NOTION: The Bristol DJ Behind "The Days" Remix and the Mixmag 2026 Cover
- MNEEMO
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
NOTION is the stage name of Rob Penny, a Bristol-based British DJ and producer whose 2024 remix of Chrystal's "The Days" has become one of the defining bass music crossover records of the current UK electronic cycle. The remix reached UK number four on the Official Singles Chart, passed 500 million Spotify streams, and earned NOTION the cover of Mixmag's April 2026 issue and a BRIT Awards 2026 Song of the Year nomination. This is MNEEMO's producer-to-producer profile of NOTION, written from inside the room at NOTION's Mixmag Lab London recording in April 2026, covering the Rob Penny real-name reveal, the Hereford-to-Bristol origin story, the Dance Dubs model, and what the Mixmag Lab set revealed about his approach to the viral hit that made his name.
NOTION quick facts
Real name: Rob Penny (confirmed via Mixmag April 2026 cover feature)
Stage name: NOTION (stylised all-caps)
Origin: Grew up in a village in the West Midlands; college in Hereford
Based in: Bristol (since his late teens)
Age: approximately 29-30 in 2026, based on prior age references rather than an exact public birth date
Genre: UK garage, bassline, house, 140, breaks, jungle, bass music crossover
Own label: N Music (launched 2017)
Breakthrough: "The Days" (NOTION Remix) with Chrystal, November 2024
The Days chart peaks: UK #4, New Zealand #1, Australia #5 (4x Platinum ARIA), Ireland #4
Total Spotify streams for The Days remix: 500+ million (April 2026)
Industry recognition 2026: Mixmag April 2026 cover, BRIT Awards 2026 Song of the Year nomination
Monthly Spotify listeners: approximately 14 million
Key projects: OUTSIDER (2022), FORWARDS mixtape (2024), Dance Dubs series
Booking: UK/Europe/ROW via The Team; North/South America via UTA
At the NOTION Mixmag Lab London: MNEEMO on what happened inside the room
MNEEMO attended NOTION's Mixmag Lab London recording session in April 2026, standing directly behind the booth for the full set as a working London-based DJ and producer. This is a first-person account from inside the room.
The set ran for roughly one hour, recorded as part of NOTION's Mixmag Cover Mix. The most striking structural decision: NOTION did not play "The Days" during the main recorded hour. Not in the opening. Not in the middle. Not as the climax. The full recorded set moved through his genre-spanning catalogue, edits, and unreleased Dance Dubs material without the track that is currently responsible for more than 500 million of his Spotify streams.
The cover was not that he forgot it. At the end of the recording, a Mixmag host walked out, thanked NOTION, and asked the room: "One more song?" Everyone assumed "The Days" was coming. It came, but only barely. NOTION played "The Days" remix for one drop and ended the track there. That was the set.
For a working producer standing behind the booth, that choice reads like a deliberate career posture rather than an accident of set flow. His recorded sets are built as arguments for the catalogue, not as delivery mechanisms for a single viral track. That is the opposite of what most artists in a similar commercial position would do.
The set also featured a unique edit of "TENTEN," his 2025 collaboration with Unknown T and D38, reworked specifically for the Mixmag Lab context. Several of the same edits surfaced again the following night at Sammy Virji's sold-out Alexandra Palace headline, which MNEEMO also attended. Within a 72-hour window, London hosted two separate moments, an intimate Mixmag cover recording and a 10,000-capacity arena show, that between them mapped the full scale at which UK garage and adjacent bass music now operates in 2026.
After the set, NOTION stayed in the room. He did not leave through a back exit. He stood, took photographs with fans, shook hands, and spoke to people who waited. For a Mixmag Cover Mix recording, that level of post-session openness is unusual. MNEEMO's impression, spoken as a fellow producer: down to earth, not performative, not treating the moment as too big.
Who is NOTION?
