How’s your physical status? Are you feeling well lately?
Yeah. Wait no, my hand hurts. Because of climbing, so I’m actually taking a break from guitar. So that’s bad. Ive been running very long distances, like 13km. I think I’m healthy.
You climbing a lot?
Yeah. I climbing every week for 2 months. But I think I need to stop because its putting too much strength on my hands, bit worry about if I’m keep doing that might ruin my guitar playing forever. Probably that’s the priority.
Do you think your music has regional character?
It’s influenced by city. My album is about to come out, that’s like chaotic music, quite claustrophobic, very stressful music. When I sent my music to family and friend who lives in countryside, I feel like it doesn’t translate there as well. But recently I’ve been playing guitar a little more live, I kind of shifted my sound more towards something kind of wider, less claustrophobic, I think I’m idealising something completely away from my reality. But I dont know if that’s a London sound. I’m trying to escape in my head total completely different planet maybe. Yeah I want to make a kind of cosmic sound.
If you don’t live in London, where you want to live? You said you want to live in china right?
Yeah it would be fun to live in China, it’ll be such a god emotion and a different thing, seems like a fascinating at the moment. If not there then, somewhere with sunshine, I think I need to be in the sun more. That’s the biggest problem with this country for me, it gets very dark in the winter and cold and wet. Maybe Spain or Athens.
What kind of music style you’re doing? Are you doing the categorisation?
Yeah its difficult. I think my style is a mix of influences, not one thing. Ambient music was a big influences, but my music isn’t ambient, quite dislocated, jarring. So it’s kind of informed by ambient music but almost anti-ambient. So I normally just tell people it’s experimental electronic music, but its too general for labels.
What kind of gig you like to watch normally?
I think I like to see people playing instruments. Not that I dislike music that’s not made with instrument, but I think I’m kind of a music nerd in my heart. So I like seeing people really good at playing and seeing how they use their instrument live. I think maybe I’ve been a bit overexposed to electronic music, and I’m being more and more drawn to group ensembles that people playing instruments together.
Trying to think of the last gig I saw… Your one! The gig you put on with James. That was nice. Any gig that I’m not entirely sure what will happen is quite exciting. I like cool gigs.
You making music alone most of the time right?
More recently Ive been playing with other people a lot. I started a band. I was playing pretty much on my own, now I like playing with other people a lot, so trying to do that more.
Any collab on your new album?
Theres only one with Kirke, just from a jam session we had, I recorded on my phone. Other than that its all me.
Want to talk little bit about your new album?
So its a collection of pieces I wrote between 2023-2025. The way I write music is I just write it and then think about the means afterwards. But I think a lot time the theme follows on the sonic me the music I made before. I wanted it to sound a bit like scrolling on your phone, wanted to be exploring the emotional landscape of what that thoughts like, when you scrolling and always having so much information, trying to live in the world with information would feel like through sound. I just find myself overwhelmed by everything, feeling loads of different emotions in a really short space.
I think the music I’m making now since that album, trying to go the other way to utopia. I’ve been more escapist, whereas I think this album is more like dealing with the reality.
I was thinking a lot about humans in relation to the perfection of technology and “AI”. One of the theme on the album is like weird human sounds like scorching, grunting and breathing. I was thinking about biological imperfection of humans, the grossness of it. I was watching films by David Cronenberg, he deals with a lot of body horror and the texture of human reality vs technology. Ive been thinking a lot about my job as an administrator, I probably be the last person to ever do this job, just because it’s gonna get taken over by computers quite soon. And it was just this image of being like “the last person to do something” was quite profound to me. Feels like being the age of the world seeing things collapsing.
How do you see AI? In my opinion I feel like China is very pro-AI generally; but company like Bandcamp very against AI, any thoughts about it?
I think at the moment the way AI is being used within music is uninteresting to me, in the sense of used to imitate commercial music. So it’s application in that sense is just boring. Music is interesting to me because a human has made it, I’m as interested in the person that’s made it as the music itself, because that adds a context which is fascinating. Music is always been a communal exercise for me. So once you kind of take out those elements it becomes not mysterious anymore. For instance if I was to hear a Bob Dylan album, if it was AI made and sounds like Bob Dylan or a folk album sounds as good as Bob Dylan, I wouldn’t be as interested in it because its not a person. But I’m cautious of being skeptical of AI entirely, I’m sure it can be used as a tool in an interesting way. Like plugins you can create interesting music with it, but not as a replication device. Some kind of educational tool can be interesting.
Do you use AI to make your own music?
Ive not used it at all. I used Suno out of curiosity to make a pop song, but I did it once and its not music you want to listen to. The way they contrasts lyrics is really bizarre. I think there is a space for something interesting like John Rathman, he use AI in his art work is interesting. There might be space for musician to do the same. Ive been leaning more towards just playing on my guitar anyway and goes like distant from the AI commission.
My worry with it, all is just a tsunami wave but we’re not going to stop, its like talking about internet in 1994. This thing is gonna happen, how do we want to approach it? Like Covid? When we first hearing about Covid and we were completely unprepared, and we weren’t expecting it to hit as hard as it did, feels exactly like that. And I imagine its gonna impact us in the same way. Right now I’m not against it, I’m interested in it, but I dont think its doing anything good. It’s been used by these soulless billionaire who have no interest in art.
Is your music imperfection to you?
The music I’ve been out on my album isn’t have much room for imperfection, its all rendered in MIDI so it’s like, almost exactly what I want. There’s no precision in it, texture kind of blew into each other on the music, so its not perfect in that sense. When I play guitar theres imperfection.
So it must be a good thing for your work to be imperfect or unfinished?
When I hear music that’s been perfectly made, like an Ed Sheeran song. Theres’s texture to it that’s really disturbing. It may as well be AI, perfectly pitched and clean. The music ive made is deliberately imperfect, about human imperfection in the face of technological perfection. I guess I like imperfection, but I’m not consciously looking for it. I think you just notice it when it’s not there. And it takes away from… It’s not recognisable to me. There has to be some dents, otherwise it becomes inhuman. But you could use AI make a song that’s imperfect intentionally. Theres a philosophical question. How would that feel if I knew there was an imperfection that is deliberately done?
You told me you’re not good at rhythm? Does it affect you or you think its just perfect?
I think I need practice more. I used to read like classical music on guitar and stuff, I always struggle with sight reading from the time perspective, like counting is hard. Maybe that side of my brain doesn’t work, maybe I just didn’t practice enough with metronome. But I do make ambient music now which is completely atemporal, so maybe theres a reason behind that.