London, UK · tech-house

Michael Bibi

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Solid Grooves boss whose rolling, bass-forward tech-house became the sound of a generation of clubs — London underground gone worldwide.

Michael Bibi, born Michael James Lawrence Bibi in 1990, grew up in London with a mother who worked as a dance teacher and a father, Robin Bibi, who plays blues guitar. After a period of travelling he began working as a DJ in 2011, and finding it hard to get booked, started throwing his own club nights under the Solid Grooves name.

Those parties took off and led to regular bookings around London. In 2013 Bibi met fellow DJ PAWSA, and together they founded the Solid Grooves label in 2015, just as tech-house was gaining wider popularity; the label's roster helped push the sound forward, and it was named Best Label at the 2023 DJ Mag Best of British awards.

His own records favour rolling drums, dry percussion and heavy low-end, with vocal snippets used more as rhythmic texture than as hooks. Bibi built long-running residencies and event series around that sound in Ibiza and elsewhere, and his profile grew further after the 2018 single Hanging Tree, built around a sample from The Hunger Games, went viral and pushed him into wider recognition. In 2020 he was Mixmag's cover mix artist and recorded a Pete Tong Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1.

In 2023 Bibi was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and stepped away from touring; treatment brought the illness into remission by December that year. He returned to performing in 2024, including hosting the One Life event at Finsbury Park, which drew 45,000 people and raised around £120,000 for the Royal Marsden cancer charity.

His first release after the diagnosis, Sungazing with Alexa Sunshine Rose, came out in April 2025. Bibi won Best Tech House DJ at the 2019 DJ Awards, and in 2024 received the Play It Back award for the One Life campaign.

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