You've done about fifty remixes in the past year. So our first question is "do you sleep?"

Well every night I'm up brewing coffee at about midnight working until two or three each night. I do get some sleep but now it's a 24-7 venture.

You've been having a lot of success on the Billboard Charts, you've had three remixes hit number one now.

Yeah, three. I've been remixing a lot of these tracks and they've definitely been doing well on the Billboard club play charts.

A lot of remix artists sort of focus in on one genre or another, but you've been doing stuff for Stevie Nicks, Coldplay, Imogen Heap, so it's really all across the board.

Yeah, and a lot of this stuff started when I put out my bootleg album, Cease and Desist, and those remixes weren't even using the actual parts, those were just straight songs being sliced and diced and filtered. So that has led to a lot of the last 60 or 70 remixes that I've been doing that are legit.

Do most of your remixes start out as bootlegs (unauthorized remixes) that you then find a way to release or do you get approached to do things?

Usually I'm approached either from the artist's manager or I have a remix agent who sort of pitches the idea of the remixes. So either people come to you or someone else is putting it out there. I think initially everything started with doing it for fun and getting the mixes out there with the bootlegs. The idea with the bootleg album was to get it on peoples' iPods with artwork embedded in there—so just something fun for people to share that I could put on my site. It started out organically as a fun thing to send to friends, and then it progressed from there.

Is Cease and Desist still available?

Yes, the album is available at morgan-page.com.

It's interesting how that's come full circle, in a lot of cases people doing things like you're doing get more exposure for these artists.

It's led to a lot of work for remixing. Some of these artists I'd never hear from, and some of them ask me to do remixes now, like Tegan and Sara. It took a while for a lot of them to catch wind of the project, but then it came around and has led to a lot of work with major record labels.

It started with Danger Mouse. He first started out causing all of this commotion [with his unauthorized use of The Beatles and Jay-Z in The Gray Album -ed] and then he ended up doing the Gorillaz album and having EMI chasing after him. In the end it usually works out, as long as the mixes are done tastefully, as long as they're good.

You're definitely not just a remix artist, you have a lot of amazing original music too. You're finding an outlet for some of these original tracks on your new label, Nuance.

Nuance started this summer, it's something I've wanted to do for a while. It's an outlet for some of my more obscure tracks and just stuff that's close to my heart that hasn't found a home on a larger label. And this is just a way for me to get stuff out quicker and have a little more control over the process, because once you submit your music to a label, they have you exclusive for a certain amount of time, and it's their baby, they're calling the shots.

Nuance is a cool way to do it, and it's nice because it's direct with the store. I work with Beatport. You can go to directly to an artist landing page, www.beatport.com/morgan+page. They've been really good for getting really high quality music out there because they do .wav files, not just MP3s. Also, I'm putting stuff on iTunes.

Landline is the most recent release, which I've re-released with some new exclusive cuts. We've started with some back catalog material and are moving to new material in the next couple of releases.

A lot of the remix work you do is more commercially oriented and appeals to a certain audience, but your original stuff goes in a lot of different directions ... downtempo, and less dance floor oriented things for example.

That was one of the hardest things on the album I'm working on for Nettwerk, trying to boil it down to what kind of sound we're going for. It's going to be four originals, four remixes on Nettwerk, and four outside remixes. I've done a real variety. Some of the mid-tempo stuff like the Jenny Owen Youngs remix, to more full on electro-house for the clubs like the Delerium mix I worked on.

Your full length album on Nettwerk is due early next year, correct?

That will be coming out as a digital album, possibly a longer version digitally, and then physical release in spring 2008. And there will be a single called "The Longest Road" this fall that features a great up and coming singer, Lissie.

You're a DJ as well as producer. Are you playing out with digital files now?

I bring .wav files and sometimes hi-res MP3s.

What's your take on that as a producer? Do you like being able to deliver in digital formats rather than dealing with the compromises of pressing to vinyl?

I've always loved the sound of vinyl, but 320 MP3s and .wav files sound great. I do think you take a little bit of a hit on sound quality working with a laptop, but it's small and it's not enough that it really affects the performance with the crowd. For a while I played with vinyl, and then CDs, and moved into using Ableton Live. I never want to go back now, there's so much more control and you can do more with your DJing. Whether it's remixing on the fly, doing re-edits where you jump ahead 64 bars and you're already into the next verse. It's opened up a lot of channels and people like Sasha are using it very creatively, so I think that is the future.

