We first took notice of Danilo Plessow when Beat Bar favourites Gilles Peterson and Benji B began dropping cuts from his Inverse Cinematics project, a jazz-fused broken beat outfit he formed with studio partner, Joachim Tobias.

Plessow started playing drums at the age of six, and by eleven he was producing his first tracks using cheap software and free plugins. He soon fell in love with hardware though, and an ever-growing collection of vintage drum machines inspired the second half of this most recent moniker. The Motor City connection is inspired by his home town of Stuttgart, the cradle of Germany's automobile industry and the home of Porche and Mercedes-Benz. The reference to Detroit was not lost on Plessow either, and his appreciation and knowledge of music from the other Motor City goes beyond techno and Motown to groundbreaking jazz labels like Strata. It is the jazz aesthetic he seeks in all music and it is that which informs his own productions. 'I love hip hop, but I don't really like the electronic stuff. I really respect people like Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke, but, for me, hip hop has always been more about jazz. And that was my introduction to house too. I don't know why, but in my small city, there seemed to be a lot of old house records, like 8 Ball, which often used jazz samples but in a house context.'

While Gilles and Benji were rocking dance floors with Inverse Cinematics, what we didn't know was that Plessow was also creating outstanding but unreleased deep house workouts. "I just didn't feel at the time they were good enough to release,' he recalls humbly. When the time came though, these tracks that were to become the Raw Cuts series led Plessow with his MCDE identity to international acclaim. Both the elusive Moodymann and techno pioneer Kenny Larkin publicly praised Plessow for taking the classic Detroit sound and turning it into something new. The Raw Cuts concept is very specific: each track in the series had to be completed within two hours and could only made up of vinyl samples and sounds from vintage drum machines.

When up and coming producers ask him how they should find their sound, Plessow advises that "if you don't seriously love music, if you don't listen to a certain record on your home stereo alone at night, and be overwhelmed by emotions, then you might not be able to "get' music yet.' Plessow certainly "gets' music - at a time when labels struggle to shift five hundred units on wax, the Raw Cuts 12"s were selling in their thousands.

One of a small number of guest DJs we have asked to return to consecutive events, we are looking forward to another deep down session in the hands of MCDE.