Robert Miles

Italian dream-house producer Robert Miles catapulted from near-anonymity to worldwide acclaim in 1996 after unleashing the massive instrumental single “Children.” Born Roberto Concina in 1969 to a military household then posted in Switzerland, he waited until age ten before relocating with his family to the northern Italian town of Fagagna. Immersed from childhood in the American soul records of the 1970s, he took up piano during adolescence and, at thirteen, began spinning records at neighborhood house parties. By the close of the 1980s he was performing weekly hardcore-trance sets at clubs around Venice under the alias Robert Milani, later shortening the name to Miles to evoke the artistic path ahead. Soon afterward he assembled a modest home studio built around a sampler, mixer, keyboard, and 32-track digital recorder, and he started accepting production assignments for the Italian imprint Metromaxx.

The track “Children” drew its emotional spark from photographs his father had taken while stationed in war-ravaged Yugoslavia; Miles was further moved by the rising death toll within Italy’s rave scene, prompting him to craft the spare, piano-led instrumental at very low cost. First released in 1994, the single gradually conquered European airwaves, reaching number one in Germany, France, Holland, and Belgium and finishing the year as the continent’s biggest-selling single; in the United States it climbed just outside the Top 20.

Following the release of its successor, “Fable,” Miles delivered his first album, Dreamland, accompanied shortly thereafter by the companion remix collection Dreamland II. He returned in 1997 with 23 AM. Four years later came Organik, which included guest contributions from Bill Laswell, Trilok Gurtu, and Talvin Singh. The double-disc Organik Remixes appeared in 2003, followed in 2004 by the joint project Miles_Gurtu with Gurtu and, in 2011, by the album Th1rt3en. Robert Miles passed away in Ibiza during May 2017 after a brief struggle with cancer; he was forty-seven.