Ahead of his show at the Twisted Pepper this Saturday- BT editor Dave B took some time out to chat with the Detroit born producer about his new XXX album, his photography career and underage raving...

Hey Jimmy- how are you today?
I'm great, how are you?

All good-where are you at the moment?
Tate Modern right now, sitting on the grass next to the food hut.

Tell us a bit about the album-Why name it XXX? Does the name have some strange underlying pornographic connotation?
Sort of. That wasn’t where I discovered it from. I started doing some research on XXX because it’s often used as a symbol. I traced it back to Egyptian times and found that it symbolizes the three parts of the soul. Basically when I was working on the album, I was getting visions of pyramids with Xs on them and I just feel like it somehow ties in together but besides that, the album is pretty strongly sexual so it all pretty much comes to one end.

The track titles are very suggestive- “Turn You Inside Out”, “Push” “Hot Raw Sex” and “Vibration”- is the whole album about sex?
No. The only track about sex is “Hot, Raw, Sex.” The tracks are just suggestive. They are basically connotative to tensions and relationships and pretty much anything before any sexual activity.

How did the production process on XXX differ from that of your last album “Colour Strip”? Do you go into the studio with a plan or is it a case of lets see what happens?
I think this album was a lot more relying on sound structure and arrangement so I put myself up to the challenge to make different parts of the songs more pop orientated. I was kind of trying to combine dance music with my background of piano arrangement.

You seem to have a lot of “rumoured” guises- Her Bad Habit, X District, Plus Device, Creepy Autography and Michaux- why all the different names? Is it some sort of undiagnosed producer schizophrenia?
I guess so. There was a time before I made this album that I was working on lots of different projects and I sort of had different personalities for producers behind them. It was like acting or theatre but it’s nice to have a different face for different projects because I have a hard time deciding on musical genres and things like that so that’s why when I make music under my own name, it’s kind of a collaboration of all these different personalities.