Patrick Hawkins and Stu Maxwell are State Of Mind. They've been cooking up beats as a duo since 2004, and after being signed to CIA, they have had releases on Teebee's Subtitles Records, Futurebound's Viper label, Doc Scott's 31 Records, Simon Bassline Smith's Technique Recordings and many more. Along the way, they have also found time to introduce to the world their own label, State Of Mind Music. We spoke to them recently about their releases, their label and the upcoming tour.

 

Hey guys, how are you? It’s great to have you on tour in Europe – let us know some of the places you are going to reach.

Very well thank you! Well this time around we are coming over to Europe via Canada. So we play Calgary, Halifax, Vancouver & Toronto, then we are looking at Holland, Vienna, Paris, Czech Rep, Germany, Portugal and even Macedonia. Hopefully we will manage to squeeze the UK in there too.

 

What are you expecting from the tour? What have been some of your international highlights so far?

Well hopefully great parties! International highlights? Well I suppose we have had opportunities to go places we might not otherwise have gone. I mean, we've even played in Siberia and Fiji. Bit of a contrast there. We've also played some massive festivals right before and after some great artists like the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Major Lazer. Those moments are pretty special.

 

 

Tell us a bit more about the background of State Of Mind.

Well we've been around for a while now doing our thing. We released our first records in 2005 through CIA and Technique. We've done 3 albums now. Take Control through Universal/Uprising and Faster Than Light & Nil By Ear through SOM Music. That’s our label by the way. Before we became State of Mind we were just a couple of ravers both trying to make music. We kinda met up through after parties and stuff and decided to have a go making a tune together. It worked out quite well. In fact Urban Takeover wanted to sign it, so we decided to keep making more and here we are.

 

Give the readers a flavour of your past releases and the places they’ve appeared?

Label wise our bio is pretty long. We've done work for CIA, Technique, Shogun, Subtitles, Commercial Suicide, Viper, BSE, Obsessions, BC, Non-Vogue, Citrus, Critical, M-Atome, Subsonik, Uprising, Hostile, Advanced, Syntax, Eat-Brain and more. We've also been quite lucky with publishing. We have had our music in several games and even a global Sony advert.

 

 

How is State Of Mind Music going at the moment?

Actually better than ever. I know people moan about the state of record sales, but honestly I think it has affected the majors more than the indies. Our last series of releases have all done quite well so we are pretty pleased with that.

 

 

What releases have we got coming up to look forward to, both from yourselves and from the label?

Well we are starting to work on our 4th album now, so releases will slow down a little from us. We do have a few things coming up soon though. For instance a really heavy tune with Black Sun Empire on their new LP called 'Tripel'. For this album we are just writing like maniacs and some time next year we will say 'Ok that’s enough, lets pick the LP'. 

 

From the label we have a couple of exciting things. We have an EP from Borderline coming up next called 'The Borderline EP', then Trei's new album which is really dope. We have a few other things signed but haven’t quite decided what to do with them.

 

 

Related Links:

• State of Mind Announce Nil by Ear LP
• MC Lowqui Returns To Europe
• MC Lowqui Returns To Europe
• Podcast 36
• Issue 83

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