Tone Glow 187: Djrum

An interview with the London-based producer about the importance of imperfection, how improvisation informs his music, and making the most of your obsessive tendencies

Djrum

Photos by Riya Hollings

Djrum (aka Felix Manuel) is an electronic-music producer based in London. He cut his teeth during the rise of dubstep in the mid-2000s and he has since gone on to forge a formidable reputation on the global club-music circuit. His productions frequently flit between genres, styles, and traditions, landing askew of both modern dancefloor idioms and contemporary acoustic musics, and his DJ sets are just as restless. Manuel’s debut LP, 2013’s Seven Lies, was predominantly concerned with post-dubstep and broken beat; his 2018 follow-up, Portrait With Firewood, saw the producer looking towards bleary-eyed ambience, cragged classical music, fiery drum-and-bass, and zero-gravity techno. His newest album, Under Tangled Silence, sees Djrum going a step further, braiding dance music and home-listening material around each other until they are one and the same, tangling up histories into something that is both meditative and head-spinning. Michael McKinney spoke with Manuel on March 4th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss his relationship to improvisation, the histories of hardcore music and polyphonic composition, finding inspiration in hardware collapse, and more.

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Djrum: What’s up? Hi. Felix.

Michael McKinney: Hello. Michael. Nice to meet you.

How you doing, bro?

I’m well. I’m just getting my day going.

Where are you based?

I’m in Minneapolis, so in the middle of the States.

So it’s early in the morning for you.

Yeah.

It’s kind of early in the morning for me, too. I mean, it’s not, but it is. I don’t always sleep so well and last night was one of those.

Oh no!

It’s okay. It’s something that you just have to manage. I think that I’ve maneuvered myself into a lifestyle that allows for it, you know what I mean? We all maneuver ourselves into a lifestyle that fits our brain chemistry. If you’re good at getting up at early hours and being an early bird, you can do certain jobs. When I describe my job—touring and shit like that—they’re like, “How the fuck do you do that? I could never do that.” And I’m like, “I don’t know! I just can.” And I know other musicians who can’t—it’s a struggle. If you want to be a musician, you’ve got to make tunes. But if you can’t do the sleepless thing, you’re going to struggle touring, and it’s going to affect your mental health really badly. You’re not going to be happy. I know people who dropped out of DJing because they couldn’t do it without it fucking with them. It probably fucks with me, actually.

It’s a funny industry—as you get more well known, you’re starting later and later, and then you’re doing all-nighter sets.

Yeah, that’s the fucked-up part of it. I get to headline more often now, which is cool, but I was always someone that people stuck on either side of peak time. I might be more of a closing act: graveyard shift rather than warm-up. People pigeonhole you with your weirdest and most hardcore moments. You’re only as soft as your hardest bit, you know? I can play loads of ambient, and if there’s one hardcore tune everyone’s like, “That was really hardcore!” And, actually, it wasn’t. People have a one-way filter for that. Once they hear something experimental, they’re like, “Whoa, that whole set was really experimental, dude.” Like no, I just had a few little moments.

Ten minutes of breakcore.

Yeah! But ten minutes of breakcore is a lot—it’s a scotch bonnet pepper. I’ve really found that a little goes a long way with that stuff. A two-minute breakcore freakout, and that’s it: “The whole set was breakcore!” But that’s how it goes (laughs). I’m always trying to push people just a little bit, to get them slightly beyond their boundary. So knowing people’s boundaries is really important—knowing what they’re used to. A few years back, it was a step too far to play any breakcore to most crowds I’d be playing to. As jungle started to have a new moment, I was like, “Okay, if you’re into jungle now, then the next logical step is breakcore.” There was a time when I was playing mostly techno parties, so I’d be like, “Can I slip in a little jungle moment?” That would feel a bit risky.

Now that everyone’s really comfortable with jungle, I’m going even further. I’m like, “You’re comfortable with jungle? What are you uncomfortable with? Let’s play some braindance; let’s play some Squarepusher.” [I’m] always thinking about what people’s comfort level is and how to push it. And that changes all the time. That’s fashion. That’s the zeitgeist. People get used to something, then they expect it, and then it’s not surprising any more. I can surprise people with deep house now because they’re not expecting it, whereas I used to be so surrounded by deep house that it was jungle that was unexpected. There’s always somewhere else to go; there’s always some way to push it further.

There’s a part of me that wonders when that might horseshoe back to ambient or downtempo music.

Yeah, so: “Immediately” is the answer to that question (laughs). That’s when it happens: it happens now. I’ve been doing that. I’ve been playing those exact genres—downtempo and ambient—alongside gabber, breakcore, and hardtek. I’ve been finding it really nice to layer ambient over really hardcore stuff. Actually, I’ve always done that.

Two things. Firstly, gabber is ambient—remind me to come back to that in a minute. There’s no difference. But also, contrast is really important to me, and I think that you can do both at once. You’re trying to serve a crowd—if you look at the way people dance, people aren’t necessarily on the beat. They’re moving around it. It’s not like they’re hitting a movement that’s (speaking robotically) on the beat, every beat. Mostly, people are like, whooa (slowly waves arms around). It’s these differences in texture and tempo—something seems smooth in contrast to the jaggedness. Something seems fast in contrast to the slowness. And so on.

So, how do you make your gabber seem even more gabber? Put it on some ambient. How do you make your downtempo seem even more downtempo? Put it with some drum and bass. These things amplify each other. Putting something more mellow with your really intense moment doesn’t make it more mellow—it makes it more intense. It has the opposite effect. Downtempo should chill people out, but how come this downtempo is making the intense moment even more intense? It’s having the effect of uptemponess, not downtemponess. These tools can be used in many different ways.

Recently, I’ve been taking old DJ Krush records out and putting them with this kind of stuff. In wanting to have some dynamics in a set—wanting to have things in certain quantities—gabber or breakcore is, like I said, a scotch bonnet. A little goes a long way. Let’s say I’m working at 200 BPM, which is a cool and intense breakcore [and] gabber realm. Loads of people are making really interesting 100 BPM stuff at the moment—bass music producers. I’m thinking about Bristol people.

Like Accidental Meetings and that crew?

Totally. They put out some amazing 100 BPM, didn’t they? They did a compilation. Good fucking knowledge, man! When I say “Bristol 100 BPM,” and you’re straight on it with some obscure cassette—in fact, wait a minute! (pulls a copy of BKV Industrial, Robin Stewart, Jade, D Ham & Franco Franco’s AMX002 from the mantle) Is that it?

Yes! I have that tape.

Fuckin’ right! It’s right there. I don’t know what people are calling it. To me, it’s 100 BPM bass music; it’s the same as 130 BPM bass music but at a different speed. People are calling it “dancehall,” which I don’t buy into. I think calling it dancehall is a reference to the dotted rhythm that’s common in dancehall and reworks at that tempo. But not everyone’s using that rhythm in it. As a musicologist, I feel like there’s different ways of looking at these things. From your little bass-music bubble, it looks like dancehall, but zoom out and look at things in a wider context. Culturally, all these people are from the bass-music scene, which is part of the rave scene in the UK and has this global reach; that’s the angle you’re coming at it from. I don’t know if it has much to do with dancehall culture. It seems more a part of bass music. There are people like [the dancehall collective] Equiknoxx, who seem to be an outlier in many senses. Is [Equiknoxx member] Gavsborg part of the dancehall scene? All that is to say, these boundaries are always blurred, and language gets a bit complicated.

You asked me to loop back on “Gabber is ambient.”

Maybe I’m being facetious there (laughs). It’s this idea of it meeting around the other end: playing around with extratone. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this?

I am.

Yeah, cool. So extratone as an extension of speedcore, which is an extension of gabber. Fucking fight me in the comments—this is the kind of shit that people get really funny about it, isn’t it? Genre, microgenre—I don’t really give a shit. I think these terms are really useful to describe things, but they describe the boxes, not the music. I think that’s the confusion people get into. I’m describing a box; I’m not saying what is in the box. I’m just describing the box. People get really worried about what is in the box and what is not. It doesn’t really matter if something is in a given genre; it’s just an adjective! (laughs).

