A pizza and a couple of beers in Cairns brought Liam Philp and Nico together. Both were backpacking in Australia, both had experience putting on parties, and a conversation about drum and bass, travel, and wrestling became the beginning of Trigga Fingaz.

Events on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane followed. When their Australian visas were coming to an end, the pair began thinking about how the project could travel with them. Here, Liam shares the story behind Trigga Fingaz Records, the friendships that shaped it, the support they want to offer new artists, and their plans for the next chapter.

Take us back to the beginning. How did you and Nico turn Trigga Fingaz from an idea into parties, and then a record label? What made releasing music feel like the next step?

Me and Nico were both backpacking around Australia at the time. He actually reached out to me through social media after hearing one of my mixes online. We were both in Cairns, so we decided to meet up for a pizza and a couple of beers. We ended up sitting there for hours talking about drum and bass, travelling, wrestling and all the other things we realised we had in common. We were on pretty similar journeys, just coming from opposite sides of the world.

We both had backgrounds in promoting (myself in the UK and Nico in Chile) so naturally the conversation turned into, “Why don’t we put some parties on?”

We initially tried to get something going in Cairns, but there just wasn’t really the audience there to sustain regular drum and bass events, especially with COVID going on at the time. Eventually we both moved south to the Gold Coast, and that’s where Trigga Fingaz really started to take shape.

From there we started running events across the Gold Coast and Brisbane, eventually putting on our own festival and bringing international artists over, while also making sure we gave local Australian talent a platform.

The events are still a big part of what we do. We recently returned to Brisbane for a Jungle Cakes takeover, we’ve got bi-monthly Trigga Fingaz events running in Santiago, Chile, and we’re looking at bringing the events to the UK in 2027.

The label came about when our Australian visas were coming to an end in September 2024. Nico and I moved to Thailand together and started having a lot of conversations about where we could take Trigga Fingaz next. We wanted it to become something bigger than just events and something that could exist wherever we happened to be in the world. The two big ideas that came from that were the clothing line and the record label.

Releasing music just felt like the natural next step. We’d spent years building relationships with artists through the events and championing music we loved, so the label gave us another way of doing that without Trigga Fingaz having to be tied to one city or even one country.

What makes a tune right for Trigga Fingaz? Has your idea of what the label stands for changed since those first releases?

There isn’t really one particular “Trigga Fingaz sound” we’re looking for. We’ve always wanted to keep it pretty broad. We’ll sign anything from liquid right through to the heavier, more dancefloor-focused stuff.

We do tend to steer away from the really commercial side of jump-up and dancefloor. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that music: it’s just not really our cup of tea or what we naturally gravitate towards.

More than a particular subgenre, we’re looking for passion and personality. We love hearing something that feels unique to the artist rather than something that sounds like a collection of familiar samples dropped into a project because that’s what’s working at the moment. You can normally tell when someone has actually put a bit of themselves into a tune.

Obviously there’s a level of quality control too. The production has to be at a professional standard and, at the end of the day, it has to be a good tune. But beyond that, we don’t want to put too many rules around what a Trigga Fingaz release has to sound like. I think that freedom and variety has become part of what the label is about.

If you picked two or three releases to tell the label’s story so far, which would they be? We’d love the stories behind why they matter to you.

One that immediately comes to mind is our release from Australian artist LCBRUIZE. Her real name is Lucy, and she reached out to us with a few demos. I was living in Thailand at the time and I remember being out riding my motorbike when I first listened to them. I can still remember exactly how those tunes made me feel. It was just such a beautiful piece of music.

It was Lucy’s first release and she was a new artist, so naturally she was a little apprehensive about signing her music to a label and wasn’t completely sure how everything worked. I really enjoyed being able to reassure her that we genuinely had her and her music at the forefront of what we were doing.

We brought in one of our mixing and mastering engineers, James from Sola, and arranged a Zoom session where he could take her through his process and explain how he approaches mixing and mastering. I think she came away from that with a wealth of knowledge.

That experience represents a big part of what I want Trigga Fingaz to be about. We don’t just want to take someone’s tune, release it and move on to the next one. If there’s an opportunity for us to help an artist improve their skill set or understand another part of the industry, we’ll always try to take it.