NOTION is not the Notion software. Not Notion A, the techno producer. Not Patrick Baglino, the Utah-based artist who also uses the name. NOTION in this article is the Bristol-based British DJ and producer Rob Penny, whose career trajectory runs from small-village West Midlands bedroom production to the cover of Mixmag's April 2026 issue and a BRIT Awards 2026 Song of the Year shortlist.
He has spent more than a decade building inside UK bassline and garage circuits. He came to mainstream attention in late 2024 via his remix of Chrystal's "The Days." He sits inside the current UK garage revival alongside producers like Sammy Virji, Interplanetary Criminal, Silva Bumpa, Omar+, and KETTAMA, covered in MNEEMO's broader UK garage 2026 analysis.
NOTION real name: Rob Penny
NOTION's real name is Rob Penny, confirmed via Mixmag's April 2026 cover feature, which identifies him as "Rob Penny, AKA NOTION." Prior to the Mixmag cover, NOTION had operated almost entirely under the stage name across UKF, Rinse FM, Bandcamp, and other outlets. Mixmag appears to be the first major editorial outlet to foreground the Rob Penny identity alongside the NOTION name in long-form coverage.
The reticence is consistent with his broader public posture. He is, by his own repeated description, a "massive introvert." He does not cultivate the social-media aura-driven persona that some of his peers in UK dance music have built around themselves. The name surfaced not through TikTok positioning but through a long-form magazine cover on the strength of the work.
How old is NOTION?
NOTION is approximately 29-30 years old as of 2026, with exact birth year not publicly documented by NOTION himself. UKF described him as 23 in their 2017 profile; Rinse FM's artist page currently describes him as 29. Triangulating from those references places his birth year around 1993-1994. He has not confirmed an exact year in any interview MNEEMO has located.
Where is NOTION from?
NOTION grew up in a quiet village in the West Midlands, roughly an hour from Bristol. Before he moved to Bristol, he was getting his first DJ gigs at The Jailhouse in Hereford, where he was attending college. A friend named AJ helped him into those early bookings. At 16 or 17, this was his first hands-on exposure to playing to crowds, almost entirely playing jump-up drum and bass on vinyl.
He has consistently said that growing up in a musically quiet place was a creative advantage rather than a disadvantage. Without a dominant local scene to orient against, he built his production practice in near-isolation, which gave his early material the introspective quality that later became one of his identifying traits.
He moved to Bristol in his late teens, shortly after releasing his first EP, Digits, on Formula Records / Champion in 2012. He has been Bristol-based ever since.
What genre is NOTION?
NOTION produces across UK garage, bassline, house, 140 tempo club music, breaks, jungle, and drum and bass.In his own words, his sound is "a mix of all the stuff I grew up listening to: bassline, garage, jungle, DnB, but also some rap, grime, and dubstep influences." His DJ sets are built as high-energy, fast-mixing club selections rather than journey-style extended arcs.
Two influences shape the emotional range of his work more than most realise. The first is Coki of the Digital Mystikzand the broader DMZ early UK dubstep scene, specifically a formative moment watching Coki play "SpongeBob" at a DMZ night, which he has cited as the point where he understood the physical impact electronic music could have on a room. The second, stranger and more revealing: he was heavily into Deftones and 36 Crazyfists as a teenager. That emotional abrasion, the ability to hold vulnerability inside heavy sound, is what separates NOTION from the purely functional bassline producers of his generation and is probably the single best explanation of why "The Days" remix worked the way it did.
The career timeline
NOTION's career runs through six distinct phases, each with its own sonic logic.
Drum and bass DJ phase (2013-2015). Before he was a producer at all, he was a DJ playing jump-up drum and bass on vinyl at Hereford venues like The Jailhouse. This phase gave him the crowd-reading instincts he later brought to bassline and garage sets.
