Robert Miles

Roberto Concina — known to the world as Robert Miles — was born on 3 November 1969 in Fleurier, Switzerland to Italian parents, and moved as a young boy to Fagagna, a small town in the Friuli region of northern Italy roughly 100 km from Venice. He worked the late-1980s Italian club circuit as a DJ before turning to production, and the track that defined his career began life in 1993 in his home studio: a piano-led, slow-tempo instrumental designed for the very specific job of ending DJ sets. "Children" was first released in January 1995 in Italy on Joe T. Vanelli's DBX label as part of the four-track Soundtracks EP — an initial pressing that moved only around 3,000 copies. Through Vanelli, Simon Berry of UK label Platipus Records heard the track in Miami and picked it up; Platipus issued the international 12-inch in November 1995, and the licence then passed to Deconstruction for the major-label release that hit #1 across more than a dozen countries in early 1996 and sold over five million copies worldwide. The debut album Dreamland (1996) — including "Fable" and the Maria Nayler vocal "One and One" — went on to global platinum status, and effectively founded the "dream trance" subgenre. Miles was explicit in interviews about the origin story. He pointed to two inspirations: photographs of child victims of the Balkans war his father brought back from an aid mission in Yugoslavia, and what Italian press called the strage di sabato sera — the regular weekend death toll of young clubbers driving home from Italian raves. "Children" was designed as a closing record to bring crowds down before the drive home. After Dreamland he moved away from the chart-pop frame: 23am (1997) opened the catalogue toward live instruments and worldier textures, Organik (2001) was an ambient/world-influenced album with Bill Laswell among the collaborators, and his final solo record Thirteen (2011) came out on his own S:alt imprint as a blend of ambient electronics, alternative rock, and progressive-rock instrumentation. From 2013 he ran OpenLab.fm, an Ibiza-based radio station and arts platform dedicated to ambient, IDM, and experimental electronic music. He died of stage-four metastatic cancer in Ibiza on 9 May 2017, aged 47.