You’ve recently released your new album, ‘Curve 1’. What’s the story behind it?
I got out of my deal a couple of years ago now and it just felt like the right time to return to – without wanting to be too cheesy or pastiche – just the music. What the music is, what it does, its function in people’s lives. That led me, naturally, to returning to making really electronic-focused music. I hate the word functional, but it’s essentially functional club music.
Where was the album made?
It started in Los Angeles. I had lined up a bunch of sessions with various singers and artists of notoriety and big pop stars. I did two or three days and then got really depressed. I wondered ‘why the hell am I so upset about this?’. It made me realise that I’m done, for now, with just being the guy with the laptop who’s serving some kind of function for an artist where they’re like ‘I’m trying to do this, can you make it sound like this?’. I felt done with being a set of tools for an artist to use. I like doing that by choice, but in that context, in LA, I think it made me throw the chains off a little bit and be like ‘wait a minute, I should just be doing what I think is cool’.
How did feeling this way impact the music you went on to make?
The sentiment was very much ‘fuck it, I’m going to do whatever and I might make mistakes, but at least I’ll own it’. And that’s when ‘Whenever I Want’ got made. That track was the first thing that emerged, which is why it’s first on the tracklist. It became the muse for the whole record.
Having produced for so many big names – like PinkPantheress and Ice Spice – over the past few years, was it also a case of wanting to regain control?
Kind of. Just to afford myself the time to actually think about what I wanted to make, void of the context of involving anyone else or trying to match somebody else’s style, which is something that I love doing. But now I produce for a very small list of artists that are just people that I love, like Shygirl, PinkPantheress, Gretel and Daniela Lalita. It tends to be people that I feel I really understand and can contribute something to, rather than being like ‘so and so heard your music and they really want to work with you’. I’m not gagging to do those things anymore – I’m happy to do my own thing.
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How does the ‘Curve’ of the album title fit into this idea?
There’s obviously the idea of curves and the club and dancing and that sort of thing, but it was a word that made itself obvious to me more because of this circuitous way of looking at things. Ignoring what we don’t care about, going around those and finding our own way.
How did you decide on the collaborators for ‘Curve 1’? Is there anything specific that you’re looking for when considering working with an artist?
It tends to all be mates or samples. It was cool collaborating that way, rather than being like ‘who’s buzzy at the moment?’. Daniela Lalita is on two tracks. I’m working on her album at the moment, and that’s nuts – it’s going to be my album of the year when it comes out. Yeule is a friend of mine, and they’re on the album too. In every case where there’s a feature on the album, it was just someone who I hang out with anyway.
How did that differ from your previous collaborations?
It’s very different. In the past, if there was an artist I admired, I would reach out to them to try and find a way of working with them. Whereas, on this album, I’m working with all these people anyway, and there are ideas that are circulating, or that I’ve written and I can send to them. It feels very wholesome in that regard.
Because the album spans so many different sounds and genres, it plays somewhat like a mixtape. Was that the intention?
As much as I try to make something that’s coherent, I always find myself playing with lots of different genres and sounds. But the thrust of it is that it’s designed for nights out, afters, to be heard in clubs… to be listened to in the dark.
Why in the dark, specifically?
It’s the same reason that the artwork is very minimal and without frills, context or explanation. I’m just trying to refocus my efforts on being anti-narrative. I feel like a lot of music, just because of the time that we’re in, has become kind of narrative-focused, and it’s all about what you’re doing around the music — almost like a vox pop questionnaire. It feels more subversive to me, now, to just drop things void of that and go back to the Aphex Twin way of thinking – ‘just go and listen to it’.
Read this next: The best Aphex Twin DJ mixes
Was leaving the label helpful in this way?
I’m sure it freed me up, mentally, to start to think that way, and I got out of my deal just as the whole joke of ‘we need to do TikToks’ became a thing, so I narrowly avoided being stuck in that spin cycle…
Are you glad it happened at that time for that reason?
It’s not that I’m not fond of it, I think it’s perfectly valid and it speaks to how artists are forced to make themselves competitive, and how the music market has changed. But, it’s just not something that suits my personality, particularly; the artifice of sitting down and trying to do something extracurricular outside of just making good music and trying to speak through the work. It’s been fun being independent and being able to pick and choose which of those avenues that feel right to me, for example putting extra work into the music videos. It’s also allowed me to be able to be selective with how much I say about the music, versus how much I just let it speak for itself.
Did you want to leave the pop aspect of your artistry behind with this album? What are your thoughts on genre in general?
Pop is such a loosely defined thing. Gone are the days of, in school, being like ‘those are the goth kids’. Everyone’s just mixing and matching everything, which is cool. But, with this album, what I was really focused on was dance – the idea of what makes people dance? And that has a pop sentiment in a way, but, subconsciously, being out of my label deal made me be like ‘now I don’t have to think about radio singles, I don’t have to think about features, particularly, if I don’t want to’. The whole thing has been a big exercise in freedom.