Early bassline releases (2015-2017). His first producer credits started landing on British bass music labels: White Peach, 877, Four40, and Crucast. These were the infrastructure labels of the mid-decade bassline resurgence alongside TQD, Holy Goof, Skepsis, and Darkzy. Early UKF "Who The Hell Is Notion?" coverage in 2017 marked his first real critical visibility.
N Music launch (2017). NOTION founded his own imprint, N Music, in 2017 as a personal vehicle for his own material, starting with "Vex" (NM002) in August 2017. The stated intention was creative control and self-pacing, not signing other artists.
OUTSIDER (11 February 2022). A deliberate artistic reset. OUTSIDER moved NOTION beyond single-track club-tool production into project-scale artistic statement, with artwork, visuals, and emotional texture he had not attempted before. The tracklist included "FOUND LOVE" (feat. Carrie Baxter), "CHERRY," "1997," "ON IT" (feat. Snowy), "LIGHTS" (feat. Charlotte X), "JACK & PLAY," "CIRCLES" (feat. Paige Eliza), and "DANGER." "FOUND LOVE" became his first major commercial success, eventually passing 43 million streams and earning BPI Silver certification.
FORWARDS mixtape (30 August 2024). The 18-month continuation of OUTSIDER's logic, expanded into nine tracks moving across garage, house, breaks, and jungle. Tracklist: GRAVITY, TEMPORARY FRIENDS (feat. Charlotte Plank), TV DREAMS, FEEL LIKE ME, BACKBONE (feat. Olivia Rose), STYLING, THINK ABOUT U, SECRETS (feat. Cameron Hayes), LITTLE STEPS. NOTION described the project in interviews as anti-algorithm, explicitly saying of its philosophy: "I just really don't want to make art that caters to whatever metric some tech company CEO decides is important so I'm just gonna do me, even if the algorithm hates it." Another quote from the FORWARDS interview framed the project as "a fuck you to all that disposable culture."
The Days remix and mainstream breakthrough (November 2024 onwards). Chrystal's "The Days" was a 2015 independent release by a Bolton singer-songwriter that went viral in late 2024 after her daughter used it on TikTok. The track was signed to Chaos, the dance imprint inside the Polydor / Universal UK orbit. Chaos commissioned multiple remixes. NOTION's version, once played into the room by Zulan, generated roughly 3 million Reels and TikTok views on its first viral wave. Sammy Virji then played it, which extended the wave further. By April 2026, the remix had passed 500 million Spotify streams, hit UK number 4 on the Official Singles Chart, number 1 in New Zealand, number 5 in Australia (4x Platinum ARIA certified), number 4 in Ireland, and charted across Iceland, Norway, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also entered the US Billboard Hot 100.
The Dance Dubs project: why it exists and why it works
Running in parallel to NOTION's commercial catalogue is Dance Dubs, a free-release series of edits, bootlegs, and uncleared club weapons that he and manager Sam launched in 2021-2022. The origin is mundane and revealing at the same time: NOTION had accumulated a large backlog of tracks that could not go through standard streaming release because roughly 90% of them relied on uncleared samples. Rather than let them die on a hard drive, the Dance Dubs format turned them into a branded free-release series on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Documented Dance Dubs entries include DANCEHALL DUB [001], HOT / TEMPERATURE DUB, TALKING THE HARDEST DUB, DY-NA-MI-TEE DUB, SKENG DUB [008], ALONE [007], and the most widely played of all, his SKEPTA DUB, which has accumulated more than 500,000 SoundCloud plays and received support from Ben UFO and Joy Orbison at Dekmantel.
The Dance Dubs series matters for reasons beyond the individual tracks. It turned a legal problem into a direct-to-fan architecture. It gave NOTION an always-on channel for giving his audience material they cannot get via streaming platforms, which in turn builds the kind of sustained fan loyalty that survives viral cycles. The series has expanded into dedicated Dance Dubs tours across the UK, the United States, and Australia/New Zealand, including 2024 stops at The Night Cat (Melbourne), Liberty Hall (Sydney), Warehouse 25 (Brisbane), Divide (Adelaide), The Rechabite (Perth), Hide Club (Christchurch), Darby Street (Auckland), and Southern Sounds Festival (Dunedin).
