Carbinax

If ever there was an album that moulded me into what Carbinax is now, this is it. 
This was the first time I’d ever seen the names Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson , Carl Craig or Blake Baxter, and two tracks towered over the rest. “Techno Music” by Juan Atkins and “It is what it is” by Rhythim is rhythim.
If you listen carefully, you’ll hear accents, nods and nuances of these two tracks in much of my work, especially rhythmically.

Listening to this album, along with my life at that time, were some of my happiest experiences. I was young, life was exhilarating, and my whole life was ahead of me, so when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived like a bolt out of a clear blue sky and swamped us with a daily onslaught of fear, anxiety and statistics, I just wanted to escape, and became a recluse, immersing myself in the sounds and rhythms that made me feel so inspired, alive and hopeful back in 1988 when Detroit Techno first appeared in a real way, and the whole landscape changed. I remember with clarity just how much of a seismic shift it seemed like at the time. Less Tectonic…..more Techtonic. 

The very first music I released online around 2002/3/4 under the name 2ndMOUSE and aut0m3k was very Detroit inspired, but then I somehow slipped into an IDM groove, which is the correct acronym for what I do, but I’ve since distanced myself from IDM due to a lot of what is now labelled IDM not actually being danceable at all, and sometimes not even music, which is the point. IDM has become this weird elitist avant-garde culture that would defend that pile of bricks in the Tate Modern as “Art”, or John Cage’s “Silence” as music, and I want nothing to do with any of that pretense. 

Gone To Ground is more representative of the majority of what I’d really like to make going forwards.

It was called “Gone To Ground” because when people vanished in those US cop shows, they always said things like “our john doe has gone to ground” and he’d disappeared into thin air and the trail had gone cold.
In a very real sense I went underground. At the time it felt like going into a fallout shelter, hoarding hand sanitizer, bottled water and 5,000 tins of beans . Very surreal, and bizarre……even now, 7 months on.

I wanted to make an album that was upbeat, that would give people hope and positive vibes, during these difficult days, and as it’s been my most successful album to date, I think I have largely succeeded in that aim, aided by two good, supremely talented  friends Don Funcken ( one half of the Dutch Electronic Wizards Funckarma ), and Devroka ( who sounds uncannily like Cybotron ) who supplied two amazing remixes.

I wanted to try something different with this album, and got a limited run of CDs printed ( I’ll be doing this from now on ) . At the time of writing, there are still a small handful left. I think they look great !!