MP3s make things a lot easier to distribute. I send out remix reels to people and it's a lot easier to send out hi-res MP3s than physical CDs or bulky .wav files.

I'm sure in general your music can reach more people faster than ever before.

Yeah, I'm in the process of sending out physical CDs to radio stations right now, and it is just so much more tedious to send out 200 promos to radio stations rather than sending out 200 links. I think now the emphasis is coming back to artwork and good mastering, so as long as it sounds good, looks good and makes a good package, it works well.

Speaking of radio you used be station manager for one of our favorite radio stations here in Boston, WERS! You're originally from New England, you came from Vermont and you're now based in LA. Was going out to LA a professional choice or a personal choice? Do you feel being out there affects your career at all?

That's a good question. You know, I moved out to LA wanting to get music in movies and film. I think my reasoning was Women, Weather and Work. That's what I told my parents and friends anyway. I wanted to come out and have a change of scenery. I had been in Boston for four years and I really got into the scene and really enjoyed going to Emerson College. But I wanted to see what this whole West Coast thing was about. And I'm still trying to pursue getting music in movies and TV but it's taken a different direction than I expected, I didn't know I would be doing more remix type work. When I was in Boston I was more into doing originals and DJing. But now it's back again to originals and full albums.

I think any location is going to change the sound of your work. I don't know if I'd be better off working in a remote location, I think these days you can work anywhere. But it's good to be in the creative hotbed of LA because there are so many vocalists.

Although I know one producer who goes through Myspace.com and looks at who has the top page views and plucks obscure vocalists. He does it by zip code. So that's one way of doing it! I try to work with referrals. With Nettwerk, with this album, they offered up a bunch of vocalists and I got to hand pick some really good up-and-comers.

When you record vocals do you work at home?

Right here. There's no vocal booth, I just turn off my monitors. I use a Pro Tools system with just a Digi 002. It's nice because they're not tucked away isolated in a booth, they're singing right behind me. It works really well like that. Sometimes I leave the mic on and leave the room, grab a snack or a cup of coffee and come back and they can feel a little less inhibited working solo in the room. But it's worked really well, there hasn't been any background noise or anything. I work in Silverlake which is a pretty chill area, really quiet, no ambulances screaming by. Which I remember from Boston was always a big thing. I'd be recording in Brookline and there was always the sound of something happening going towards the hospital!

You have been using Ozone as a final mix tool, but also in some cases on vocals and drums?

Things lose their life when you stretch them so much. Especially when you're working on something like a Stevie Nicks remix and the recordings are from 1981, there is a lot of bleed from other elements. You want to be able to isolate the good parts and give it a more polished sound. I think I've used Ozone on pretty much every mix that's come through. Some mixes I feel just need a little extra polish, others get a heavy dose of it.

It's also been really useful for mastering. On this last remix reel some of the remixes didn't get proper mastering. I went back and re-mastered them myself and ended up with a better product.

We've been hearing that from a lot of artists lately. With Ozone and the other technology available, people are sometimes able to get closer to what they want working from home.

I think it's always good to get another set of ears on it. But lately especially with running my own label, since so many of the manufacturing costs have been removed from the process, my biggest costs now are graphic design and mastering. So now I'm really taking a second look at mastering and saying, "do I really need to pay somebody I don't know 100 to 150 dollars a track to master my stuff?"

I'm still planning to have upcoming releases mastered with someone else, but I really want to do a comparison side by side to see how much better they are. That's my next experiment to take the newest material, send it out to a few mastering houses and compare it to what I can do with Ozone on my own.

One of the things that's most notable about your tracks is the way you work with drums. They have a lot of impact and separation. Any tips on mixing and working with drums?

A big thing I do is a lot of sidechaining. I've been getting more and more into it over the years now that it's so easy to apply a key insert. I use a lot of limiters.

Everything is kind of a compromise especially with bass. I try to take the really low stuff out of tracks that don't need it.

One of my favorite things with Ozone is the Multiband Dynamics. You can give a lot more beef to the track, a lot more punch, without having to boost the bass. I started with one of the initial presets and I've tweaked it over the years. I always do a little bit of Stereo Widening, a little bit of Multiband Dynamics, and it all sort of adds up piece by piece to a bigger sound.

To learn more about Morgan Page, visit www.morgan-page.com
or visit his Beatport store at www.beatport.com/morgan+page