The production setup
In a 2026 Mixmag interview, NOTION described a minimal hardware setup. He keeps only two hardware synths in regular rotation: the Moog Grandmother and the UDO Super 6. Everything else he works in the box. He has not publicly named his DAW, and MNEEMO has not found a verified disclosure of it.
The two-synth commitment aligns with his stated production philosophy: colour comes from the producer, not from the gear. Over-stacked signal chains and over-saturated plugin workflows tend to flatten rather than sharpen electronic music. NOTION's tracks often sound cleaner than the bassline average, and the minimal hardware setup is part of why.
Notable collaborators
NOTION's confirmed collaborators across releases include Conducta, Chrystal, Unknown T, D38, Slew, IRAH, Willow Kayne, nate sib, Charlotte Plank, Olivia Rose, Cameron Hayes, Carrie Baxter, Snowy, Charlotte X, Paige Eliza, Anna Lunoe (remix), Holy Goof, Young H, Javeon, Slick Don, Deadbeat UK, KiLLOWEN, p-rallel, and Eljé. B2B sets include his Glastonbury 2024 NoWhere stage debut back-to-back with Oppidan, a Bass Fest b2b2b2b with Skepsis, Darkzy, Bru-C and Holy Goof, and a 2026 Radius Chicago back-to-back with Interplanetary Criminal.
The peer support that moved "The Days" remix into mainstream visibility reads like a who's-who of current-scene gatekeepers: Zulan was the first DJ to play the remix in a way that triggered the initial viral wave; Sammy Virji played it soon after and accelerated streaming momentum; wider FORWARDS-era support has come from salute, Disclosure, Ewan McVicar, Ben UFO, Joy Orbison, and Floating Points.
The 2026 touring year
NOTION's 2026 live calendar confirms the scale shift. Beyond the Mixmag Lab London recording captured in this article, his year includes verified dates at Wildlands (Australia), a Radius Chicago booking back-to-back with Interplanetary Criminal, and ongoing US and UK club and festival appearances through the summer. His 2024-2025 festival run is already documented across Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, HARD Summer, Creamfields South, Love Saves The Day, Lost Paradise, Beyond The Valley, Rhythm & Vines, and Shambhala.
The Love Saves The Day 2025 performance in Bristol is one he has publicly described as a homecoming, and the image of a self-described introvert playing to his hometown crowd during his own viral remix is the clearest emotional anchor of the current NOTION career phase.
The BRIT Awards 2026 nomination and Mixmag cover
In early 2026, "The Days" (NOTION Remix) with Chrystal was nominated for Song of the Year at the BRIT Awards 2026. The nomination is notable because the track is, by every production metric, a bass-driven dance record rather than a pop crossover in the traditional BRIT Song of the Year sense.
Mixmag's April 2026 cover feature, framed around the headline "Feel like me forever. Why viral success won't change NOTION," sits alongside the BRIT nomination as the other half of NOTION's current institutional moment. The cover and accompanying Mixmag Lab recording positioned NOTION as a defining artist of the year for the magazine. MNEEMO was present at the Mixmag Lab recording that accompanied the cover.
How NOTION has influenced MNEEMO's own production
For MNEEMO, NOTION sits as one of the clearer reference points in the 2025-2026 UK garage and speed garage production space. Two tracks in the current MNEEMO catalogue on Warsaw label Radar Records, "GIVE YOU MORE" and "Down 405," were written with NOTION's sonic logic as a direct sonic influence: specifically, his ability to keep melodic and vocal warmth inside a bass-heavy production, and his way of moving between garage swing and bassline weight without losing groove continuity. The influence is methodological rather than imitative. More context on MNEEMO's own Radar Records era sits in the Radar Records era piece.
