Label of the Month: Lost Miracle

Sébastien Léger was born with music in his blood. Growing up with professional classical musician parents, the 45-year-old French DJ, producer and label boss was always destined for music to become a fixture of his life - just perhaps not in the way his mum and dad predicted.

“Modern music was nearly forbidden at my home,” he recalls, adding that there was “definitely no dance music”. While his mum and dad “tried to, through piano lessons, make me like Mozart, it didn’t work”, Léger recalls, adding that he “wasn’t interested in what my parents were doing, really”.

His sonic horizons were widened at an early age, however, especially when he heard Technotronic’s iconic ‘89 hit "Pump Up The Jam" on the French Top 50 chart show when he was just 10-years-old. “I was a little bit in shock,” Léger recalls, “because I hadn’t heard anything like it before, except from very conservative artists, which was quite boring to me, as well as children’s songs and Michael Jackson, maybe."

While that song got him hooked - “that was it for me; dance music forever” - he wasn’t sure why he liked it so much. “Maybe it’s because it was new, or because you could dance to it,” he reflects, describing the track as “simple and effective”. Not to say that Léger’s limited music upbringing made Léger a rebel, but it certainly encouraged him to forge his own path musically. This is perhaps why he turned to dance music: “it’s the purest and simplest form ever”.

From there, Léger found himself gravitating to sounds and genres that he hadn’t yet discovered but were soon to have a similar impact on him. ”When you’re 10-years-old, especially in France, you don't listen to the most underground music in the world,” he laughs, adding that Eurodance was popular when he was young.

He soon found his scene, however: after starting to discover vinyl records at the age of 14, he became a resident DJ at a local “under the radar” club just one year later. “I was going to school during the day, and then the club at night,” he recalls of being 15 and self-taught. “The only way to make it was to actually be a good DJ,” he reflects of the pre-internet age and leaving education at 16. “That was it – I never had anything else as a job."

Drawing on the New York and Chicago classic house scene of the mid-90s, artists like Masters At Work, David Morales, and Danny Tenaglia proved influential to a teenage Léger. “Very soulful, vocal-led music, that was my first love,” he summarises, adding that he would play funky and soulful house tracks in his sets.

Producing followed soon after, when he saw an advert for an MPC2000 sampler/sequencer in a magazine. “I had no idea what it was,” Léger recalls, “but I remember seeing it and thinking, ‘I need that.’” Despite using it to make his first “terrible” track on the day it arrived, he understood what it was and reflects on the following few months as “a good learning curve.” Like his DJ sets and record collection, Léger gravitated towards making house music and released his first track one year after getting the MPC.

In the two decades since, he’s released music on some of the biggest labels in the scene, including Defected, Intec and Lee Burridge’s All Day I Dream. He’s also launched several different imprints of his own. Lenger’s first, created in 2000, came about because he wanted to release more music. “Back then you could release two EPs per week on vinyl, so I was very productive and wanted to release pretty much everything I made,” he says. But, with hindsight, Léger describes this approach as a mistake.

The antithesis of that is Lost Miracle, a label he launched in 2019 with two aspirations in mind: more artistic freedom and creative control. “When you're on someone else’s label, you always have some problems - big or not so big, but money-wise, payments or artistic visions - and I just wanted to be a little bit more free,“ he says of the imprint which was named after a track he released on ADID. Aside from the music, he felt this would also extend to artwork and A&R.

The best thing about running a label, he suggests, is that “I’m in control. I can do whatever I want, which is great because, at this stage of my career, I don't want to have anybody telling me what to do”. With releases by Tim Green, Chicola, Raw Main and Kasper Koman, Lost Miracle is now among the top three organic house labels on Beatport. Although other labels tend to release much more music, he prefers to focus on quality rather than quantity. “This is why I slowed down this year, because things were going a bit too fast last year, when a lot of my friends were sending me music,” he reflects.

Having so much material to release went against Léger’s original ethos: “I thought it was just too much”, he says. This, he adds, is one of the biggest challenges of running a label – knowing when to slow down and also having an instinct of what may do well. “I want to keep people excited about each release, and when there's too many it becomes a bit like a routine and sort of boring.” It’s for this reason that he decided to cancel several releases that had been planned for this year.

“For me to release something now, it has to be really, really special, and not just another DJ tool that’s going be in the chart for two weeks and then it drops,” Léger says. This is always a tricky dichotomy; he suggests: “to find a balance between the DJ tools that will please the DJ scene, but also something that is a bit more accessible, that is hard.”

Reaching this middle ground is arguably why the label has remained so successful over the past five years. Rather than feeling the pressure to rush things out just to fill a calendar, Léger takes the time to really plan when it comes to each release. Now the label is half a decade into its existence, he feels that now is “the perfect time” for new ideas and new music. “It’s important to keep the old fans happy and with us while, at the same time, gaining new ones. Finding that balance is very difficult, but I’m pretty confident that, with taste and work, we can achieve something really good.”

As for the future, Léger says the big plan is actually to slow down: “the idea is for the label to get bigger by releasing better”, he explains. Collaborating more with his friends Tim Green and Roy Rosenfeld is also in the pipeline; “we already play back-to-back a lot together, but we also want to make tracks together, which we’ve not done before”. 

Rather than following music trends, Léger is happy that the label has its own path: “the music we make is sort of niche and appeals to a bit of an older crowd. It’s definitely not TikTok generation music,” he confirms, considering that “maybe it’s a bit too sophisticated; I’m 45 so I’m not aiming for that”, he makes clear.

In terms of big ambitions for the label, Léger feels that the goalposts have shifted over the years. “I think that whatever I wanted to achieve is done and that’s why it now feels like it’s time for a new era,” he suggests, adding that this would be more focused on the label’s key artists: himself, Roy Rosenfeld, Tim Green “and obviously if there’s great music from someone else or a friend”. Right now, however, he thinks “the most important thing to do is focus on the three of us one core main act – keep it simple and, from there, build it into parties and shows,” he teases. “Smaller but bigger, that’s the idea.”