I think it’s because, historically, genres and subcultures have been so interlinked that people attach some sort of identity to genres. Punk is a genre, but it’s also fashion and a political stance. It’s so big that people say, “I have attached my identity to this genre, and that’s not it! This is it, and this is not.” They get emotional about it because they’ve attached their identity to it in some way. If I say, (crosses arms and scowls) “I am a dubstep producer,” then what dubstep is is really important to me, because I’ve hung my identity on this genre. So if someone says Britney Spears has made a dubstep tune, that offends me, because you’re aligning me with Britney Spears, but, sorry, she did make a dubstep tune, and that doesn’t affect you (laughs). It shouldn’t affect you.

Do you know about DJ Tron?

Is this footwork-type stuff?

No—it’s hardcore. In ’96 he put out a tape called End of the Fucking World. It’s three hours of increasingly heavy gabber, speedcore, acid—that kind of stuff. By the end it turns to a kind of ambience because you get so worn down by it.

That’s it. There’s a line there—between industrial as well, which starts to sound like noise. And noise and ambient are the same thing. There’s tricky things here: for some people, “ambient” is an intention by the listener rather than by the composer. “Chillout” as a genre—that’s a listening preference. “I want to relax; I need some music that’s going to aid that relaxation.” It doesn’t matter what the composer thought; you are using it for this. You want it to have this effect on you. That’s quite different to a genre which is about the intention of the composer.

We often use this word “experimental” much too broadly. It’s not up to a listener to say if an album is experimental or not. It’s just not our decision. We’re describing the process by which it was made. That’s a fact of history. Was it made through experimentation? Yes or no. This word—“experimental”—you can listen to a noise album and say, “This is really experimental.” Actually, it’s that artist’s fifth noise album, and they are not experimenting at all. They went into the studio with an idea and process and they did it. It’s not born out of experimentation; it just isn’t. That’s a term that’s misused really, really often. You call an album “experimental” and it’s like, “Nah, not really.” (laughs). It was composed and planned and made by someone who knew what they were doing.

We’re going around the houses on genres, but I think they’re really interesting. This feeling of gabber being ambient, as well, is pushing that sound design to the point where it’s noise. Extratone is that too: what is that distinction between texture and beats? Extratone gets into a territory where you can say, “What’s the difference between melodic and amelodic sound?” That’s where we use this word “texture”: sounds that are not percussive, but they’re not really melodic either. They’re there to provide texture. You can mangle your beat to the point where it’s more texture than rhythm.

It’s the same with melody. I think that with interesting sound design you can lose a sense of where the melody is—like with additive synthesis, where you’ve got so many melodic signals that our brain can’t pick out a dominant one. If you hear a gong or a bell or some kind of metal percussion, you can ask different people what note they heard and they might say different answers because there’s many notes—they can’t tell which is dominant. I find that area really interesting: the space where the distinction between melodic and nonmelodic [sounds] breaks down. That’s where something can become so hardcore—so fast—that the beat is texture or melody. That’s from the technical perspective.

Who understands the music better: the raver or the nerd composer? In a sense, the raver has a more immediate grasp of what’s going on because they react instantly. When you hear something, you react to it and this kind of analysis goes on afterwards. I love this! When you hear a chord, that chord is basically a ratio of frequencies. It’s frequencies of vibrations, and what makes it a major triad is the ratio between just two of those frequencies. What’s bonkers about that is: that’s a bit of maths your brain has done to figure out if it’s major or minor. It’s just a mathematical calculation. That calculation happens instantly in your brain, and you instantly have an emotional reaction. Now change that to a fucking orchestra, or a whole tune, and your brain is working out all these ratios—doing all the maths—to decide what ratios are which, and then transferring those ratios into emotions, and you’re having that emotional reaction pretty much instantly. It’s not instant, obviously—there is a bit of a delay—but it hits you pretty quickly.

As a musician, I’m here trying to figure out how to do that. I’m trying to listen to this music and say, “What makes this sad?” But our brains know instantly! That fucking gets me. To me, it’s like: how do we access that response? It’s in us; we can do that math. Our brains are doing all these calculations, so how do I access that? It’s intuition, I guess. How do we access that intuition that knows how to feel at those frequencies? I’m always trying to get in the head of the listener. It’s going back and forth between being super analytical—analyzing and overanalyzing everything, looking at everything from a super scientific and artistic perspective—and then trying not to analyze anything, to just feel and experience it.

I had this really—fuck, is transcendental the right word? I think it might be. I had a transcendental dancefloor experience at a squat rave somewhere in London. It was a very large and echo-y warehouse, and I think there were two or three soundsystem link-ups in the same room. So you get areas where there’s soundclash. You’ve got (laughs) two hard techno rigs and a gabber rig in the same room, and if you stand in the right place, all you hear is washed-out kick drums whooshing. Everything’s flattened by this reverb, and it’s fucking ambient! I remember having this experience and being like, “This is really colossal ambient—power ambient.” The word “power ambient” wasn’t really used at the time, but it felt like DJ Spooky could sample it and put out something really blunted on it. But it’s coming from these hard techno rigs! (laughs). So that was a real moment. I remember feeling that, and I remember going down to one of the rigs and dancing at over 200—maybe 210. Nobody was dancing on the beat; everyone was, like, flying. That moment made me really notice that people aren’t dancing to it like it’s hardcore. They’re dancing to it the way you’d dance to ambient music. From that perspective it’s a full circle. It’s the same thing.

When was this?

This would have been mid-2000s. 2005, 6, 7, something like that. That’s breakcore’s golden era. Venetian Snares was on top form. I think the Born Under a Bad Star [Rossz Csillag Alatt Született] album was around then. The Bang Face club night was going on in London. I was a regular at Bang Face; I was really into breakcore and squat [raves] and all of that. It was an interesting time for music in London: dubstep was still a new thing and it was completely underground.

Earlier you talked about finding a more of-the-moment relationship to music. What is your relationship to improvisation as a practice?

Wonderful question. My relationship to improvisation as a practice is completely fundamental: I struggle to not improvise. I can’t follow a script. I can’t follow a plan. That’s made it difficult to work with other musicians. I think improvisation isn’t respected in Western classical music. It’s not considered to be a part of the Western classical tradition any more. I say “any more” because it’s false that improvisation isn’t a part of Western classical music; it’s just been written out of history. For example, there were writings in the time of Mozart that said, “Oh, yeah, his compositions are cool, but it’s absolutely nothing compared to when you hear the guy improvise.” We’ll never hear Mozart improvise, but I find it really interesting that people at the time were like, “Yeah, he’s okay at composing stuff, but improvising is his main thing.” Fuck! You know?

That aside: I work by improvising. It fucks me off, actually. In write-ups about me, people describe me as classically trained. I’m not, for the record (laughs). I’m just not classically trained. I tried, but I’m shit at it. At school I’d get asked: “What’s your favorite subject?” I’d say, “I want to be a musician.” So I tried to do classical music; I tried to learn dots on a page. It just doesn’t suit me. I really struggled with it. Dyslexia is probably part of why it was difficult for me, and other neurodivergencies, but the thing is, Western classical music is quite restrictive—and prescriptive—on ways to do things. I really struggled with that. I wasn’t allowed to study music at a particularly high level in school because of not being able to read sheet music. That really upset me. I picked up improvisation on the piano. Someone showed me the blues scale and from there, at the age of seven, I was improvising boogie-woogie. And then I went with jazz.

I had a few piano teachers in my teenage years, but I always found music education tricky for multiple reasons. Improvisation, for me, was always about enjoying making music and enjoying that process, about sitting down and doing it, free of intention or structure. When I say “intention,” when you sit down to play a song, you have an intention to get to the end or to play these chords in this sequence. That is the plan, you know? And I always found that restrictive. I had this one jazz piano teacher who was trying to teach me standards, and I had a copy of the Real Book, and we’d go through it. I’d stare at this page and it would have the chords and the melody. Being unable to read music, I had to work it out, counting: “A, B, C, D, E—Okay, that’s an E.” Really slow stuff. I’d write it down and figure it out. But I couldn’t get beyond the second chord, because I’d start playing—chord one, chord two—and I’d be like, “Oh, that’s cool,” and then I would improvise around the first two chords instead of progressing. I’d say, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and learn all twelve chords in this tune.” And I could never do it. I’d just get distracted. It’s like going on a tangent—like you’ve learned from this interaction, I’m big on tangents! (laughter).

