With the release of his seventh mix disc, the equally meticulous and gracious Dieselboy remains atop the crop of domestic drum 'n' bass producers. Lily Moayeri is not sleeping with him.

"There are not that many people that truly know me."

The person who seems the most surprised by Dieselboy's popularity is none other than Dieselboy himself, Damian Higgins. On a Thursday night at Los Angeles' "Respect" drum 'n' bass weekly, there are as many people inside the club as there are queued up at 1 a.m. waiting to get in. "These people are standing out here in the cold, waiting for me?" Higgins says mystified.

The source of admiration and envy from peers and fans alike, Higgins' being is not defined by drum 'n' bass alone. An unending source of trivial yet captivating information, he is an avid film fan as well as a collector of the same quirky-looking doll characters that E-Bay offers in endless supply. He obsesses over video games, animation and technology, always has the jump on whatever gadgets and toys are fresh on the market, and is hip to every band that forges a new sound or recreates an older one. In his bag, all the records rest in alphabetical order. At the last Coachella Festival, fans stopped him at every turn to take a picture or chitchat. He graciously spent at least a few minutes with each person. People--particularly other DJs--oftentimes mistake his shyness for aloofness and unease.

"It gives me a different perspective on how people that are really famous, what they must go through being scrutinized in the tabloids," Higgins explains articulately, enunciating every consonant. "I can't even imagine what kind of lifestyle that would be like. I'm a fairly private guy. I have a small circle of friends that I keep in touch with all the time. There are not that many people that truly know me. It's funny that people seem to have all this inside information about me when, in fact, I know how many people really do know things about me. People don't understand, I'm not that interesting. I'm just a normal guy."

Crowds literally screams all the way throughout each of his DJ sets. Hard, dark, precise and impeccable, they are 2002's answer to stadium metal. KCRW's Jason Bentley observes, "[Dieselboy] has the ability and talent as a DJ to lock into a groove. When your skills allow you to achieve that as a DJ, you really begin to take the audience somewhere. It's about him being able to mix records and create a vibe that transcends, especially in this day and age where everybody thinks they can DJ, he has that uncanny ability. It's undeniable."

To date, Dieselboy's sixth mix CD, Sixth Session, is the highest selling drum 'n' bass compilation ever, outselling Roni Size/Reprazent's artist album, In The Mode (released on the same day), by over 21,000 (and counting) copies domestically. His current CD, projectHUMAN (coupled with a six-track second disc of previously unreleased material, SIDEproject) is the first release on his newly established HUMAN label, and is by far his most ambitious mix CD to date. A testament to his perfectionist attitude, projectHUMAN brings Higgins' own human essence into the digital realm of drum 'n' bass. He painstakingly handpicked every component of the CD, from tenaciously chasing down a particular font to designing the logo and directing the artwork. He even spent eight weeks on a single remix. The producers he recruited for the project (Usual Suspects, Technical Itch, Kaos, Hive, E?Sassin, and Ram Trilogy, among others), in turn handpicked tunes from the drum 'n' bass, trance, hip?hop and house genres to rework exclusively for projectHUMAN. Dieselboy himself remixed four of the numbers, two with Kaos and two as Weapon with Kaos, Sine, Nicky Bulletproof and labelmate Joshua Ryan.

"It's more fun to work in the studio with someone else and bounce ideas off of each other. It's like going to the movies with someone. It's more fun to share the experience and the results are more interesting because you have two separate imaginations to work off of," he says of his unbroken habit of collaborating on every production. "The reason I haven't done stuff by myself at this point is that I'm slow in the studio. Credibility, that's something I toss around in my head. But then you look at Ed Rush and Optical, no one disses them because they work together on stuff. Personally I don't think I have anything to prove to anybody. I'll get around to it at some point. In time, it will happen."

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