Hi Robert, I appreciate you coming on here. I loved listening through the album, so I wanted to extend a huge congratulation on this; it feels like a special one.

I’d like to start by asking what inspired you to release this album now, and how does it reflect your personal journey over the last decade?

Thank you for having me. It was a culmination of multiple losses, and a fresh realisation of how fragile life is – along with having the material ready to release – that drove me to finalise and share this work. As has been the case with previous albums, a title and a sense of interconnected pieces coming together arrived years before the album was finalised, but there was a protracted process of melting down everything towards a coherent two hour narrative.

Truthfully it's not the most encouraging time to be putting out music, especially if you struggle with anything resembling self promotion and don't want to work algorithms, but it was really the deaths of some people I cared about, and then my own mysterious health problems, including a period of severe hearing loss - that woke me up to the truth that it's better to share the music than not to.

My childhood background is in classical music, and I love forming sound into music, and even conceiving of albums in long form manner – inspired by longer view of symphonies I grew up with. I'll do that whether the music gets out or not. But releasing Brutalist became a genuine catharsis, where it all began to come together to its final form as most of my hearing recovered. So, on one level it represents all the obsessions I've always had with sonics, the semiotics of sound, and what music even is; on another it truly existed as a parallel kind of life re-start.

I'll always advocate for sharing; you never know what will resonate the most with those exploring your works.

Drawing parallels to architectural Brutalism; Can you elaborate on how this concept influenced the sound and structure of your compositions? Any buildings or areas specifically that you’ve been fond of?

Despite the painful experiences outlined above, I don't view my music as a direct transcription of emotional binaries. And so yes, in sound - while acknowledging that sonic materiality and abstract conceptual frameworks resist simple translation - the album does in some sense often reflect brutalism: in its more clinically elegant constructions, in its stark geometric frameworks, and how it is in a certain sense more minimalistic, groove-orientated and monolithic than my previous releases.

I love that neutral-grey-concrete sound colour that appears in certain dub tracks. I'm drawn to creating sonic environments where detail proliferates at every scale, where each new listening reveals nested architectures, intricate systems operating within systems, like discovering new rooms within rooms in some vast brutalist complex. Brutalism, both as a concept and a word, carries an interesting paradox for me.

On the surface, it once seemed a bit aggressive – it conjured images of harsh, imposing forms; it can be seen as unwelcoming. As a kid I also misunderstood it - associating it with "brutal" in English (even though the word comes from the French "béton brut" meaning "raw concrete", rather than from any connection to brutality.) Yet at its heart, Brutalism was a utopian statement of intent. It’s about building something resilient, functional, something new from the rubble of war in concrete and light. This tension - between its perceived severity and an idealistic core - is something I found inspiring while finalising Brutalist. When people do listen to my music they often tell me it is “dark”, which I don't understand at all, and that total difference is a bit intriguing in my mind also. As for specific structures, I'll be honest that I’m always been drawn to abandoned Soviet bunkers in Hungary and spend hours absorbing their atmospheres - and they're not technically 'Brutalist'! But they are utilitarian, austere, carry a similar aesthetic visually, and are profoundly evocative, especially rising in the fog.

The historical context is so important; and it's intrugiing that there can be parralells outside of the archetecture itself into something such as your music. As an artist trying to make something new and interesting; how do you navigate being influenced by such giants while carving out your unique identity?

It seems to me that inspiration doesn't work in a linear way, and I don't really try to do anything in music except follow curiosities and make whatever is in front of me as good as possible. Even the question of whether something is “good” or not can be paralysing, along with considering yourself as the sole author; at some point you can doubt everything you do, and a track that seemed great to you one week seems so weak the next. So I find it better to just say “creativity is happening” and try to leave it there. If someone creates freely and doesn't limit their imagination, I think the question of identity answers itself. Certainly though I have to credit those who influenced me; amongst other things, hearing that music gives a feeling of “permission granted” to try anything.

To work to a degree of detail you've always wanted to, but never heard before. To collapse the boundaries and categorisations that are often put on so-called seperate musical elements or categories of music. To dare to believe that music doesn't “need” a certain element, or conversely that it can be borne from a density, a fierce cloud of stochastic sonic collisions. I wouldn't be doing this music without people in the past who were braver than I. Even when it is very indirect, I'm thankful for any and all influences that create that excitement to towards adventure. I remember making all these rave tracks after reading about John Cage as a teenager; they were about as far in results from his philosophy as you can get – not that I properly understood him either - but just coming into contact with a very open, free, generous inquisitive spirit grants you uplift and fearlessness to try new ideas. I love the sense of otherness, the ecstasy of the unknown that hits you as you venture into music making – the way a track can burn with a thick, overwhelming atmosphere that shifts the atmosphere of any room it plays in. I hope Brutalist can take people into some deep and unusual journeys.

I know they will.

On Slowfoot Records, how has your journey with them so far been?