But that’s it! The music teacher is going to be like, “Stop that! Get back on track, we have a song to learn.” And that’s the intention here, not: “Enjoy playing music, or make some nice music regardless of whether we get to the end of the song or not.” So if I sit down and I end up spending twenty minutes on the first two chords, playing them, that’s a success, because it was enjoyable, and I developed my practice. But it wasn’t a success if you measure it by this intention to learn a song.

I find all of that stuff quite restrictive. I get the most out of myself if I allow those tangents, if I allow myself to improvise and then let the analysis come afterwards. When I’m working on a tune that’s more structured, creating something with a beginning, middle, and an end, I still find that it’s better for me to go (thrusts arms out) and let it all flow, even if it’s a total mess. Then I’ve got all this material; I can come back afterwards and tidy it up. But it has the spontaneity of the improvisation, and that stays. You can hear that even if you tidy it up afterwards.

We started this conversation with me telling you I didn’t sleep so well. It’s often because inspiration hit. It hit at midnight, and so I was up ’til 3. If it does, it does, and you have to go with it, because I don’t know when it’s gonna hit next or when I’m next gonna have that creative energy to push it through. Again, at the beginning of this conversation, we referenced maneuvering yourself into a lifestyle that fits your brain chemistry. Being able to have a flexible enough lifestyle that I can stay up ’til 3 if inspiration hits… when I was building my career and I was still doing an office job, I’d have to think twice. “Okay, inspiration’s hit; I want to stay up ’til 3 on a Tuesday working on tunes, but I know if I do that I’m not gonna sleep much and I’m gonna be fucked at work tomorrow. Is it worth the risk? Is it worth having a shit day tomorrow if I get some music done tonight?” I think this is the thing for a lot of musicians. You’re not earning from your productions. Maybe you’re earning from a second job—or a first job, even. I guess music was my second job for those years. There’s major sacrifices there. It’s fucking tough. It’s something that everyone’s got to get through: this tricky time where it’s not paying but it requires a lot of time investment.

A thing I say to people is: focus on it being an enjoyable practice so that it’s your downtime. I was gonna say I don’t see it as work—I do see it as work, because I take it really seriously. But different parts of the process are enjoyable compared to others. Some people really enjoy sound design but find programming beats more mundane, but you have to do the parts that you find mundane. For some people, mixing and mastering is their fucking career, and they’re good at it and they love it. I find that difficult, and I think that because I find it difficult, I find it mundane. I just have to say, “It’s a job; I have to do mixdowns today.” It’s a job. Other parts that I love—sitting and playing the piano for hours on end—you hear musicians saying that they don’t like practicing scales. I fucking love practicing scales! (laughs). I really enjoy it! I really enjoy going up and down the keyboard, doing scales. I find it really meditative—really soothing. So that’s cool. It means I’m good at scales. I guess that feeds into my music. My music wouldn’t sound the way it does if I didn’t enjoy scales, actually. Hmm.

I’m curious as to what you’re thinking about.

I’m thinking about that thing I said at the beginning: how you think, and what drives you and motivates you, and how you listen and hear things—they have such an effect on what you produce. I say “how you listen”—I’m quite good at tuning in and tuning out different things sensorially. I’ll be in my studio, really focusing, and someone will walk in the room to give me a cup of tea or something and I just don’t see them. I’m not aware of my surroundings at all because I’m so focused. They’ll (laughs) tap me on the shoulder or something and I jump out of my skin! I scream like I’ve just been stabbed. It’s so alarming to me. Part of that is being able to filter out stuff, and not hear certain things to be in a focused state.

I feel that’s how I listen as well. I’m very happy to listen to music and filter out parts of it that I don’t like. I’m not so into distorted guitars, for example—I’m not into that sound. But I think a lot of metal has really interesting drumming. So I’ll listen to that, but I’m not really listening to the singing or guitar; I’m just listening to that one element. That’s one way of listening, but other people listen in a more holistic way. You can get very different descriptions of the same piece of music depending on who you ask; it’s because we’re all listening in different ways. There’s this concept of “training your ear”—as musicians, we’ve done a lot of listening, and we’ve done a lot more active listening than most people. It’s really important to be aware of how we are active in our listening. I say “important to be aware”—that’s bollocks (laughs). Be aware or don’t.

But for me, I can’t help it—I just am very aware. If you’re a mastering engineer, you’ve trained yourself to listen for certain frequencies and to be aware of transients and that sort of thing. Your listening experience is going to be filtered through all of these things; you’re going to notice stuff that other people don’t notice. I guess that’s what it is: it’s the difference between hearing and listening. You can hear something without noticing something, you know? There’s loads of examples of this, like auditory illusions—the sound equivalent of optical illusions. What illusion, in that sense, demonstrates to us is how active our brains are in the listening process. What we hear in our brain is not pure sonic input. It’s filtered by our interpretation of it. This is something I love about electronic music: it can exist without any visual [elements]. If you hear a recording of a trumpet, you can’t see the trumpet, but you know it’s a trumpet, or at least you know it’s a brass instrument. At least you might know there’s a human blowing down a tube even if you don’t know which instrument or human it is. There’s an implied visual, an implied thing happening in reality: a human blowing down a tube.

In electronic music with interesting sound design, it’s not necessarily going to put in your mind, “Oh, it’s nerds at a computer.” It could do that; certain electronic music might give you that image. But I think we’ve got more of a blank slate in terms of what images come to peoples’ minds. If you listen to Autechre, it’s not necessarily going to sound like two guys sitting at a computer. It’s gonna sound like whatever you mind decides it sounds like. I think of Bernard Parmegiani. Do you know this guy?

I’m not certain!

Oh! Google it after this. He’s a musique concrète guy. Early experimental electronic stuff. Some of his stuff—it’s really abstract, you know? I think that’s a really interesting thing. Abstraction in electronic music allows you to create sounds that don’t necessarily imply too much to the listener about what’s going on. If we hear a traditional instrument, we attach things to it. We attach things to anything we hear; they stimulate thoughts and emotions in us. It’s different for everyone, but I guess we’re trying to tap into something universal there. But it feels really exciting to me that, with electronic music, and with really abstract sounds, we have this opportunity to explore what it is about these sounds that have those effects.

You can isolate it better.

Exactly. It’s further removed from some of these cultural and historic links that we’ve made. Cultural references are hard to avoid; they’re almost impossible to avoid. And why would you want to? It’s tricky when we’re communicating with a range of different people; we don’t know who they are or where they’re coming from.

There’s something I wanted to grab from that, though. I was listening to Portrait With Firewood (2018) this morning. You’re talking about electronic music being able to isolate that emotional timbre a bit more. But on so many of your records, you’re doing electronic music and bringing in all sorts of instrumentation and orchestration. To me, it feels like there’s a tension of sorts in between those ideas. Does that track? Am I overreading?

Yes! I am hyper-aware of this kind of referencing; I am very aware that this is going on, whether you like it or not. You can try to be Autechre—they’re deliberately trying to be as abstract as possible, and not reference any real-world things. In the past, in earlier stuff, there were more sounds where you’d be like, “That’s a vibraphone.” Even drum sounds: I listened to Incunabula—it’s got drumming that sounds like jazz drumming. It’s got what sounds like brushed snares. It samples real sounds. Thinking about the instruments, they’ve gone more and more abstract.

Let’s take jungle as a genre. I can reference jungle with a couple of little sounds—a little bit of the Think break, a little bit of Amen, or something like this, and I have implied a whole fucking thing.

A whole tradition.

A whole tradition. A whole culture. I’ve put myself in a context immediately. I’m really aware of the potency of those things. Jungle is a really big love of mine, as is jazz; those two genres are the largest ones in my collection. I think jazz is the largest, actually, but jazz is a close second. Both of those are genres you can reference with a tiny sound. If you put the tiniest snippet of saxophone—a scotch bonnet!—[on a techno track], people will describe it as jazzy. “Jazzy techno.” It’s got a pinch, but all of a sudden it’s jazzy. Same thing with jungle: a tiny pinch of jungle and, all of a sudden, it’s jungley. Those are really potent. I’m really aware of those references. These things allow you to layer your tracks and make them more dense. I could make a tune that’s pretty much straight techno, and if I think it’s a bit boring—I don’t really want to make a straight anything tune—then let me shift one of the hi-hats just slightly, and, now, it’s gonna shuffle, and people are gonna say, “That’s kinda garagey,” because shuffled hi-hats or shakers or whatever are a reference to garage. All of a sudden, you’ve implied garage with a tiny little tweak. Now let’s put a Think break on top and you imply jungle; let’s put some piano that implies jazz. Before you know it, it’s not just a techno tune thanks to some really little—but potent—references.

