Raja Ram was desperate to form a collective and get all these talents into the studio to make some exciting new music for Tip World. And so came "1200 Micrograms". The name 1200 Micrograms comes from a reference to a very high dose of LSD and the Terence McKenna quotation sampled in the track Salvia Divinorum: "A substance so powerful that 300 micrograms is the dose. That means 1 gram will dose 7000 people". It was formed in the summer of '99, in the Triball studio's in Ibiza. A bottle of liquid and copious amounts of charras was the starting point and the first track "1200 Mic's" was written. A lot of fun was had and the outcome was a high octane, no nonsense, peak time, dance floor powerhouse....making sure everyone did party like it was 1999! It was made in a way almost like the punk ethos. The whole project is not about labouring hours over a drum sound but striking while the iron is hot. The objective was to get into the real essence and energy of the music. To send people into a frenzy. I think it's safe to say that over the past few years that's exactly what they've done, worldwide. With their stage show getting better and better, audience reaction amazing and the gig requests never ending, the only problem is finding the time to lock them into the studio!
The idea for starting the project allegedly came to Raja Ram while he was thinking about making an album about his favorite drugs. Thus, their first, self-titled album featured 9 tracks about Ayahuasca, Hashish, Mescaline, LSD, Marijuana, Ecstasy, Magic Mushrooms, Salvia Divinorum and DMT. Not surprisingly, the tracks featured many quotes from Terence McKenna and samples from movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The album has been a big success, and 1200 Mics even released a "Marijuana" music video in 2003.
The second album, "Heroes of the Imagination", was dedicated to famous inventors and scientists, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Albert Hofmann, Francis Crick, James D. Watson, and Tim Berners-Lee. This album also contains the 2003 party hit, "Acid for Nothing", a trance remix of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" (the track also replaced the phrase "I want my MTV" with "I want my LSD").
