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What a legend…. How and when did you get into dance music? But I guess it was more when I started secondary school, my friends and I got into garage and drum and bass. At which point did you start making some yourself? Your mix for us incorporates live elements; can you tell us more about using a drum machine in your DJ sets?

How often do you play in London? What do you think of the scene there? I moved out of London about four years ago. Obviously Phonica and Honest Jons are great shops. Blackmarket Records is very nostalgic for me, seeing as it was my go-to place as a teen, but there are some great new shops like Kristina records and I recently did an in-store performance at Love Vinyl which had some great music in there as well.

Who would you say was your biggest influence? Production-wise, my college friend Rahim from Lab Creation, he was a few years older than me and took me to Technicality which used to be at Herbal. This introduced me to the likes of Paradox, Fracture and Neptune, Macc. Basically the Drum Funk guys, early Metalheadz stuff and Reinforced which has shaped the way I make music to this day.

On this particular project, I played it to a few friends whilst compiling the tracks in order to see what worked together so the album made sense. Do you think advances in computer technology and gear have affected your creativity? Although I did use some old gear on this some old Emu racks and Oberheim synths , the main bulk was in the box.

There is a really good new plugin that emulates Akai samplers that convert to the bit sound, which saves a lot of time and sounds great. Writing on a computer is great and the writing process is really quick, but sometimes it feels very formulated.

Writing on hardware feels a lot freer. Happy mistakes are more frequent, rather than copying a bar loop with slight automation and sound changes. But I guess the balance between the two is healthy. I wanted to try and capture some of my main influences of the music I grew up with that excited me and shaped my palette of sound design and finding samples. Creatively, how did the work on this album stack up to previous studio sessions? Was this more challenging to complete than others? Half of the album was written over the course of the last three—four years.

I got back into drum breaks recently and got back to the roots of music I listened to when I was younger.