I might say to myself, “It’s sounding too much like a techno track” or “It sounds too electronic—I need to put some acoustic sounds in.” I’m really aware of balancing these things. I don’t necessarily get the balance right, but I am constantly juggling it: “This section feels too dominant and it makes the track feel too much like this” or “This section could be longer, and then it would feel more like this.” In my process, a lot of the time, that’s what I’m tweaking. I talked about having improv sessions where I generate loads of material and edit afterwards. That editing afterwards—it’s often a case of saying, “I’ve got all these different parts and they all work together. I’ve got this ambient moment, I’ve got this garagey moment, I’ve got this techno moment. How much of each should I have in the track? How do I balance that?” That balance doesn’t really have an answer. It’s tricky, because you’re trying to second-guess your audience in a way.

And I do like to think of the audience; some musicians look at it from the perspective of their own artistic intention being primary, and I think that I try and balance my own artistic vision with a sense of what I think people are interested in hearing. I consider it to be a contribution to… music, I guess. To human endeavor, actually. I think that any artist putting anything into the world—they’re contributing to the artistic endeavor of humanity. If you’re out there producing lots of generic music that’s kind of similar to stuff that’s already out there, it’s not a huge contribution. It’s still a contribution! But if you’re out there producing the most original stuff that doesn’t exist, and no one’s made anything like it, that’s a huge contribution that you’re making to music. You’re already advancing music. By being influential, as well, you’re advancing music massively.

So I would say, from one day to the next, the more original artists can be, the better. That’s not to say we have to be one hundred percent original all the time. People often say, “There’s no such thing as creativity! Everything is just remixing ideas from the past.” That’s absolutely true, but remixing some shit from the past—that is creating new stuff. I think it’s a bit extreme to say that there’s no such thing as new; I think that it’s just about being aware of the role the past has to play in the future, and understanding that innovation is incremental.

If there’s 100 people churning out really similar tech house tunes, they’re making a little bit of progress because they’re exploring what possibilities there are within this area, and they might be expanding that area slightly by doing a slightly different variation on that blueprint, and a different variation on that blueprint, and a different variation on that blueprint. I think of genres in terms of this “blueprint” idea: someone develops a blueprint that works, so it’s like, “Cool. We want more of those.” And that’s great. But then the innovation happens when we push outside of that blueprint. That’s the contribution. It’s: “What did you do that’s not been done before?” Even if it’s slight, that’s at least a step forward. It’s a little one.

There’s nothing wrong with making generic music—we need it. It’s okay to make incremental improvements. Someone comes up with a blueprint; someone else copies it but makes a slight improvement. In this, I feel like we’re all collaborating by just listening to each other and being inspired. That’s humanity’s collaboration. We really have to celebrate those people who make the biggest contributions. Like Sun Ra: he’s been hugely influential, and he really pushed things forward. I don’t think he had time for stuff that had already been done. There’s no need for it—he was able to do stuff that’s never been done.

I’m getting the sense that you’re less interested in individual genre iterations than you are in building something else. Does that track?

I think that individual genre iterations are really interesting. I’ve thought about doing that; I think that ambient gabber, for example—when I hit upon that idea, I did a couple of tracks that I feel fit into that concept. I still feel there’s, to use a capitalistic term, a gap in the market. More stuff could exist in that area than currently does. I thought: “Should I make an attempt to make that a genre by investing in it?” I could make a concerted effort to cultivate a scene around it—compilations, radio shows. There’s ways to create a scene. But, at the same time, I don’t have time for that. You know what I said about my brain chemistry—I’m all over the place, and I constantly have new ideas. The idea of locking myself into a tunnel for a whole album tour—I can barely sit still for one track, how am I gonna do one album? I can’t stay still for that long (laughs). I can’t stay on one genre for three minutes! Maybe I’d have to work with someone else to do that. I’m just so interested in the in-betweens. I think of Om Unit, who’s done Acid Dub Studies: Volume I, some remixes. Has he done Volume III yet?

Yeah, there is a Volume III.

Volume III just recently came out right, didn't it?

Yeah. [This] February.

This, to me, is someone that’s hit upon a cool genre concept. Naming it Acid Dub Studies is an intention: “I want to explore this genre as a study.” It’s a study in a cross-pollination of two genres, and it’s exactly the way you turn that into a genre. “Acid dub is a thing; we’re gonna call it that; and this is what it’s gonna sound like.” Mad respect to Jim [Coles] for what he’s done with that. I think it’s super astute, and it’s an almost academic approach. I don’t know if (laughs) I’m wired to do that, you know?

I once made a flipbook—hold on! Let me see if I can find it. (gets up, leaves for a few minutes, then returns) I can’t find it, so I’ll just explain it to you. I studied graphic design at art school and I made a flipbook. You know kids’ flip books where there’s multiple pages with, like, multiple heads, and you change the pages?

Oh! Exquisite corpse, sort of.

Exactly. Exquisite corpse in book form. I made a music-genre flipbook so you could make your own genres by flipping it—so “metal samba” or “techno country.” I did artwork, too! I’m more that. You can make a hundred new genres by combining them all in different ways. With the speed of information these days and access to that information, you can become an expert on something pretty quickly. Research is at our fingertips. I explained this to someone the other day—you see these radio shows on NTS, and it’s like—did you know [about] the hip-hop scene in Ukraine? Before the Internet, how could I become an expert on Ukrainian hip-hop? I’d have to go there; I’d have to meet the people. Now, half an hour on the Internet, and I know a lot of what I need to know to do my NTS radio special.(laughs).

I learn about new styles from there all the time!

The thing is, we have so much access to this now. God, I’m also thinking about AI and how this will shape things in the future. If I want to fuse two completely random genres in my flipbook, I think you have access to those genres more easily. It allows you to dip in and out, as well. People’s listening is getting more and more eclectic.

That comes back to the rise of open-format DJing.

It comes from the same thing. It’s super exciting to me because I think I’ve always tended towards that.

Towards open-format mixing?

One hundred percent. In terms of DJing, I grew up on the Solid Steel radio shows, and [the weekly BBC radio program] Breezeblock, I guess. But before I was going to clubs, I heard DJs on Solid Steel Radio. And that was always completely mixed, genre-wise. They’d mix hip-hop tunes with their original sample source, so you’d go between electronic-sounding and acoustic-sounding music via these samples.

Sounds familiar (laughter).

Yeah. Exactly! That was really inspiring to me—to hear this mix of, you know, an electronic track, but then it would totally morph into a jazz tune. That, to me, was what I thought DJing was. When I got into DJing, it was through that. DJing was about putting different things together. It was “I can put jazz with hip-hop” or “I can put these two different things together,” not “It’s there to create a groove for dances.” That, to me, came later. I didn’t go to a club until I was however old, but I’d been listening to DJs on the radio long before that. I think a lot of people get into DJing through clubs and through dancing, where the point is seamlessness, to keep a beat going so people can dance. Which, fair enough. That’s another utility for DJing. But that came secondary to me, and I had to learn that.

I also had to learn that’s what people wanted, because I never did. Being a rookie DJ, I was not moving the crowd, and I’d try to figure out why people weren’t vibing with what I was doing. I realized I was being a bit too all over the place. I had to rein it in and I had to deliver something more palatable. As people have become more open to multiple genre DJ sets and multiple tempos, it’s allowed me to do my thing a bit more, and to do what I always wanted to do. Headlining helped, too. This is the trajectory for any DJ, I think: you’re playing warm-ups, you’re playing for other people’s nights, you’re not the headliner, you’re having to set up for someone else, so you learn to focus on the dancefloor. There’s a balance with any DJ, and any musician, of “entertainer” versus “artist.” If you’re a DJ, and you’re 100% an entertainer, you’re taking requests and you’re giving people exactly what they want. If it’s 100% artistry, you get up there, and you say, “I don’t give a fuck what you want; this is what I’m doing. This is my vision, and leave if you don’t like it.” (laughs).

