For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator. In 1992 he co-founded the revered left-field hip-hop label Mo’ Wax, the home of DJ Shadow’s groundbreaking Endtroducing…. Soon after this Lavelle started work on an album with DJ Shadow under the name UNKLE, resulting in LP Psyence Fiction (1998) that featured collaborations with Richard Ashcroft, Mike D and Thom Yorke. Later UNKLE releases include commissions also from Massive Attack, Ian Brown, Robert Plant, Michael Kiwanuka, Brian Eno and Josh Homme.

Besides legendary DJ residencies in London, Lavelle has played in all six inhabited continents and was one of the first DJs to play in China and Eastern Europe. He has put together several commercially released DJ sets, including for Global Underground (2002 – 2015). He also contributed the soundtrack for the late, great Virgil Abloh’s final Off-White show at Paris Fashion Week.

Lavelle curated the Meltdown Festival line-up in 2014 and curated a series of multi-sensory art exhibitions through Daydreaming With… most notably, Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick (2016) at Somerset House. 2017 saw Lavelle releasing his first UNKLE album in 7 years, The Road PT 1 to critical and commercial acclaim. Lavelle has scored several soundtracks, including for Danny Boyle’s anthology series Trust. His own unique journey was captured in Matthew Jones’s documentary The Man From Mo’ Wax (2018).