Why NOTION matters to UK electronic music in 2026
Electronic music in 2026 is splitting between artists who react to viral moments by replicating the track that caused them, and artists who absorb the viral moment into a longer-running catalogue without letting it define them. NOTION reads as a clear example of the second kind.
The single most telling detail from the Mixmag Lab recording MNEEMO attended is the decision not to play "The Days" inside the recorded hour. That is not an accident of set design. It is a career-scale statement: the recording is the work; "The Days" is an extra; the audience is not entitled to the viral hit as the deliverable. This is the opposite of algorithmic music economics.
This sits inside the broader London electronic music moment MNEEMO has been tracking, from UK garage at Alexandra Palace scale to intimate room economics at Rave Per Minute to Gallery Club London's 2026 season opener: the producers and venues that programme for depth rather than delivery are the ones defining the current UK electronic music era.
FAQ
What is NOTION's real name?
NOTION's real name is Rob Penny, confirmed via Mixmag's April 2026 cover feature identifying him as "Rob Penny, AKA NOTION." Prior to the Mixmag cover, his real name was not publicly foregrounded in any major editorial interview, database, or artist profile.
How old is NOTION?
NOTION is approximately 29-30 years old as of 2026. UKF described him as 23 in 2017; his Rinse FM artist page currently lists him as 29. He has not publicly confirmed an exact birth year.
Where is NOTION from?
NOTION grew up in a small village in the West Midlands and attended college in Hereford, where his first DJ gigs were at The Jailhouse venue. He moved to Bristol in his late teens and has been based there ever since.
What genre is NOTION?
NOTION produces across UK garage, bassline, house, 140 tempo club music, breaks, jungle, and drum and bass. His DJ sets operate as high-energy genre-blending club selections rather than single-genre journeys.
Did NOTION produce "The Days" remix?
Yes. NOTION produced the official remix of Chrystal's "The Days," released via Chaos / Polydor / Universal UK in November 2024. The remix reached UK number 4, New Zealand number 1, Australia number 5 (4x Platinum ARIA), Ireland number 4, and passed 500 million Spotify streams by April 2026.
Was NOTION nominated for a BRIT Award?
Yes. "The Days" (NOTION Remix) with Chrystal was nominated for Song of the Year at the BRIT Awards 2026.
Is NOTION the same as the Notion software or Notion A?
No. NOTION in this context is the Bristol-based British DJ and producer Rob Penny, not the Notion productivity software, not Notion A the techno producer, and not Patrick Baglino, the Utah-based artist who also uses the name.
What is NOTION's label?
NOTION runs his own imprint, N Music, founded in 2017. His major-label work, including "The Days" remix, is released through Chaos, the dance imprint within the Polydor / Universal UK orbit.
What is the Dance Dubs project?
Dance Dubs is a free-release series NOTION launched with manager Sam in 2021-2022 to distribute edits, bootlegs, and uncleared samples that could not go through standard streaming platforms. The series lives on SoundCloud and Bandcamp and has evolved into dedicated Dance Dubs touring across the UK, US, and Australia/New Zealand.
What synths does NOTION use?
NOTION told Mixmag he keeps only two hardware synths in regular rotation: the Moog Grandmother and the UDO Super 6. Everything else he produces in the box.
Who are NOTION's booking agents?
NOTION is booked via The Team for UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Rest of World (ollie.seaman@the.team, nick.matthews@the.team), and via United Talent Agency for North and South America (kevin.gimble@unitedtalent.com, marissa.loil@unitedtalent.com).
Primary-source on-site reporting from NOTION's Mixmag Lab London recording in April 2026 by MNEEMO. MNEEMO is a London-based DJ and producer whose 2025-2026 catalogue on Warsaw label Radar Records includes GIVE YOU MORE and Down 405, both written with NOTION's bassline-to-garage production logic as a direct sonic influence. Full archive at mneemo.com.
