full-length is completed and ready for release. That project, he says, has a strong possibility of being translated completely live. “I’d love to play live again – it’s definitely something I miss,” Migs muses. “Locking with other musicians onstage and creating something spontaneously, taking it in another direction, but yet being all totally on the same page with what’s going on onstage, is a really good feeling. It’s a feeling you can’t really get from many other things.”

– Lily Moayeri