Both are totally valid, and I think any DJ is choosing where they are between those two things. You start out having to be a bit more of an entertainer and adapting. But the more you headline, the more people turn up and say, “We’re here for you. We want to hear what you have to say, and we want you to be an artist.” And that develops with your career. So today, I have more opportunities to say, “You know what, guys? I’m going to do what I want, and hopefully you’ll like it.” (laughs). I still get gigs where I have to play to the crowd—particularly festivals and things where plenty of people aren’t there to see you, so you’re trying to win people over. It’s a balance. It’s a really hard balance, and I don’t always get that balance right.

Even there, a Dekmantel and a Bang Face would ask for a different calibration.

That’s something cool about having different sides to what you do. I played Bang Face for the first time last year, and that had been a long time coming for me; I had been a regular back in the day, so I was pulling out all these records that I don’t get to play normally because they’re mid-2000s breakcore tunes that are a bit too wild, though not for Bang Face. I’m very aware of what the Dekmantel crowd is expecting and what that means. A Dutch crowd versus a UK crowd: gabber, for example, as we talked about. Dutch gabber and UK gabber are totally different things. I’ve never been into Dutch gabber, and I would feel like I’m not totally certain about the cultural position of gabber in the Netherlands. It’s a loaded word there: it was a huge cultural movement in the ‘90s, whereas in the UK it’s much more niche; your average person on the street hasn’t got an opinion on gabber. In the Netherlands, I think that’s slightly different. It’s like me going to Detroit and being like, “Do I want to play any Detroit techno tunes here? Do I feel I have something to add to that?” I might be playing to people who are really knowledgeable about that, and I’m not. There’s minefields with this stuff!

With jungle, garage, or grime—when I play that stuff to a UK audience, I know they know certain things. One tune isn’t cool because it was in the charts, and it was too popular, whereas Polish people don’t know that, so when they hear it they’re like, “That’s a cool tune.” When you travel to DJ as much as I do, being aware of how shit’s gonna land [is really important]. Tunes that are too obvious for a UK audience might not be for a Polish audience or a Minnesotan audience. I remember the tune “Footcrab” by Addison Groove—there was a time when it was getting battered. Everyone was playing it. In the UK, it was the tune of the summer. And I loved it, so I had it, but I was like, “I can’t play it because everyone’s playing it.” I remember mentioning that to a friend in France who had never heard of it. I was like, “What do you mean, you’ve not heard of it? It was huge!” I realized it wasn’t as big in France, so I could play it there and people would hear it in a different way because they’d not heard it before. These things are so hard—it’s fascinating, and it’s endless. No one can claim to have a full grip on it.

But that’s the fun of it, right?

Yeah, it is.

Earlier, you were talking about that line between performing-as-entertainment versus performing-as-an-artistic practice—on that note, tell me about studying turntablism. Do you feel it reverberating in your practice now?

I had an odd journey with turntablism. Like I mentioned, my route into DJing was mixtapes on radio; it wasn’t the club. I say “mixtapes”—I mean taping mixes off the radio. I was into experimental hip-hop, too—Ninja Tune, Mo Wax—and so turntablism wasn’t a decision. It was just a part of what was going on. To be a good DJ was to have those technical skills. So, in a way, I flowed into that naturally. It started to become clear that I was more technical than other people in my friend group, and I started to see myself as that; I wanted to work on that. There were certain techniques I’d see: I remember seeing Mr. Thing perform, and he was crab scratching, and I was like, “Fuck, I need to learn how to do that.” That’s one of the few techniques that I was really focused on learning. It’s not like I studied most techniques; I just tried them out and got good at them over the years. But a couple of things, like crabbing, you do just have to be focused about learning.

In the beginning that was just how I played and I didn’t really question that, because I was playing music that it was appropriate for. Then, later, I got into raving and dance music. I started going out and getting into seeing DJs in clubs. I started buying dance-music records and I started playing them. At this point, I’m playing—I guess this is early 2000s, so this is proto-dubstep, dubstep, and garage with jungle, breakcore, wonky techno, dancehall… a bunch of stuff like that. No one was scratching. No one was doing that kind of thing. So I didn’t; I didn’t think people wanted to hear it on that kind of stuff. And I didn’t really know how to, either. I couldn’t really fit it together; it always sounded a bit cheesy. A lot of people scratch with the same fucking sounds—we’re still using “fricka-fricka-fresh” and using that on this stuff felt a bit naff. Then, in the late 2000s, London started to look to Berlin and that kind of techno sound was very far away from hip-hop and cutting and scratching. It just didn’t feel right.

A big thing in my career is allowing myself to be myself and not adapting myself to other people. That’s been difficult psychologically, as well; you just have to have confidence. I never had confidence in my music until relatively recently—I’ve always been very shy, and I find it very hard to share my music with people; I assume people won’t get it, that it won’t land. I think that I’m becoming myself more and more. Scratching crept back into my DJing practice as a result of me having more confidence: “I don’t care if you want to hear scratching on techno; I want to do it, and I think it’s gonna work.” [I’ve been] finding my own way of doing it as well, so it sounds like it fits. That’s been a psychological process as much as it’s been a musical one. It’s about me being comfortable being myself and expressing myself and doing what I want to do rather than what I think other people want (laughs).

It’s a beautiful thing to get there.

I’m not fully there, but I’ve made an amazing amount of progress. It’s validation. I was talking about entertainment versus art, and, now, I’m in the position where people say, “We want to hear you do you. We want to hear you do your thing.” So I’m trying to allow that.

It makes me think of that Patti Smith bit referenced in the Under Tangled Silence (2025) liner notes: “We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.”

This is really fundamental to that record, yeah. But it sums up my life—this quest for authenticity, to peel back the layers and expose my real identity underneath. I want that to be the sum of everything that is me. Thinking about genres, for example—back in the day, when I was playing squat parties and playing heavy, dark rave music, jazz was a dirty secret (laughs). It was not relevant to that scene and it wasn’t cool, either. So the fact that I had a knowledge of, and love of, jazz didn’t necessarily help me in that scene. But then you step out of that, and say, “What if it did help me? What if everything about me was an advantage, not a disadvantage?”

Let’s say there’s this one guy that only likes drum and bass, and listens to nothing but drum and bass, and is, therefore, a fucking encyclopedia of knowledge of drum and bass. If you want a drum and bass mix, that’s a good person to ask because they’re gonna be really detailed and knowledgeable. Fine. For that job, a knowledge of jazz might be a disadvantage, because that’s time you didn’t spend listening to drum and bass. If I’m trying to be that, then these other interests of mine aren’t helping me. So it becomes, “Can I somehow maneuver myself into a place where everything about me is an advantage?” It’s the context that makes these things an advantage or a disadvantage. If I make music where it’s an advantage that I like drum and bass as much as classical, and that my interest in medieval music can help me here—do you know what I mean? It’s, “Can I make sure that all of those things are contributing positively, and that none of them are holding me back?”

And that’s it. As I’ve progressed, I’ve allowed more of these influences to permeate. I’ve always been into post-punk and new wave, and that’s always one I found slightly difficult to integrate into what I do. It’s a bit of a sidestep. I mentioned medieval music, and maybe that’s not so obvious to people—or maybe you can hear it on the new album?

I’m not sure! I listen to a decent amount myself, actually (laughs), and I have my own biases [within the canon]. I actually just jotted down this Cantus Orbis tape to send you—it’s a project by Michael Tanner. He has a series where he looks for medieval drone music from the 5th to 15th centuries, and he had an entry in All Night Flight’s tape series last year.

Beautiful. I love the artwork.

Most of the medieval stuff I’m familiar with is typically pretty funereal; I’d have to revisit yours to see what I’m catching. But what references are you thinking of?

I listen to a lot of early polyphony. I find drone interesting, [but] I think my focus is slightly later: early French polyphony, when things started to get into two-three-voice polyphony and the bottom note started to move. What I find particularly interesting about medieval music is—it’s the Wild Fucking West. We’re talking about established genres and this sort of thing, but, here, there’s none of that. They haven’t even agreed on what notes are notes! There are some wild fucking harmonies which would not be considered harmonious [today]. Some really interesting stuff. There’s a bunch of different European folk traditions, as well—I’m thinking about Bulgarian and Hungarian folk music, in particular, which have a lot of close harmonies which, to me, often sound jazzy.

