For those who aren’t familiar with your journey, how did you get into composing, producing and sound designing?

It was a sort of coming-together of lots of things, music in general has always been my special interest so growing up I hyperfixated on many different aspects within that. I learnt piano until grade 6 and played tenor horn in an orchestra but also used to make as-accurate-as-possible pop covers on Garageband as a tween and then got obsessed with collecting field recordings and then DJing. I also wanted to be an actor and went to various drama clubs which I feel helped me mould my erratic stage presence a bit haha, so after losing touch with making music whilst I lived in London it felt like a good time to try and create some language of expression which could honour every aspect of my ‘inner child’. I’d been DJing where I grew up in Exeter, and a bit in London too, so once I moved to Bristol that was my in. I was so lucky to immediately fall in with a really fun and supportive crowd who were pushing something really fresh in terms of live electronic music and nightlife, and five years later here we are!

On your phenomenal album “The Horgenaith”, it features a Daxophone you made yourself. When did you begin building your own instruments and what was the process?

In terms of actually constructing a purpose-built instrument, my only prior attempt was some kind of one-stringed harp stretched between a branch and a cardboard box that my grandpa helped me make as a kid. But I’ve always been fascinated with acoustics and harmonics and the visceral impression we receive from those physical vibrations, there’s something very different in that to what you get from a digital synth. Surprisingly the Daxophone actually has step by step instructions on how to build one written by its creator Hans Reichel, so I brought the project to Jemima Coulter who is as incredible a carpenter as they are a musician and it took maybe a month or so of blunting various woodworking tools to carve out these specific but unpredictable shapes.

As a composer, producer and live performer, how do you translate your music from inside the box to the stage?

For me the process is almost the reverse - it begins as a performance in my head, even if there are no bodies involved but just flashes of memories and chromatextural landscapes undulating and cracking open. And the tricky part is translating that into the box in a way that feels authentic but also good haha. When I first started under this moniker I didn’t have any of my own music to perform to so was doing like an hour-long DJ set imbued with some narrative that I wanted to express at that time, and would lip-sync and thrash around to the whole thing to embody this storyline and work through it. Once I had my own tracks it was much more personal, and each unrehearsed performance feels out some new facet which I have to face right then and there on stage. There are aspects which I plan of course, the tracklist is often set and I’ve been really enjoying using set design and costume more, those elements come from the initial internal inspiration, but the rest is this entity I can only seem to access in the room with the audience and how I’m feeling at that moment.

Your track “I Am The Earth” is beautiful, could you talk us through your inspirations for this track and the rest of the album?

Thank you! It really surprised me how much people engaged with it. I was researching a lot about mythology and folklore but hadn’t actually worked on a track that felt traditional, so it was partially about paying homage to the history of what was inspiring me. I’d been listening to lots of Bulgarian folk choirs and Gaelic Psalm singers and was in love with the way these voices move like a flock of birds, all in sync darting around and mirroring each other shifting between monophony and polyphony. I spent about 9 hours in the studio recording the 40 layers of vocals which make up the choir, playing with an accordion that my boyfriend inherited, a vintage autoharp which we found in Cornwall and our cowbell collection. The lyrics themselves really sum up the main idea at the album’s core, about rediscovering the body as a landscape made up of many disparate organisms, with an immense history inside it both scientific and mythological, recognising feminine archetypes and playing with them to construct new speculative trajectories.

You’ve been touring for some time now, what have been some of the highs and lows of being on the road?

It’s definitely a real dream at times, I’m so grateful I get to share something really special to me with so many people. I always try and plan time off too otherwise it would be completely unmanageable, I often forget how taxing it is to perform at full throttle even twice a week let alone four times. The tour I’m currently on has been really wild, but surprisingly lonely. There’s been some family things going on at home and it’s odd to be so physically separated from that, as well as my friends and enemies (in an endearing sense). A surefire way for me to reset properly and get back to myself if I’m feeling overwhelmed is to be submerged in water - anyone who has watched my instagram stories probably knows this - so be it a bathtub, a pool, a river, a lake, the sea, whatever it is I will find it haha. I’m really proud too that we managed to sort this whole tour with no flights, it’s actually made the travelling part much more pleasant despite carrying a 30kg suitcase everywhere I go, and it’s made me very optimistic to know that it’s not just possible but affordable too. 

Your music has been featured in high end fashion shows including Acne Studios, what’s in store for you this 2023 and beyond?

I kinda wanna chill out a bit honestly haha, I feel as though I’ve been doing the most for the last few years doing things I never would’ve imagined. It’s been so wild and it’s made me really excited about going chrysalis mode again - I wanna enter my collar era this summer since the whole of The Horgenaith was a personal endeavour, there’s definitely some juicy potentialities afoot.

Talk us through the track you last [cmd] ‘S’d ? ([ctrl] ‘S’ to PC users)?

Since I’ve been gigging for the last two weeks it’s my ‘LIVE.logicx’ project, which is the track I play through for my performances. I’m pretty sure it’s the same project since I started performing, for a while it became super fragile with loads of audio samples and tempo markers but for this tour I finally made time to clean it up and simplify everything which has helped a lot with latency and input glitches. I’ve made a couple of ‘live versions’ of tracks from the album which is a process I’m having a lot of fun with, how can I make a dance track out of this or how can I make this moment stand out. I’m incredibly proud of this run of shows and finally being able to bring the album to people in the way I imagined from the start.

What can the CDR audiences expect from your time with us?

Lots of surprises probably! A lot of the reasoning behind my musical choices is highly emotional and it’s about creating a structure that externalises something then tweaking until satisfaction (or dissatisfaction depending on the telos of the piece). My composition style is fairly traditional but my production is very instinctive, I use almost zero plugins from outside Logic but I find ways to twist things. I think that comes from using Garageband for so long, because it’s probably the most rudimentary DAW everything is super simplified but with enough will power you can do some crazy things - I actually released an EP from GarageBand with the label Infinite Machine when I was 17, under a short-lived pseudonym ‘Kalpa’. 

And finally, for those just getting to grips with producing and keen to get their Works In Progress out there, what advice do you have for them?

Try everything, keep practising, listen to your instincts. Whatever interface you’re working with, spend as much time trying to understand it as you do trying to break it. 

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