Paradinas was born in
Charing Cross Hospital and began playing
keyboards during the early 1980s, and listened to
new wave music such as
OMD,
Heaven 17 and early
Human League. He joined a few bands in the mid-1980s, then spent eight years on keyboards for the group Blue Innocence. During this period, Paradinas had been recording on his own as well with synthesizers and a four-track recorder. In 1992, following a performance at "The Orange" in London, Blue Innocence broke up. The bass player, Francis Naughton, had a Atari ST Cubeat based MIDI setup that he was using to create electronic music, introduced Mike to the sequencer, and they started to create some new tracks together. After the material was played for
Mark Pritchard and
Tom Middleton—the duo behind
Global Communication and the heads of
Evolution Records—it was to be released; however, recording commitments later forced Pritchard and Middleton to withdraw their agreement. Fortunately for Paradinas, Richard D. James (a.k.a.
Aphex Twin) had also heard the tracks and agreed to release their music on
Rephlex Records under the alias
μ-Ziq. Naughton then left μ-Ziq to start Rocket Goldstar. A second album
Bluff Limbo was scheduled to be released in mid-1994, though only 1,000 copies were published. It was re-issued by Rephlex in 1996 after Paradinas served papers on the label. Paradinas's first major-label release came later in 1994, after he undertook a remix project for
Virgin Records: the
remix EP The Auteurs Vs μ-Ziq for the
britpop band
the Auteurs. The remixes Paradinas offered sounded nothing like the original song, a familiar practice for many experimental electronic musicians in those times. Even though the EP was hardly a high sales success, Virgin signed up Paradinas and gave him his own
sublabel, Planet Mu, to release his own work and to develop similar-minded artists. (Paradinas later broke with Virgin and in 1998 established
Planet Mu as his own independent label.) Written into his own contract was a provision for unlimited recording under different names, and during 1995 Paradinas unveiled three aliases and released many albums within less than a year. The neo-
electro music label
Clear released his debut single under the alias
Tusken Raiders (named after the
Star Wars species) early in the year. Clear Records also released the first Paradinas alias album,
Jake Slazenger MakesARacket, later in 1995. Although they were still audible, the LP ignored the electro influences in favour of some synthesizer figures and the previously unheard influence of
jazz-funk. Paradinas continued to release solo albums under the aforementioned names as well as Gary Moscheles, and a one-time collaboration with
Aphex Twin under the
Mike & Rich moniker. In 1997, Paradinas made a style change again, mixing experimental electronic music with
drum'n'bass, a similar aesthetic path taken by
Squarepusher and
Aphex Twin. During this year he was also touring with popular musician
Björk. Björk inspired the 1999 album
Royal Astronomy, with its mixture of unusual vocals, strings and breakbeat. All of his albums until 2003 were released in the US on the more mainstream label,
Astralwerks. Under the pseudonym μ-Ziq, Paradinas also released
Challenge Me Foolish (2018),
Magic Pony Ride (2022),
1977 (2023), and
Grush (2024). ==Personal life==