PaulStretch is a really out-there, standalone audio stretching engine. So with 'Second Sun,' I took a portion of what I was working on and took it into PaulStretch and then bring it back into the track to sit low in the mix as a drone version of itself. It gives the track a good base and a haunting texture to it.
I do really long DJ sets - I play for five or six hours sometimes - but the live shows are a bit more compact. The arch of how to tell a story, where the energy is, where you have peaks and drops, where things go up and things come down, that's all being informed by DJ-ing.
All my records feel like a diary of the time and headspace they were made in and 'Black Sands' documents this in real time for me. A transition of falling in love with beatmaking again. An appreciation of a place and time and an anticipation for what was going to happen next.
I got to Brighton in the late 90s and discovered samplers. Suddenly, I could be my own band with a guitar and sampler, getting my drums in charity shop records. It was better than bashing around in someone's basement, trying to compromise ideas.
In the very beginning, I kind of had this hip-hop, cut-and-paste approach to music. The first record, especially, was from looking at people like DJ Shadow and A Tribe Called Quest, and I think a phase that a lot of people go through when they start sampling is to go out and stamp on twigs and try to record that kind of stuff.
I never used to be able to work on the road, I was always strictly in the studio. But not everything's gotten smaller - I have Ableton on the laptop now and a sample library, which means I can use that downtime to pour it into the music.
People think about L.A. as being sunny and relaxed, but there's a darker side to it. There's people living in tents under bridges in their thousands. The culture almost encourages you to look the other way.
Most of the time I approach a track as series of experiments: seeing what fits, and trying to manipulate sounds into each other so they have some kind of dialogue, and then start building a structure around it.
I struggle with arrangements. I take forever doing them. It gets to a point where I've been playing around with things on loops for days. I always paint in broad strokes - very quickly, I'll feel out the larger structure - but it's putting the details in that I find the hardest part.
When I made my first record, I was very naive, and I didn't know much about production, and I had a very basic amount of equipment, and I was just digging through vinyl for samples in a very old-fashioned way. It was very loop-based and very cut and paste, and that's the way I started out.