Beyond that, it’s genuinely difficult to pick another one or two releases because I’m really proud of the standard across the catalogue. I think our 2025 output as a whole probably tells the story better.

We made a conscious effort to work with artists we’d built genuine relationships with during our time in Australia. That included people like Paul T & Edward Oberon, Kleu, Conrad Subs, Inja, Ben Soundscape and Collette Warren.

For a label that’s still pretty young compared to some of the big boys in drum and bass, I feel like we came out swinging and managed to work with some proper household names very early on.

At the same time, we’ve always made an effort to give Australian artists a platform. Neither of us lives there anymore, but we’ll never forget that Australia is where Trigga Fingaz started or what that country did for us, both personally and for our careers. It’ll always be part of the label’s DNA.

What’s the moment you still find yourself talking about? It could be something that happened at a party, hearing a release played out, or a little moment behind the scenes that meant everything.

There are honestly loads, but if I had to narrow it down, two immediately come to mind.

The first would be hosting the Brisbane leg of the 30 Years of V Recordings tour. V is a personal favourite label of both mine and Nico’s. We grew up listening to the music that came out on V, so having Bryan Gee, Paul T and Edward Oberon come out to Brisbane was genuinely a bit of a dream come true.

We were really lucky with how their tour dates fell because we ended up getting to spend almost a full week with them. We got to show them around, take them to some of the local sights and actually spend proper time together away from the club. Most importantly, a really good friendship came out of that week that continues to this day.

If you’d told me when Nico and I were sitting having that first pizza and a couple of beers in Cairns that a few years later we’d be bringing Bryan Gee, Paul T, Edward Oberon and all these other incredible artists over to Australia, I probably would have laughed at you. That was definitely one of those moments where you stop and think, “How the hell did we get here?”

The other one has to be our final event before leaving Australia, which we called the Royal Rumble.

We invited back pretty much every DJ we’d booked during our two or three years of running events. From memory, there were nearly 60 DJs involved.

We paired everybody up and put all the pairings into a hat. Above the DJ booth we had a screen, and roughly every 25 minutes a one-minute countdown would appear revealing the next two DJs. When the countdown hit zero, they took over. So the whole night basically became this massive six-hour back-to-back session involving the community of DJs who had been part of Trigga Fingaz.

It was also a chance for me and Nico to sneak our love of wrestling into the brand with the whole Royal Rumble concept!

I’ll never forget that night. It was emotional because we knew that chapter of our lives was coming to an end, but at the same time it was really beautiful. It gave us the chance to say goodbye and, more importantly, say thank you to everybody who had contributed to this amazing little moment we’d managed to create together in Australia.

Who has helped make Trigga Fingaz what it is? Paul T & Edward Oberon told us meeting the team in Australia helped bring their remix about. We’d love to hear about those relationships, including the people listeners might not know.

There are honestly so many people to thank.

First and foremost, we’d be nothing without the people who bought tickets, turned up to the parties and supported what we were trying to build. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if nobody comes through the doors, none of it exists. So the first thank you has to go to them.

We’ve also got to thank all the venues that took a chance on us, every DJ and MC who came and performed, and all the booking agents we worked with to bring artists over from around the world.

We’ve had some really supportive friends and family behind the scenes too. I want to give a massive shout out to Blunted Couture, who helped us kickstart our first clothing line, and to Abby, who supported mine and Nico’s dream and helped us massively, particularly around the V Recordings event. I want to give a special mention to Phoebe Train and Kayla, who have been part of the team also.

Then there are all the artists we’ve met along the way. A lot of those relationships have gone way beyond just booking someone for an event or signing a tune. The friendship we built with Paul T and Edward Oberon is a perfect example. Years later we’re still working together, and those genuine relationships are probably one of my favourite things to come out of all of this.

I’m sure there are people I’ve forgotten to name, and they know who they are, but we’re eternally grateful to everyone who has contributed in any way. Trigga Fingaz has never just been me and Nico. There’s been a whole community of people behind it.

Explore the Trigga Fingaz clothing collection

What has running the label taught you that putting on parties hadn’t prepared you for? What’s been the hardest lesson so far?

