Jade is the drum & bass alias of Gábor Simon, a Hungarian producer and DJ from Budapest and the founder of Eatbrain, one of the most recognisable neurofunk labels in the scene. An architect by trade, he came through in the slipstream of the original neuro and tech wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he is widely counted among the producers who helped define the neurofunk sound.
He found drum & bass by accident: sheltering from a storm with friends, he ended up at a drum & bass night in an underground club called Jailhouse and was hooked. Bad Company's “Seizure” was the tune that did it, and Konflict's “Kemal” remains his all-time favourite, with The Usual Suspects, Matrix, Ed Rush & Optical, Stakka & Skynet and Future Cut close behind. In the late 1990s he bought a turntable and practised at home before moving into production, picking up early pointers from producer SKC and a studio session with Chris.SU. His first record came out in 2004, the year he also played his first gig, at Miu Miu in Szeged. That first release was picked up by Black Sun Empire, and over the following years he released on around fifteen labels, including Moving Shadow, Commercial Suicide, Citrus and Lifted, collaborating with Black Sun Empire and being remixed by Phace, Audio and Icicle along the way.
In 2009 he quit architecture to make music full time and released his debut album, Venom, on Citrus Recordings. Tracks from it such as “No Cure” and the title track “Venom” with RymeTyme became fixtures of the neurofunk canon. Asking to design the album's artwork himself led to a job as in-house designer for the Dutch distributor Triple Vision, work that helped fund his next step.
That step was Eatbrain, launched in 2011, at a moment when much of the scene was chasing dubstep. The first releases were his own, but in 2012 he signed the then little-known Mefjus and Neonlight, and later Teddy Killerz, all of whom went on to bigger things. The roster has since included Mindscape, State of Mind, L 33 and Agressor Bunx, and Jade names the label's first album, Tales of the Undead, as its real breakthrough. The name came to him while binge-watching George A. Romero's zombie films, and the logo's crossed-out eyes and sharp teeth follow the same idea.
On his own label he has kept pushing the sound with tracks like “Smash Face” and “Audio Hypnosis”, “Respirator” with State of Mind and “They Are Mutants” from the Mirror Universe projects, and the Awake and Propaganda EPs in 2018. Mindscape and State of Mind are his most frequent collaborators, and he has also worked with Fourward, Gancher & Ruin, Chris.SU and Rido, as well as in the three-piece project ClashTone. Behind the decks he has headlined Boomtown, Dour, NASS, Let It Roll and London's fabric, and in 2026, the label's fifteenth year, he has been playing special 15 Years of Eatbrain sets.
