Cameron grew up in Rockport, Maine, a town of 3,300 people. He describes it as an “an everyone-knew-everyone situation,” and perhaps it was the type of rural, far north place that breeds independent thinking. Andy Widdecomb aka DeeZ grew up one town over. “We were listening to Prodigy together, and he and a couple other friends of mine got sucked into this stuff,” Andy says. “We would hang after school and talk music. He ended up moving away to Illinois before I graduated. After a year or so, I found out that he’d also been making music - secretly, kind of low key. His sister told me, ‘he never leaves his room, he’s trying to be a dubstep producer.’”

That was almost eight years ago. “As the new year hit going into 2012, I was pedal to the metal balls to the wall,” Cam says. “Every day, all the free time I had was going directly into making music. After the third or fourth year, I started becoming more comfortable with my sound and my knowledge about music.”

I first came into contact with Mickman’s music through a vocal sample from Terence McKenna about an “ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness” in a mix by Brian “Levitation” Jones. Unaware of the song or sample source, I asked Brian about it. “That's actually part of one of my favorite tracks of all time, “Dissolution” by Mickman,” he wrote me. “This guy is a production tank and every song on his SoundCloud is just fire. He actually doesn't even perform, just an awesome dude who sits in his room cranking out tunes.” That was the Summer of 2015. Just under one year later, Cameron would perform for the first time at a show he and Eric threw in Peoria, IL. It would be the first of many shows that Cam put together himself.

“I think there’s a curve for people once they really start saying, ‘okay I think I’m onto something.’ You’re becoming a little more comfortable rather than being shy and bashful showing someone your music. That’s when I gave up the notion of, ‘well, I don’t have a musical background.’ That means nothing.”

Cam’s approach to sound design is stripped-down. “Less is more,” he says. Andy, who is still the only producer to officially collaborate with Mickman, touches on this. “Many times we’ll go over a tune and I’ll ask him how he made something sound so cool. It will be the simplest thing like a square wave with some reverb just tweaked in an interesting way. Nothing crazy or complex that takes a lot of time. I think he’s one of those people who is pushing things forward with composition, although he also has great sound design. Composition is one of his strong points.”

His sound design is absolutely ferocious, but as Andy alludes to, it’s Cam’s songwriting that sets him apart. His melodies are straightforward yet infectious. His note relationships are simple but undeniably powerful. His songwriting prowess perhaps shines brightest on Mending the Riven. A primarily downtempo album with just a few dance floor bangers, it finds Cameron experimenting heavily with time signatures and musical ideas.