It’s all blue notes.

Yeah. You’ve got flattened fourths and all that. You know—there’s this weird concept around the Devil—tritones and that kind of stuff. That’s a myth, by the way—there’s this myth around the tritone being banned. But I’m really glad it wasn’t, because it’s stuff like that—these rules that came in made music more uniform. [Before those], it’s the Wild Fucking West, and that’s what I love about it. So, yeah, if you were to identify medieval music influence in my work, it’s hidden in my use of harmony. It’s hidden in my choice of intervals. Tracks like... huh. I can’t think of any specific tracks, actually. It’s more moments and approaches to harmony. It’s simplicity as well, you know? If you have something so stripped-back, it’s easier to understand it, in a sense. I’m very interested to listen to this album you just sent me.

Speaking of blue notes: Is your piano still out of tune?

Oh, yeah. It’s really—can you hear that on Portrait?

A bit! But I was reading an XLR8R interview, and you said you deliberately keep it a bit out.

Kind of deliberately. Some pianos—particularly old uprights—get to a point where they’re a bit fucked and they’re past their best. If you keep them in tune in concert pitch, you’re straining on the strings, and they feel a bit more relaxed tuned a semitone out. That’s a decision, but it’s based on wanting to get the best out of your piano. I’d rather it sound nicer, and I’ll just correct the pitch in post, rather than it be [at] concert pitch. If you want to jam with other musicians, it needs to be concert pitch, so that’s a decision on my part: to prioritize the way it sounds, and to allow it to go slightly out of tune. It just makes it sound like a real fucking piano, and that’s quite different to a MIDI one. On the album, there’s a mix of MIDI piano and real acoustic piano; you never quite know which is which, and I’ve blurred that line. People that really know their shit can probably tell which is which. Same with the flute on the last EP. It’s kind of like what I was saying earlier about hearing things and imagining how they were made—if you hear a saxophone, you have an image of a person blowing—and playing around with expectations.

The reason I ask about your piano is: I want to ask about imperfection, and mistakes, and surprises. How does your own work catch you off guard?

You know, Lynch talked about finding ideas: you’re trying to grab hold of ideas. It’s not that you’re having them; it’s that your finding them. I think improvisation feels a bit like that search sometimes. I can sit at the piano—in fact, I did this today—and just play for twenty minutes or longer, feeling my way around and coming up with stuff. I might not find anything, and that’s okay. I’m not doing it to find something; I’m doing it to enjoy it, and hopefully I’ll find something. I’m not very prolific. I’m trying to think of the metaphor people use: you throw a lot out and see what sticks. I think that’s it: it’s a lot of time improvising and exploring and, sometimes, something will catch my ear and I’ll be like, “That’s dope. I’ve found something. That’s really cool.”

What I’m trying to cultivate is a kind of obsession; it’s through obsession that I’m most productive. Most of the time, I’m scatty and all over the place—new idea, new idea, new idea, new idea—and then one idea gets fucking lodged in my head and I can’t shake it. I’m obsessed. It’s then that I think I’m on to something: if I cannot get this loop out of my head for five days, it must be decent. So I’m having lots of these sessions: playing until something gets locked in place and I can’t get it out of my head. I ride that wave of obsession; that goes back to what we were saying earlier. If it’s midnight, and (snaps) you have that obsession, and it’s the first time in a few weeks it’s hit, I’m fucking staying up, man. If this is the best inspiration you’ve had for months, fucking ride that wave whilst it’s there; you’ll be super productive. After a week, maybe the obsession is gone, and you needed to get as much out of that obsession as you could at the time. I’m trying to harness those moments when they come.

Are you comfortable giving me a picture of what that process looked like last night?

Sure. I don’t really have a process; everything is different. But as an example, I was playing around. I have a MIDI keyboard and I have an acoustic piano, which is super out of tune, actually; it’s too much. I have to deal with that. But I was playing a piano plugin on the MIDI [keyboard], and I hit upon a cluster of notes that I found cool. I played it over and over and I eventually recorded it. What did I do...? I just fucked with it. Since it was MIDI, I could put different sounds on it; I just tried a bunch of things. That was a brand new session, so I saved it in the end. It started out as piano, but it ended up as some sort of ambient pad-y thing. I don’t know if I’ll go back to it; I might. I think it was interesting.

This is another thing: if I have a day which is designated in my calendar as a studio day, I might enter into that day not super inspired or without any particular ideas. But I’ve got a stash of started ideas from when inspiration did hit, so I’ll go into those. A night like last night—what comes out of it is a little idea that might be useful at some point. I have days when I lack inspiration and need to tap into that archive, and I’ll have days where I lack structure but I’ve got ideas, so I can add to the archive. It’s great to have stuff knocking about on the computer that I can use. I just put a lot of importance on enjoying the process and being process-based.

I also think about—fuck, what’s his name? He’s a sculptor... I’ll remember his name in a bit. I was watching an interview with him, and he said “Your mistakes are your personality.” I think that is a really interesting idea: if everyone was perfect, we’d all be the same. The imperfections are those differences that make you who you are. I think that’s really beautiful. I think of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of imperfection-as-perfection: the beauty of imperfection. Particularly in working with computers, digital accuracy can be a bit boring and regimented. As soon as you put something through an analog kit or record it with a microphone, you pick up all this extra stuff that’s so juicy. Texture! Grit!

The notion of what perfection is breaks down. In the digital world, as compared to the real world, the computer can get everything on grid. It can get everything perfectly lined up on tempo and following a BPM. This is perfection, right? Because everything’s perfectly on grid and that’s perfect. However, any classical musician would say, “We’re not trying to play on the grid; it sounds shit to play perfectly on grid. It sounds really soulless.” The conductor is trying to get people to play with tempo rubato: this concept where the grid is stretchy. It means “stolen time,” which means you can speed up a bit if you slow down afterwards. You’re never on grid. The idea of perfection, there, is different to what the computer’s trying to achieve. I don’t know if we can define it: it doesn’t really make sense unless you’re talking about a goal. “We met the goal: that’s perfection.” If we’re not trying to be that, the notion of perfection doesn’t matter.

It’s kind of bunk.

Yeah. Perfection is about intention: did you achieve what you were trying to achieve? If we’re making experimental music, our intention is to experiment. Maybe that’s of primary importance over enjoyability: a slightly academic approach of wanting to make something avant-garde, and saying that’s more important than it being enjoyable or easy to listen to. I don’t know if we can necessarily know someone’s intention by listening to their music, so how can we say if it’s perfect? It really breaks down.

All that to say: if I’m aiming for something, and if we were to call whatever someone is aiming for their perfection, then perfection, to me, is textured, layered, and complex. I don’t want to see straight lines; I’d rather see a bumpy line. That’s more perfect to me. If you consider the wabi-sabi philosophy, things get more interesting with age because those little knocks, dents, and scratches—that’s age, that’s wisdom, that’s life, and that’s adding to the thing. I feel the same with music: antique things with history are more interesting to me than the factory-made, brand-new thing that’s out of the box.

As for surprises, that’s something different. That comes into experimentation and when part of your process is: “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not entering this with the intention of a specific goal.” The goal is experimentation; the goal is to generate material. It’s so different going into a project—let’s say a sound-design project—with a specific thing in mind that I want. Let’s say I’m working on a tune: pretty much everything’s in place, but I really need an organ sound. I’m going into the studio looking for an organ sound, but it’s not just that—I know what kind of sound I’m trying to make. I’ve got a brief for myself. I’ve got an API. You can measure how successful I am at fulfilling the brief to make the sound that is needed. I’m not very good at doing perfection because I’m quite bad at sticking to a plan. But what I am good at is ideas. My approach is to have a million ideas; at some point, something’s gonna stick, and that’s okay.

My understanding with Under Tangled Silence is that it emerged out of you losing a lot of your files. Is that correct?