I actually think running a label and putting on events have a lot more in common than people might realise. A lot of the skills cross over really well.

I’ve always been entrepreneurial and passionate about business, so that side of running Trigga Fingaz is something I genuinely enjoy most of the time. With events you’ve got promotion, social media, marketing, budgets, artwork, working with loads of different people and generally trying to bring all these moving parts together. Running the label is pretty similar.

The difference is that instead of booking a line-up, you’re listening through demos and deciding which tunes are right for the label. And it’s not just about the music either: the artist is important to us. We want to work with people who align with our ethos and who we feel we can actually build a good relationship with.

Then there’s everything involved in actually getting a release out there: artwork, mixing and mastering, distribution, promotion, social media and all the other stuff people probably don’t see.

I’d say the hardest lesson has probably been the financial side. In a weird way, that’s another similarity between events and the label. You can spend months organising and promoting an event, but until the doors open you don’t really know how many people are going to turn up. With a release, you can put everything into it, but you have no idea exactly how many people are going to stream it, download it or buy it.

Thankfully, most of our releases have done really well across streaming and downloads, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for how much time and money can go into every single release if you want to give it the best possible chance.

That’s probably been the biggest learning curve. You can do everything you possibly can behind the scenes, but there’s always going to be a part of it that’s completely outside of your control.

Early on, you spoke about helping Australian artists reach listeners in Europe. How has that ambition developed, and what would you like the label to make possible next?

That ambition is definitely still there. We really want to shine more of a spotlight on Australian artists and, wherever we can, help put them on the map internationally.

We’ve done a few call-outs for Australian music and, if I’m honest, we haven’t received as much as we’d like. We know the talent is there, so we’d love to hear more of it.

Ultimately, we want to help grow the careers of individual Australian artists, but also contribute in our own small way to growing the drum and bass scene across Australia as a whole.

I think that ambition has developed beyond simply releasing somebody’s music as well. We want Trigga Fingaz to be somewhere artists, particularly newer artists, can actually develop. We listen and respond to every demo we receive, and wherever possible we try to give detailed, constructive feedback rather than just sending a yes or no.

Sometimes we’ll receive something where the idea is absolutely there, but the tune itself isn’t quite release-ready. Rather than immediately writing it off, we’ll explain what we think could be improved and hopefully give the artist something useful to go away and work on.

So if anyone reading this is making drum and bass in Australia and sitting on some demos, send them our way! We genuinely want to hear them.

Australia gave Trigga Fingaz its start, and as the label grows internationally, we want to make sure we keep creating opportunities for the scene that helped create us in the first place.

Submit a demo through the Trigga Fingaz website

If we have this conversation again in three years, what would need to have happened for you to feel Trigga Fingaz had moved forward?

I feel like we’ve already covered a lot of ground in Australia. Even though neither of us lives there anymore, we still run the occasional event and definitely don’t see ourselves walking away from that side of Trigga Fingaz. I also want to give a massive shout out to Kayla, who’s over in Brisbane representing the brand and helping us keep that connection alive.

Looking three years ahead, success for me is really just continuing that expansion around the world.

We’re well established in Australia now, and Nico is absolutely killing it with what he’s building in Chile, so we want to keep growing both of those sides of the brand.

The next big focus for me personally is the UK and European market. The music is already doing really well over here and we’re getting a lot of streams from the UK, so the next logical step is to build the events side alongside that. From 2027, we’ll be looking to start bringing Trigga Fingaz events to the UK and hopefully build the same kind of community here that we’ve been lucky enough to create elsewhere.

Beyond the events, we just want to keep releasing really good music, keep developing artists and continue growing the clothing side of the brand.

So if we have this conversation again in three years, I’d love to be able to say that Trigga Fingaz has a genuine presence across Australia, South America and Europe.

Ultimately, we’d love Trigga Fingaz to become a household name within drum and bass, but without losing what made us want to do it in the first place: good music, good people, genuine relationships and having a lot of fun along the way.

Our thanks to Liam Philp for sharing the Trigga Fingaz story and supplying the archive photographs, and to Nico for reviewing the answers.