Star: Good to go breakfast ...

Breakbeat or simply "breaks" is a form of music long overlooked by the celebrity obsessed public who hold the most buying power. With some of its characteristics evident in the sounds of Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers, the breaks genre has quite a rich history.
"Breakbeat is an electronic dance music that shares a history with house music and drum 'n bass.

It's been around from the mid-90s and came from a sound called big beat," explains sought-after breaks DJ General Midi, who hoists the flag of this deserving genre up high.
General Midi, real name Paul Crossman, is currently touring South Africa and will play alongside South African DJ's One Track Mike, Kid Colt and DJ Toine at gigs organised by Triphazard Productions. General Midi aims to change perceptions about breaks and make the music more accessible to everyone.

This UK DJ has been in the game for years: "Prior to this I've been involved with promoting techno nights; I have a live act and I've also done progressive house. So breaks is a way of me trying to combine all these flavours into a style of music. My music is like a mash-up of styles which is one of the things I like about it.

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One of General Midi's biggest hits was Good to Go off the Midi Style album. The song made good on its title and went all the way to MTV and became the theme to The Real World, a reality show.

It is no wonder this DJ has been all over the world as some of his tracks can be found on games like Need For Speed, Fifa Street 2, the Sims Nightlife edition and even the hit TV series, CSI.

His music has been featured on many compilation CDs, so the General decided to release his own album entitled Midi Style with breakbeat power label Distinctive. He gets to do what he loves and gets paid for it, a luxury many musicians can only dream of.
"My first album [Midi Style] with Distinctive came out towards the end of 2005.

Now I'm also doing a Y4K compilation, which is a series of breaks compilations that Distinctive have been doing for a while. In fact, a lot of the material that I'm bringing [to SA] with me is new records that I got from this compilation so I'm bringing through a whole lot of new music."
He could hardly contain his excitement about coming to the country and went on to say: "This is a new scene for me so I'm really interested to see how people react.

I hope to come away with some enrichment from absorbing everything that goes on in SA."
With finality in his tone, Paul adds: "There was a time when dance music was actually suffering, so now I'm actually very happy in the way things are going right now, there's lots of good stuff around.