Slowfoot's tagline is that it is an “independent record label exploring the boundaries between pop and experimental music”, and that is where I feel most at home! They are a fantastic label with real integrity in how they deal with artists. As much as I never think of outside issues or viewpoints while making music, I sometimes wonder later, after that, if anyone else will like it, since it's neither truly academic nor pop.

But Slowfoot provides a perfect space in the boundary of these various worlds. And really to me, it's all the same on one level, because I just care about the sound. There’s that tension zone engaging music occupies. That holding of the space between seemingly impossible sonic opposites and area of friction between different conceptual underpinnings and outworkings is what is really exciting in music. With Brutalist, there are nods and references to certain genres and movements in electronic music history, and there's no label better than Slowfoot to hold disparate references.

So let's get stuck in to some technicals. Could you share a little on the technology, equipment, and software you’re working with? Could you talk me through what goes into making a track, from start to finish?

Sure, I'm always happy to share anything about how I make music. I will say that the tracks existed in “families”, where sometimes aspects of one would inform where the next began. I take a lot of field recordings, and a track like Seven Bowls is almost entirely created from spending many weeks of moulding and editing those field recordings (in that case, of aquatic life, scrunching and squishing objects, crunching boots on mud, water recordings etc.) into musical form.

The mystery of whether sound can “defer meaning” and the play invovled in how much we allow a source to “name itself” or create associations excites me. Some hardware synths I often used were the Korg MS-20, Nord Lead 3, Moog Subsequent 37, Juno 106, and a good few others – with many guitar pedals at times. More than that, I like to build things up and shred them in the digital domain.

Most of the tracks are written in tuning systems other than 12 tone equal temperament – often tunings I've devised. My friend Andy Knight, who plays pocket trumpet on this and on my previous albums, is incredibly gifted at his instrument and able to play in quarter tones, for example. As much as I still love improvising on the piano, for this music I usually start with creating sounds. That kicks inspiration off for me and leads to other decisions. Segregating what people call “sound design” from “music” doesn't make sense in this context. What fascinates me is how our categories in music - pitch, rhythm, timbre – exist on a perceptual spectrum. These supposedly discrete parameters reveal themselves as different aspects of pure oscillation.

You'll learn that as a kid when you speed a snare drum up till it becomes a tone! And you soon discover this goes for everything: a reverb's decay envelope contains its own melodic architecture; feedback patterns generate emergent rhythmic structures and imply other tonal choices; the room you feed the music back into to record it back into itself is as much “music” as anything else. You make patches in Reaktor where all the elements making up a musical sound “talk” to each other. These aren't separate parameters, but expressions of the same underlying sonic phenomena.

So I often like to create sounds from first principles, not out of purism, but because it allows me to work in these interstitial spaces where traditional musical categories break down. You're creating from the edit -out. That's not to say every track is conceived like that. I really like the Microtonic software drum machine, and sometimes bashing something into that lead to the next step. Or creating a quick sequence on the Korg Monologue, which wonderfully has some support of alternate tunings, leads to the rest of a track's construction.

Overall, many different approaches and tools go into making a piece – from singing into an object into a spinning fan for a central tonal aspect of a piece like Bipdeal, to Dance of Oxidation, which was mostly an Elektron Machinedrum and Korg Volca along with sequenced vocal processing – but in all cases what emerges is an exploration of sound as a malleable continuum.

The digital domain becomes a crucible where these sonic elements can be deconstructed and reconstituted - where field recordings transform into harmonic beds, where synthesis and natural sounds intermingle until they're indistinguishable. It's a process of constant metamorphosis, where every sound contains the potential for complete transformation, and where the boundaries between source material, processing, and final form dissolve into a unified audio field.

I imagine you’ll want to reflect on such a great release, however I couldn’t help asking. What’s next on the horizon for you?

That is kind of you to say. I try to make sure I'm always making music, which means something new could always be around the corner. Even when you're tired, totally uninspired and most music irritates you, that's a good time to discipline yourself into making something new. You will be more demanding.

The results will potentially even be better, as you'll have to go further to avoid everything sounding absolutely unimpressive. But either way, for whatever reason I have been drawn back into writing more overtly melodic music again, in a very emotional different space to what came in the period before. Really, there's so much to explore, and there's no reason we can't follow all these different lines of inspiration. The landscape of sound is infinitely vast, and I've come to embrace the idea that creative exploration needn't follow a single trajectory – that we can pursue multiple conceptions of music simultaneously, each informing and enriching the other.

Any artists or up-comers you’re inspired by right now?

Most of the most fascinating music I've heard recently has been from people who haven't even put a first release out yet! Kids making wonderful things that they're not got confidence in to release. There's something particularly compelling about these nascent sonic explorations, where innovation often emerges from a place of pure creative necessity rather than conscious experimentation. Beyond that, I've discovered an incredibly vibrant community of musicians on Mastodon, where the absence of algorithmic curation has led to some genuinely surprising and inspiring encounters. If anyone wants to hang out there and continue the conversation, here's a link to my page. Many of the people I talk to are making inspiring music.

Robert's fantastic project releases officailly, 10th January 2025. Be sure to support it if you can; this is something truly special.