By the early 90s, the DJing bug had kicked in. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to even think about spinning in public in the DJ hotbed of Detroit, even after years of practice – and Servito didn’t even own a mixer, and only one lone turntable. “I was just kind of cocky about it; I knew I could do it,” he says, laughing. “My friend Dat Duong was throwing this party called Poor Boy, and he was the first guy who put me out there. He just said, ‘I want you to play’ – and he had me playing a lot. It was a blessing, especially since I had never practiced. I would basically just put these records that I liked in the bag, and hope for the best.”

Those hopes came to fruition, and Servito quickly became a regular on the Detroit circuit. The culmination came in the early 00s, when he fell in with the then-nascent Ghostly International crew via a resident at the much-beloved Untitled, a weekly throwdown that also featured Matthew Dear, Tadd Mullinix, Ryan Elliott and Plaslaiko on its line-up. Yet even with that success, wanderlust was kicking in. “I was 33. I felt like time was ticking and if I didn’t leave Detroit at that moment, a window was going to close,” he says. “But I didn’t have any real plan. I didn’t even know I was going to be a DJ in New York. I never asked anyone for gigs. Finally, a few came to me.”

Some of those offers came from Bunker boss Bryan Kasenic, who eventually installed Servito as one of the party’s residents. “At that point I wasn’t thinking that Mike was going to be a big international DJ,” Kasenic recalls. “We just basically needed another DJ. People really liked him… but I wouldn’t say it was full-on Servito-mania at first.”