‘An Endless Quiet Night In’ – released March 2024
I wanted to make the tracks quite organic and etheral. The only rule was ‘no percussion’. Quite a few tracks didn’t make the cut. Behind the scenes of gentle music making lies a bloodbath of discarded tunes.
I really like some of the post-Roxy stuff Eno did where he does these short pieces, usually very melodic and repetitive. Much of the music here would’ve started with me spending an evening jamming for 45 minutes and then the next day getting the best bits to form a distinct shorter piece.
‘Amsterdam Field Recordings’ – released July 2023
In 2022 I managed to get a detached retina (fun times!) which meant no screens (and hence no music) for some considerable time. I used this opportunity to travel around my city to record various sounds/noises/atmospheres (from church bells to metro trips to park scenes and more).
A collection of sounds for homesick Amsterdammers.
‘Low Country’ – released February 2021
I spent the first few months of lockdown 2020 developing an unhealthy obsession with dub. Stripping back tracks to leave only the bare bones and then using tape delays to sending feedback slices and hits to the moon and back. How those days flew by. What virus? I was listening loads to King Tubby, Sly & Robbie, Keith Hudson and particularly the ‘Berlin’ dub-techno of Rhythm & Sound, Purl, Heavenchord, Monolake and Deadbeat. All great stuff. They manage to make music sound so simple and effortless when I know (now) how tricky it is to get that balance of using space as much as sound itself.
‘Hissy Fits’ – released April 2020
I wanted to challenge myself and give writing a ‘pop’ album a really good go. It was probably the most time consuming project I’ve ever done. Took years of re-writes, tinkering, mixing, mastering. Had various musicians to help out (notably Kurt Weiss on trumpet, Katty Heath on vocals for ‘Cut It Out’ and First Family Riot’s Ben on vocals for ‘Misinformation Housing Estate’).
‘Null Structures’ – released March 2016
Electronic melodies and atmospheres influenced and containing the sounds of the infamous shortwave radio ‘number stations’ of the cold war era and beyond. Legend has it that the broadcasts ranged from containing coded messages to spies to implicit instructions that if the broadcast could no longer be heard at a certain time then the listener would know that the transmitting party had a suffered a nuclear attack and a suitable military response was then required. They included the British Intelligence Service’s ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ and the mysterious Russian ‘UVB-76’ (broadcasting from 1973 to current).