Label of the Month: MicroHertz
After running his label for over 15 years, Archie Hamilton has built an international community around groove-heavy house music.



On New Year’s Day in London, the tech house function was the place to be.
Some might sneer at that claim as the sound is oft-treated as the butt of the joke in the current dance music zeitgeist. But on the first night of 2025, fabric, the legendary clubbing establishment, went low-key. Opening the doors of only Room 2, filled with just the right amount of happy dancers getting down to effortlessly groovy basslines from none other than London’s own Archie Hamilton.
“It's very easy to jump on that hype train, isn't it? Of hating on a certain genre,” Hamilton tells Beatportal. “The real thing that made tech house special and still does around the sort of genesis time was how non-conforming it was in terms of arrangements and sampling.”
Hamilton’s approach to tech house is certainly non-conforming. From his perspective, arranging a good bassline (the foundation of the sound) is more about space than anything else.
“What a lot of people don't realize is [funk and groove] come from the space and where the notes aren't, not where the notes are,” Hamilton says. “You always find yourself moving to when there's a gap.”
Hamilton now releases dozens of tracks a year with these spacious basslines via his record label MircoHertz, but when the label started back in 2009 it had a different name: Moscow Records.

The original title was “Moscow” because Hamilton and Alex Harris, his partner in running it at the time, were originally going to name their label “Temper Records,” but the shop owner where they brought their first vinyl pressings confused that with Tempa, the historic dubstep label. So they went outside the shop and in the moment named the label “Moscow Records” in honor of Harris’s late Russian grandfather whose inheritance paid for those pressings.
Their expectations for the label were as loose as the nomenclature. “We had zero intention of running that label for another 13 years. We had no idea it would be successful,” Hamilton says. At the 13-year mark, Harris had stepped away long before to run a bar in London, the sound Hamilton was curating was far different than where they started, and he had no connection to the name “Moscow,” so he changed the name to MicroHertz.
Now, under that name, the label has shared releases from respected names in house music such as Luuk Van Dijk, Ranger Trucco, and Ben Rau. Hamilton has also grown MicroHertz into a major player in global events.
During our chat, he’s sitting in his hotel room in Santiago, Chile before the MicroHertz South America debut at Teatro C. “I've got a really solid fan base here and so does the label. It's really nice to be able to finally put our flag in the sand,” Hamilton says. But the MircroHertz flag will be in many more dance music hubs before 2025 is over. On February 7th, Hamilton returns to his home country for the MicroHertz debut at Motion Bristol. Then on February 23rd, he’ll head over to Italy for the debut at After Caposile, and he has yet another debut event at Cabaret Aléatoire in Marseille, France scheduled for April.
“We've got pretty much something every month all the way up till the end of the summer, and it's just really exciting. I'm really looking forward to all of it,” Hamilton says.
With the events moving full speed ahead, Hamilton has been able to bring MicroHertz artists together. Rather than just being faceless names in an email containing mastered audio files of new releases, they’re sharing the stage and the resulting energy of the parties. He’s giving artists opportunities to join a real family, just as he was given the opportunity to join the Fuse family in his early days coming up in London.



Established in 2008, FUSE is one of the most well-known house music events in London, and, it’s still running today on a grand scale. Later this year Fuse will host their annual Open Air at Barking Park, and then the following weekend the crew is heading to Barcelona for OFFSónar. Building on the success of the events, FUSE became a label, which has hosted music from Enzo Siragusa, East End Dubs, and Archie Hamilton.
Before Fuse was a global brand, though, it was a regular party at 93 Feet East, and Hamilton was there in the crowd every weekend. One thing led to another. Hamilton started meeting the FUSE residents like Seb Zito and Luke Miskelly, and then on a fortuitous afternoon while he was still working his office job, he got the call to come to play, and he’s never veered away from being an artist since.
In 2025, he is giving young artists the exact same chance with MircoHertz.
“We have the opportunity not only to give someone a release, give them some profile online, and in the music world, but add them to lineups, too,” Hamilton says. “It's great to be able to offer that to people because that's just so important when it comes to developing artists. 10-15 years ago, if you had a release that did well on a big label, then you were set. But now the shelf life of music is so much shorter that if you don't follow up [a great record] with some high-profile gigs, then it's kind of wasted.”

Hamilton rues the effect of social media on the shelf life of music as well. Being that he is still heavily involved in the A&R process for MicroHertz, he is very against signing records based on social stats or TikTok strategy. His label manager balances the approach by emphasizing the ubiquity of numbers in the modern industry, but at the end of the day, Hamilton has maintained a core vision behind Microhertz releases:
“It's just whatever makes me move and whatever I love playing in my DJ sets. It’s pretty much as simple as that. This platform is about me expressing what I'm playing, and I don't want it to be much more than that,” Hamilton says.
As simple as that sounds, for someone with a widespread musical taste like Hamilton, it’s quite a refined process. Many artists who run their own labels release all of their music through them to retain complete creative freedom. However, in looking at Hamilton’s discography, there are large time gaps where he doesn’t release on MicroHertz. For instance, he didn’t put out anything on MicroHertz between February 2023 and April 2024.
In that time, he signed music to Defected, Dansu Discs, and NATURE. He had the agency to release those records on MicroHertz, but he is committed to maintaining the MicroHertz sound. And as much as he loves playing all his original productions in his sets, those records did not fit on his label.
“I love making all kinds of different music. Take the Defected one. I've always wanted to make a classic house record. I couldn't possibly put that on MicroHertz. MicroHertz is my default, and then other labels are more of my forays into different styles,” Hamilton says. “It’s really nice to have a label where almost immediately, if you heard it in the club, you'd be like. ‘That sounds like the kind of thing that would be on MicroHertz'.”
Under Hamilton’s leadership, tracks that sound like they belong on MicroHertz are being produced by artists at all levels of their careers, and being heard by the international raving community. Whether it’s a legendary club town like London or a growing hub of dance music like Santiago, those spacious basslines are doing serious damage on club-ready loudspeakers.