Yeah. Some of the ideas on the album date back to before Portrait. There’s a track called “Galaxy in Silence” in the middle of the album—that piano part was going to be on Portrait, but I just couldn’t finish the track and I didn’t feel like its mood fit, so it never got finished. A lot of the ideas were older. I got to the point, in 2020, where I’d almost finished the album and I had this major computer meltdown involving my laptop and my backup drives. A power surge burned a load of things out. My backup system was not very robust at the time, partially because I was doing manual backups whenever I traveled. When COVID stopped my traveling, my backup routine stopped. It’s funny: I always thought of backing up as something I needed to do if I left the house with my laptop. My laptop just sat in my studio; it didn’t feel like it was in danger.

Thankfully, I make a lot of mixdowns as I go because I like to listen in my headphones as I’m going for walks or things like that. I had a lot of the ideas in audio form, but I had none of the session files, so I had to recreate those ideas from scratch. I was surprised to realize how vivid my memory of this stuff is; I recreated a lot of it from memory, and pretty accurately. Unfortunately, there’s certain sound design that’s just really fucking hard to retro-engineer. I’d listen to these sounds I made like: “I know what synth this was, but that was a wavetable synth with 80 different waveforms and I chose three of them.” Stuff like that is definitely lost.

Those glitches—that digital fuckery—really found its way into the music in a meaningful way conceptually, as well. I was already working with more glitch sounds than previously, and I’d already started to work with raw data sounds as well, and when this whole thing happened, it just kind of made sense that it was part of the story of the album. Obviously, I took all my stuff to data recovery specialists, so I was able to recover some corrupt files, and I found some interesting glitches in those. I started to incorporate those in the album. Some of the glitchy sounds you hear are genuine. The track “Hold,” for example—a lot of that is actual fucked files.

Aside from corrupt data and fragile computers, I’ve always found this balance—between the organic-acoustic and the digital realms, between perfection and imperfection—to be interesting. We think of computers as being perfect, but the piano’s still fine! I think of, like, WALL-E: computers as fragile things, as broken little robots that bump into things. People think of technology as perfection, but technology’s fucking shit! It’s always breaking (laughs). I really think of computers as broken promise machines. They’re full of promises of what they’re able to do, but they’re clunky. Playing with that—being like, “I’ve got computers here, but the robots are broken, the humans are holding it together”—there’s a lot of broken robots on the track. There’s a broken robot in “Waxcap,” all the way through, who’s trying really hard to keep up but struggles.

It’s also there structurally. I wanted to break out of the structure: you get into a groove, but you don’t want to get too comfortable before you break it. In the context of this machine-music versus acoustic music, the machines always want to be in the groove; they want to be doing a repetitive thing; they want to be looping. That’s their safe space. The humans—it’s a little different. We feel more comfortable being a bit looser and not being on grid. I think there’s a fight, sometimes, between the electronic and the acoustic elements in the tracks. It breaks apart. I really wanted to accentuate that tension. [It’s] that idea of the broken computer, and the fragility of the digital world, and the fragility of technology, and thinking of it as a slightly soulful approach to computer music.

We too often think of these things as being perfection, and of technology as being advanced. Technology isn’t advanced. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. A violin is technology; a pencil is technology. Once upon a time, those were innovative and at the forefront. It’s taking a little bit of a zoom-out and saying that, in the history of technology, we’re at the early stages of computer music. This is brand-new shit. It’s gonna look really dated. I was listening to Kraftwerk this morning and they’re all about being futuristic. It doesn’t sound like the future; it sounds like the 1980s! (laughs) And of course, why wouldn’t it? I think we’ve got past the stage where “computer music” means “sci-fi” or “futuristic music” or “innovative.” No: computer music’s not innovative. It’s old-school. It’s been around long enough.

It’s a tool, not a form.

Yeah, but you can’t avoid the tool and you can’t avoid the form. That’s a form-and-function debate, in a sense, and I think you can’t avoid it—and I think that you shouldn’t. If I’m trying to fake strings on my computer, I could spend a lot of time working on making those strings as realistic as possible so that someone listening to it thinks I hired an orchestra. I could spend a lot of time working on it to make it sound realistic even though it’s a plugin, but for me, what is more interesting is for it to sound like a computer simulating strings. I’d rather it sound like what it is than have it pretend to be something else. Maybe you’re working on a soundtrack and you have a low budget and a deadline. I get it—I’m not against fake strings. But what I’m aiming for is making the most of everything. You could say, “I want strings, but I don’t have access to a string quartet; I only have access to plugins—oh dear, it’ll do that I can do it on a VST plugin, and it’ll be almost as good,” or you could say, “Let’s make this an advantage.” How can we say that having to do it on a computer is actually better? That’s the thing: making it work for you.

Going back to the story of me losing my shit: if I incorporate the breakdown into the album, then it’s a better album for the fact that the breakdown happened. And I believe that it is, actually. In some ways, it’s a bummer to me—these ideas are five years old, and electronic music moves so fast. Five years is a long time for innovation in dance music. So I’m like, “Are people going to hear this and say ‘This sounds a bit old-school—it sounds like 2020?” So that’s slightly a bummer, but that allows it to maybe be a little bit more timeless. I have the confidence that these tracks, and these ideas, still sound relevant today. I feel it’s worth people hearing it; it was worth finishing the album off and going with those ideas. I wanted those ideas to be done—it becomes its own thing.

Talk to me about making music as a physical process. You’ve talked about finding ideas, and I think about mixing with vinyl—and the way they warp over the years. What do your instruments and records teach you as objects?

There’s two things going on there. You’re a player, and you’re a listener. I think that when you play and you improvise it can be, physically, a bit mechanical. I was talking about practicing scales, and a lot of the time when I practice scales, I like to improvise: I stick in a mode and go up and down. That can become quite mechanical. In a way, that’s the point: you’re working on your muscle memory. But as a listener, you’re tuning in to stuff. I think a lot of inspiration comes from deep listening: listening to something and hearing what needs to go into it. You know this phenomenon of knowing a journey, but not being able to describe it to someone? Someone says, “How do you get from your flat to your favorite coffee shop?” You know the journey, because you’ve walked it a thousand times, but try describing that journey in terms of left, right, left, right.

It’s impossible.

Yeah. You don’t know it as it is, but you can kind of feel it as you go. It can be a bit like that. I can’t explain it, I just have to do it and it’s there. You just have to sit down and play and it will come out. There’s no way other than the practical way. Weirdly, listening can be like that as well. If you listen to the same thing over and over again, you start to hear stuff—you start to hear more things in it. I listen to my own stuff a lot in my process—maybe I made a four-bar loop, or a melodic line, and I’ll listen to that over and over again, on loop, for half an hour. As I listen, I’m allowing myself to imagine what else goes on top. That, to me, is improvising. What I’m saying about the journey—I only know what comes next while I’m walking it, so I have to keep walking it, over and over again. I’m looking at the map, but the map’s not useful. I have to actually walk the street.

In musical terms, that means that if I want to know what happens next in my tune, I have to listen to it from the beginning. If I need to know what happens after bar 32, I start at the beginning; when I get to bar 32 I’m like, “Ah! That’s what happens next.” I can hear it happening in my head. So I get that bit down, and then I need to know what happens in the next four bars. That process can be very long-winded, but that’s me walking it and going on that journey. You get to the crossroads, and you know what direction to go. I can’t always explain why (laughs). I just feel it. And in a sense, that process of constantly listening and reacting to what you’ve heard—that’s trying to stimulate an improvisation. I’m working on the computer, so I can’t improvise in real time because I’m programming, but I’m trying to access the part of my brain that can improvise: to ask it what happens next. It’s annoying that I have to walk it, because it would be much quicker if I could use the map (laughter). But I just can’t!

It’s not the way you’re wired.

Yeah, it’s not. For plenty of people, it’s all about the map. I think of composers who work on paper and jot down notes. I’m like, “You can use a map. That’s amazing. You’re able to have a broad overview—that’s fucking dope.” Equally, there’s plenty of people who are envious of people who can improvise.

You’re making me think of post-minimalist compositions situated in between those spaces—there’s written sheet music, but there’s space for doubt and uncertainty.

