Hive

Hive first drew notice in underground circles while still in high school, serving as guitarist for the Washington D.C. outfit Backlash. Following his relocation to Los Angeles in 1992, he shifted away from hardcore punk and began crafting drum'n'bass-infused hip-hop productions. Five years of local DJ work and hip-hop projects preceded his debut album, Working With Sound, which appeared in 1997 on the Mandala Recordings imprint he founded. Issued under his given name Michael Petrie, the record quickly sold through its initial run of five hundred copies and earned underground praise on both coasts for its jazz-inflected pieces overlaid with heavy drum, bass, and jungle textures. A bidding war among major labels erupted the next year, culminating in a deal with London Recordings. That same year Hive unveiled Devious Methods, whose stark, apocalyptic tone drew from William Cooper’s conspiracy treatise Behold a Pale Horse as well as UFO lore. The album’s themes of a mistrustful nation and humanity’s darker impulses remained rooted in his established blend of jazz, hip-hop, and jungle, now laced with echoes of his earlier punk years. Those roots surface most plainly on the single “Ultra Sonic Sound,” which incorporates a sample from the Bad Brains track “Re-Ignition.” A year afterward he issued the follow-up full-length Working With Sound in 1999, then scattered several singles before returning in 2002 with the eighteen-track mix album Bedlam, released via Rockwell.