Michael Bibi didn’t get his start by getting booked — he started by booking himself. In 2011, unable to convince London promoters to put him on, the South London DJ scraped together £1,000, rented a venue and illegally plastered subway tunnels with posters for a night he’d invented and named Solid Grooves. He needed 100 people to break even. They showed up. Over a decade later, that party is one of tech house’s most influential labels, and Bibi is one of the genre’s defining names — deep tech’s more terrace-facing evolution has a lot to thank him for.
From Subway Posters to a Residency at 5am
Bibi grew up in South London, raised by a dance teacher and blues guitarist Robin Bibi, who took his son on the road supporting artists like Robert Plant and BB King — an early, unglamorous education in what live music actually takes. He became a DJ in 2011 after a period of travelling, and when clubs wouldn’t book him, he built his own stage instead.
Solid Grooves started small and stayed scrappy for years. Bibi landed a residency at a Vauxhall club where, every week for three and a half years, he played an afterparty that started at 5am. It was the kind of unglamorous grind that builds an actual scene rather than a following.
Hanging Tree and the Breakthrough
In 2013 he met fellow DJ PAWSA at a warehouse party, and in 2015 the two co-founded Solid Grooves as a label — right as tech house was starting to break into the mainstream, with a roster built to lead that shift.
The moment that changed everything was almost an accident. In 2018, Bibi made “Hanging Tree” — built around a sample he’d noticed while watching The Hunger Games — in 45 minutes, then more or less forgot about it while working 18-hour days on the label. He played it out at Egg London and it went viral overnight, selling out London’s 3,000-capacity Magazine by October 2019 and winning Best Tech House DJ at the 2019 DJ Awards. The bedroom producer became, in industry terms, a superstar DJ almost against his own plan.
Solid Grooves Today
The label he started with £1,000 is now a genuine institution: a 2022 tenth-anniversary takeover of a 6,000-capacity London venue, over 100 releases, a roster spanning ANOTR, Dennis Cruz, wAFF, Josh Butler and Route 94, and its own RAW sublabel. Since 2022, Solid Grooves has run an annual residency at Ibiza’s DC-10 — one of the clearest anchors of the modern, minimal deep-tech terrace sound we cover in our guide to deep tech house. In 2023, Solid Grooves won Best Label at DJ Mag’s Best of British Awards.
The Fight That Reshaped Him
In 2023, at the height of that momentum, Bibi was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. He stepped back from performing to focus on treatment, and came through it. At the 2024 DJ Awards, he won the “Play it Back” award for “One Life,” a campaign he ran in aid of cancer charities — turning what could have ended his career into a public act of giving back. He’s since returned to the booth at a calmer pace, by his own account with a sharper sense of what the music and the community around it actually mean to him.
It’s a rare thing in dance music: a DJ whose biggest year commercially and a genuine personal crisis happened almost back to back, and who’s been open about both.
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VIDEO: Michael Bibi Epic Tech-House Set Live From NYC Block Party
Presented by TekSupport, the party marked Bibi’s first appearance in New York since 2021 and saw 10,000 fans descend upon the industrial ship yard for a 3 hour soundtrack from the Solid Grooves boss. Video source: DJMag Youtube Channel.