This is about composition, in a sense, and it’s about this idea of a composer having a level of control. It’s basically a set of instructions to musicians. I’m a huge John Cage fan and yes, his approach to this question is very much to say, “You can’t control everything, and randomness is inevitable.” Elements that are outside of your control are inevitable as a composer; for him to embrace that to the point of 4’33” is wonderful. That’s an almost complete acceptance of the composer not controlling the piece—all that is left is the elements that are not controlled, which is the silence. He has no control over the silence in a track whatsoever. I find that beautifully poetic. The thing about electronic music, in terms of composition, is the concept that the file is the piece of music. We’re controlling quite a lot with that. We don’t control the silence, but there’s a sense of what the absoluteness of silence is in a digital file: it’s the absence of data.

It’s very different to delivering a composition as a set of instructions. This is where we really get into the notion of control and randomness. Fucking—it’s an American avant-garde composer, I want to say it’s Harrison Birtwistle, but it might be—it’s La Monte Young! La Monte Young said (laughs) that he doesn’t like his own music existing in recordings because the listener has a volume control. He’s like, “You’re making decisions about the dynamics of the music. As a composer, I’ve given you power to change my music in a way I’m not comfortable with. My music should be heard at a specific volume that I set.” I think that’s wild. I love the madness of that—the idea of the volume knob as something that offers control over the music. Of course it is! Absolutely!

You just forget it’s a tool.

It’s a tool, and it has a huge effect on how the music is heard. So for a composer to say, “That is not my art; that CD is not my art”—I guess, in a sense, it’s the difference between seeing a picture of the Mona Lisa in a book and seeing the actual thing. That’s La Monte Young’s point: “That CD might give you an impression of what my music is, but that CD is not my music.” Autechre would say, “That CD is the music.” That is the product. I don’t know—maybe I shouldn’t put words into their mouths. But another way of looking at it, from the digital perspective, is to say: the CD, and the digital file, are art forms in themselves. An oil painting is an art form, and an MP3 is an art form; they’re just different mediums. As musicians, are we here to create files or are we here to create experiences? There’s these different ways we reach people, and I’m a big believer in form and function having a close relationship—the medium and the message being really tied up with each other.

I like the idea that the medium is the message. I don’t necessarily think you need to commit fully to that idea, but they’re so linked. Classical music on CD, or vinyl, always seems a bit odd—it doesn’t really fit. It doesn’t really work on that format so well. There are people who have made it work, but I don’t think it works in itself—not in the same way as, like, dub on a 7-inch. It belongs there; it’s part of the culture; it’s part of the music for it to exist like that. I’m very aware of making music that’s going to exist as a file. I want it to sound like that—bringing in glitches and sounds like that. If I’m painting, I want you to see the brushstrokes. I think of those glitches, in a sense, as brushstrokes. I made this on a computer, and you can tell, because you can see some pixels occasionally. I’m not going to pretend it’s an oil painting if it’s not. I hope that in my work you can see the brushstrokes and the pixels, because there’s both.

I love that. Thank you.

There’s a pull quote! (laughs).

Just to be a bit cheeky—am I hearing that if there’s a remix EP, it’ll be wildly different?

I haven’t thought about that. You know what? I think there probably can’t be because I don’t have full stems for all the tracks. Some of the tracks are made up of little samples that I had from work I’d done previously. It’s a real hodgepodge. In some sense, I had it finished in 2020 and I knew what the album was, ideas-wise, but I didn’t finish the album until [the] last minute. This is how I work—everything’s up in the air until it all comes together. I leave each track unfinished because I want to finish it off in the context of knowing the rest of the album. With a lot of tracks, I open up my session file and I’ve got different permutations of the same elements: does this track sound better if it starts off with the beat and then the melodic elements come in later, or does it sound better the other way around? I might create both versions in my Ableton session—I might create four or five different versions. Which one is right might depend on where it is in the album, and what track comes before or after it. Those decisions don’t have to come until late stages.

That’s something that I’ve gotten better at doing. Before I was like, “It’s so hard to finish a track, so if I’m able to, I should.” Now I’m better at doing it, and I’m more able to balance it out. I’m more able to do what I want to do. I guess that’s just technical ability—I’m not just flailing around. I’m self-taught, so that’s a big part of it. I think self-taught people tend to lack a bit of confidence; we haven’t had validation that what we’re doing is the right way to do it. I think imposter syndrome is a lot more common in self-taught people. I know so many people who have studied audio engineering and been to music tech school and that kind of thing. They know what they know; they know what they don’t know as well. For ages, I didn’t use compressors at all, because I didn’t realize they were important. My first few releases have no compressors on them whatsoever! I listen back and I think, “How is that even possible?” But I didn’t know that. If you’re self-taught you inevitably take a slightly odd path and have bits missing.

I’ve felt similarly in some of my crafts, too. Without a formal education, there’s this responsibility to piece it together.

It’s funny, these gaps. I think electronic music is interesting because it doesn’t have a long history. At least when I started in the early 2000s, most people making electronic music were self-taught. Now, I’ll meet people on the road who have studied audio engineering, but we’re still in the infancy of this whole thing. More and more, education around it is going to change it in a really positive way. I think we’ll be able to move things forward. That is an inevitability when it’s self-taught, though: you cut your own path.

This is something I like to ask near the end of my interviews: what is something you recently came to learn about yourself?

I’m learning stuff about myself all the time. I’m in therapy, so that helps.

That’ll do it (laughter).

I am, at the moment, trying—I guess I’ve always been trying—to focus my energies in positive ways: to point my energy at something constructive. What I realized recently is that I can be quite hard on myself when it comes to that. I want everything I do to contribute to my work as an artist. When I say that—“contribute to my work as an artist”—what I mean is that I want it to make me a better thinker. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I’m always researching things, and I’m very inquisitive. I’m always trying to make more connections between the different parts of my thinking, as I think we become stronger thinkers the more connected we are in our thinking. If I watch TV, or if I want to watch a movie, I want to choose something that is going to enrich me. For that reason, I mostly watch documentaries and factual stuff. I’m always trying to research; I’m always trying to learn. If I watch a movie, I want it to be really visually enthralling and atmospheric. I want to get something from it in that way.

Recently, I started to think that I was being hard on myself and that I should relax. You don’t have to work all the time, you don’t have to think about self-improvement as being the only thing. I got a bit hung up on that, so in turn I started to say, “You need to chill more, do nothing more, and relax more.” I’ve come back around to another way of thinking recently, which is: a lot of those working practices—they are my downtime. Playing the piano is how I chill out, and that’s okay. I don’t need to think of it as work. I don’t need to put that pressure on myself—to perform, to constantly do better. I’ve come to a feeling of: it’s important for that to be part of a healthy daily practice. Music can be that, and this idea of it being a job, or a hobby, or both, or some combination—what if it’s none of those? What if it’s just like breathing? What if it’s just part of existence? I think for me it kind of is—it’s something that needs to be there.

I recently realized how fundamental music is to my existence. I didn’t realize it wasn’t like that for everyone—you don’t realize people don’t see things the way you do, you know? Not all people hear music in their head; I have a really strong imagination for it, and maybe that’s not the same for everyone. The fact that it’s so soothing to me—it’s fundamental. We have to compartmentalize things in our lives. You have to call it a job, or you have to call it a hobby, or you have to label it as leisure time. When we’re trying to give structure to our day or our week or our lives, we have to categorize our activities. But I don’t know—this is beyond that. I don’t know what we can call it, because it just is. You don’t put “breathing” on your to-do list. You just do it. You don’t put eating on your to-do list, either; you just have a feeling for it in the back of your mind. I guess it’s like that with the piano, and with music, for me: I just get a sense that I need to go and play music for a bit. It’s a fundamental thing.

What’s next for you?

Pushing forward. I don’t want to give too much away in terms of creative projects, because I’ve got a lot on the boil and I don’t necessarily know which ones are going to be fruitful. I’m constantly buying new acoustic instruments, and I’m constantly experimenting with those in different ways. I’m researching electroacoustic realms—different ways to bring acoustic and electronic sounds together. I’ve bought lots of drums recently; I’m looking out into my room—I’ve got a violin, a guitar, a didgeridoo. Some gongs. Lots of different sound sources. I feel like I’m going to be doing a lot of chilled and meditative music because I’m going to need to wind down after touring. So that’s what’s next.

Djrum’s lastest album, Under Tangled Silence, is out now.

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