Let’s go to Ibiza. we will wear bikinis and banana hammocks, and dance languidly in the shallow waters of the Mediterranean. Lawless transcendence seekers will frolic to beats that sound custom-crafted for android parties. We can even take some X if you so please. There’s that song again, the one that the DJs keep sneaking into their sets. It’s, like, the fourth straight set we’ve heard with that song in it. But what is that song?
    “Maya Jane Coles,” a random raver dude, his hair colored an impossible gold and spiky like a Dragonball character, tells you as he offers you both a hit of DMT and a blanket to curl up in. Did you actually ask him out loud, or is he reading your mind? Will we have a threesome with him tonight? Sure, why not?
    On your way back to reality, aboard a Ryan Air flight to a shit 10-6 job in Milton Keynes, that song pops in your head. The four-on-the-floor thump, the soulful snippets egging your hips to groove, the ghostly laser sounds. Let’s look her up on Resident Advisor, the homepage of all good dance aficionados, when we get home.
    Thank you for indulging. Now back to our regularly scheduled interview.
    “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Coles says. It’s asscrack early in the morning, a phone call from a desk in Los Angeles to Coles in London. She is a busy bee. She has only a few minutes. Them’s the breaks when you’re named Best Newcomer at the Ibiza DJ Awards. Odd, because Coles isn’t really a DJ—she does DJ, but she’s a producer in her heart of hearts, crafting organic house songs from her multi-instrumentalist abilities. Nevertheless, DJs are hot commodities. And DJs have to play something! That something is the music produced by good people like Coles—including the underground house-chart topping, soulful snippet-laden multi-dimensional banger “What They Say.” “The last couple of years I’ve been really, really confident and happy with my sound,” says Coles, who has previously stated the attention caught her by surprise. “And that’s when people have been really catching on, so yeah.”
    Coles got an early education in musicality from her pops, who kept a mix of dub, punk, soul, world, and classical LPs around the house, and who quit graphic design to start a boutique indie label eight years ago, around the same time Coles got in front of a cracked version of some home production software. She sat there churning out hip hop and trip hop instrumentals at the ripe old age of 15. “When I was 16,” Coles says about the shift to tech-house, “just before I was legal, I started going to parties like Secret Sundaze. That was my first time hearing underground house music. I did my first DJ gig when I was 17.”
    And there’s enough in her catalogue to dig up and keep yourself grooving for hours on end. She’s been prolific, a dirty word in dance dialect. “I don’t really see the point of holding back,” she says, dismissing the notion. “If you make it and you’re happy with it, then why not release it? Other people might disagree [with that approach], but also, I have so many different kinds of styles.” There’re a couple dozen tracks under her own name (including the Don't Put Me in Your Box EP, out physically on Hypercolour in November), a grip of songs as dub duo She is Danger (with singer Lena Cullen), and a bunch of material as her dubstep alias Nocturnal Sunshine. That’s all in addition to her remixes for heroic folks like Tricky, Maceo Plex, Tom Middleton, and Massive Attack. The Tricky remix is an extra-choice cut.
    Coles’ striking looks stem from a love of Japanese fashion, and the owl tats on her chest are “linked to my Nocturnal Sunshine name, with the sunlight in the back and the nocturnal—the owls. Owls are one of my favorite creatures.” Owls, like the Tootsie Roll owl, Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh, and the Wise chips owl, have a reputation for being wise birds.
    It’s a perfect metaphor. Coles is beyond her years, and ready to make a major move into the upper echelons of dance royalty. “My main focus at the moment is just getting my album finished,” Coles laughs, “which might not be what people are expecting because it’s not house music. It’s purely music that I like—painting with no boundaries and no rules. It’s genre-less. It’s music from the heart, really. I’ve got so many tracks at the moment and it’s just cutting it down to the right ones, and then finishing the last few. I’ve got some really, really cool guest artists, as well.”
    Like who? “It’s a surprise. Sorry.” Fine, wise bird of the disco, but Ibiza awaits.