The Mix 039: Randomer

Your new EP ‘Everything Happens For No Reason’ is your first in five years — how does it feel to be releasing a record after such a long time?

Honestly, it’s like it’s my first release again, it took me by surprise. I’d forgotten what this feels like, it’s so weird. I used to release quite consistently. But it’s been nice, the response so far has been great so I’m happy.

How do you feel like the electronic landscape has changed since ‘Sleep Of Reason’ came out?

Yeah, the last record was just before the pandemic, so I think we can all agree that after the pandemic – even during it – the whole industry landscape changed in such a big way. Maybe that is what made me quite anxious about the release, just because of how different things are now in such a short space of time.

Half a decade is quite a long time though, isn’t it?

[Laughs] Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I’ve kind of been touring for 15 years, and there’s times when I go to a club and I’m playing there and talking to the promoter or the booker, and they’ll say “Oh it’s your first time!” and I’ll be like “No, I actually played here about five years ago.” Then it’ll be at the dinner or something and I’ll do an investigation, and I realise it was more like 10 years ago. I think when you’re touring, time goes so fast and I think that’s part of the reason it doesn’t feel like that long.

You have said that the EP has come following a “reflective hiatus” for the last five years. Can you tell us a little about that reflection? What do you feel has been the outcome of taking time away?

The thought of just releasing more music for the sake of releasing more tracks that were the same as before wasn’t really that inspiring to me. Maybe I would have a different career trajectory if I had done that. But I wasn’t ready to release until I had a more meaningful sound or direction. There’s a lot of inconsistency in my work, but something links it all together… I’m not sure what.

But yeah, the hiatus came from me stripping things back during the pandemic and rebuilding my craft as a musician — not so much music production, but writing and composing music. It was something that I was grateful to have the time to do because I felt like I didn’t have the consistency… not in styles, but in how effective I was at writing. The weird thing is, for me, this hiatus… I’ve been writing the whole time. But none of the music that I’ve made has gone out. It’s been brewing.

How do you think that has influenced the EP?

I’m proud of how the tracks came out. It’s a step up in terms of the composition of what I was writing before. I’m happy, I think it was time well spent, for sure. Now, every time I’m writing I feel all the tools are there, the ideas are fully realised.

Read this next: “Everything changed”: How Anetha is powering up her artistry

How was it to work with Anetha on the record on the track ‘I Can’t Believe’? And what was behind the decision to release on her imprint ‘mama told ya’?

We’ve known each other for a while and played a fair few B2Bs in the past so we always felt like kindred spirits musically. When she first started the label, I think she asked me to release on it — but I think that was during the hiatus [laughs]. But as it grew, I was so impressed, the curation was amazing. Because of that, and hearing the records they released, I could tell they put a lot of care into what they were doing – and because this was such a meaningful record to me, it made sense to have Mama told ya as a home and explore those themes together.

The collaboration track, we’d also been talking about doing that for years and it never happened — so when it came to it, we went through so many versions, it was fun. We were trying to hone in on the mid-point between our two styles, and we got there and it ended up being quite a deep track. I found this sound library of a Balkan choir, I find sacred choral music is beautiful, and I was playing these harmonies and they resonated with my mood when I was writing it; they combined well with the sounds Anetha was sending me – she makes incredible arrangements – and it worked.

It feels extremely timely with the state of the world right now to touch on themes of embracing unpredictability/finding our way in the chaos — has it been cathartic for you to explore this? What do you hope your listeners take away from the EP as far as this theme is concerned?

It’s interesting, I don’t think it’s possible to embrace unpredictability — but I guess this EP explores sitting with it at least. I mean, the record’s called ‘Everything Happens For No Reason’; I find that sentence quite reassuring. You know what I mean? Rather than believe there’s some higher force, that seems to be quite evil [laughs]. It’s quite nice to sit with the randomness of the world. I’d quite like the audience to experience their own reflection and catharsis within the music that I make.

How have your own experiences with “sitting in it” informed the record?

It is heavily inspired by my experiences of being in Kyiv in 2022 during the full-scale Russian invasion, with my partner who is Ukrainian. Experiencing that first-hand. That’s why the first track is called ‘I Saw The World Melt’ because I did feel like I saw that happen in front of my eyes. We woke up at 5:AM to the city being bombed. Nothing would be the same again for either of us, we spent several days on the road escaping Ukraine — narrowly avoiding battles, seeing columns of tanks, and people on bicycles with AK-47s and fighter jets. You can’t put words to those experiences really, we were quite lucky to survive that journey. But also, seeing the desire for freedom astounded me. There was so much humanity. We crossed over the border into Poland and we were greeted by hundreds of Polish people who had been staying up for three days just helping people who were coming across the border — they weren’t aid workers, just normal people who had taken time out of their lives to help their neighbours really. It was a very intense experience.

I was in two minds about talking about my own experiences, because I didn’t want to shape how people feel themselves when they hear it. That is something that is so great about music, you can kind of make your own connections with your own life and emotions. Something that I’ve learned a lot recently is that inspiration isn’t so much under my control as an artist, it’s about what you experience in your life in general, from big things to your day-to-day mood — they influence the choices that you make while writing, they rear their head each second while you’re composing. You sometimes have to really dig afterwards to find out where it all came from when you listen back, because at the time you’re just focused on what you need to do to finish the track — but in reality, it’s the inspiration that informs that.

It’s a bit more of a subconscious thing than something you’ve been purposefully attempting to capture.

Yeah. The reason I said it’s something that I’ve learned recently, is that for a long time, I thought I didn’t have what It is that makes people create music inspired by, I don’t know… that stream over there or some birdsong that I heard, or the beautiful moment I met my partner or whatever. Even though when I did write music I was feeling all these things, I couldn’t really connect them to events. But sometimes, it’s just there. It’s kind of like therapy, where you have to investigate “What does that feeling mean? Where was I?”

And then suddenly it makes sense when you really start to dissect it?

Yeah, it clicks and you’re like “Wow.” Sometimes even after that moment, you can get even more meaning out of it.