Mefjus

Mefjus is the alias of Austrian producer Martin Schmid, who grew up around Innsbruck. He started on trumpet in primary school before enrolling at a music school, and by his mid teens was making hip-hop with his brother Christian, working alongside fellow Austrian producer Bowsar. Early tracks appeared on labels including T3K, Virus Recordings and Neodigital, and by 2013 he had left a day job to produce full time.

He came to wider attention in the early 2010s through releases on Critical Music, and is associated with the neurofunk end of drum and bass: intricate, heavily processed basslines, precise drum programming and an audibly engineering-minded approach to mixdowns. Alongside the standard 174bpm material he has also worked in halftime, using the slower framework to foreground sound design rather than momentum.

His debut album Emulation arrived on Critical Music in 2014, after three months spent solely on sound design; it featured collaborations with Phace and Misanthrop. Manifest followed in 2018 on Vision Recordings, growing from what had started as an EP into a two-year project, and was later named among PopMatters' twenty-five best electronic albums of that year.

Beyond his own catalogue, Mefjus has recorded with Emperor and Noisia, and with fellow Austrians Camo & Krooked, with whom he co-founded the drum and bass label Modus to release their joint work; the trio also produced an official remix of the Prodigy's 'Breathe'. In 2021 his single 'Hear Me' reached number 36 on the UK Singles Chart.

His DJ sets tend toward the technical and the heavy, drawing on his own catalogue and the wider neurofunk scene. In 2017 he was chosen for the Fabriclive mix series, compiling a set built almost entirely from his own tracks, remixes and collaborations, and in 2024 he presented a mix for BBC Radio 1 drawn largely from his own productions alongside other drum and bass artists.