Born in Wimbledon (though he grew up in several other spots around London), Paradinas began playing keyboards during the early '80s and listened to new wave bands like Human League and New Order. He joined a few bands in the mid-'80s, then spent eight years on keyboards for the group Blue Innocence. During that time, however, Paradinas had been recording on his own as well with synthesizers and a four-track recorder. When Blue Innocence disintegrated in 1992, he and bass player Francis Naughton bought sequencing software and re-recorded some of Paradinas' old material. After the material was played for Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton .. the duo behind Global Communication and Reload as well as being the heads of Evolution Records .. they wanted to release it; recording commitments later forced Pritchard and Middleton to withdraw their agreement, though by that time Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) had also heard the tracks and agreed to release a double-album for his label, Rephlex Records.The debut album for µ-Ziq (paraphrased from the side of a blank tape and pronounced "mew-zeek") was 1993's Tango N' Vectif. The LP set the template for most of Paradinas' later work, with at times shattering metal-cage percussion underpinning a collection of rather beautiful melodies. The Rephlex label was just beginning to flourish, with added journalistic attention paid to Aphex Twin's recent Selected Ambient Works 85-92, and though James began to feature less in label-doings than co-founder Grant Wilson Claridge, later Rephlex work by Cylob, Luke Vibert (aka Wagon Christ), Seefeel and Squarepusher made it among the cream of electronic home-listening labels.
