Wiley

Biography

Richard Kylea Cowie, 19 January 1979, London, England. Wiley Kat refers to his abstracted, mutant music as ‘eski beat’, and maintains that his sound often owes more to rapid-fire computer games than the UK garage that spawned it. Since 2001, the former member of the influential Pay As U Go cartel and Roll Deep Crew-aligned producer/MC has churned out a slew of weird tracks thematically linked by a penchant for the cold, the winter, and the glacial. Track titles such as ‘Igloo’, ‘Frostbite’, ‘Freeze’ and his benchmark ‘Ice Rink’, in addition to ‘Eskimo Dance’, Wiley’s similarly themed MC-led raves in and around London, have made his state of mind and music-making aesthetic explicit: ‘I wasn’t making sad songs but I was cold inside’, he claimed in XLR8R magazine.

Often recording a track a day, Wiley deliberately flooded the market with white labels bearing his...

Read the Full Biography of Wiley