'Recognising the portentous warning signs of a global extinction event, elect individuals retreat to Hermetica: a sealed biosphere and luxury resort; a privileged vantage for the super-elite to watch the last catastrophic moments of humankind play out on screens as entertainment.

Whilst life support and ecologies are governed by an artificial intelligence, under the Labour For Life Initiative, a non-elect staff, selected by trades, skills and other desirable physical attributes, are housed within Hermetica. After all, a biosphere needs maintenance, its elite residents require hospitality, and the eventual rejuvenation of an apocalyptic world must have bodies to do the heavy-lifting.

After months of exposure to what began as casual current affairs viewing, growing into algorithmically curated media debasement (decapitations over breakfast before hot-yoga; the live-flaying of a village playing out on the screens of the gymnasium), Hermetica’s elite residents begin to desire something more, something that even the capital-expenditure sim’s most outlandish scenarios can’t provide.

There’s only so much you can get from witnessing an act before you just have to try it yourself, they say, as Hermetica accelerates into wilder, happy destruction…'
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WILDER is an imagined soundtrack exploring isolation: daily life as allergenic catalyst for revolution; the closed community as incubator for human dysfunction; the occultation of violent aberrance and taboo pathologies birthed from vicious (sub)urban boredom.

Inspired by J G Ballard’s novels (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes) and Todd Hayne’s Safe (1995), WILDER is Ballardian cinema for the ears: thundering synth brutality and ethereal kosmische liminality divulge a filmic narrative across eleven tracks.

The creative process for this album was often interrupted, starting life in autumn 2017 before being finished in summer 2021. This fragmentation, having to put the album down due to life events, scoring commitments and global catastrophe, in turn became the creative process itself, taking inspiration from Brian Eno’s liner notes to Ambient 4 on composting: ‘converting what would otherwise have been waste into nourishment.’

The act of composition became one of rich collaboration with a past self, tied directly to time, and part of a cycle of musical (and self) reinterpretation, renewal and rebirth: a broken conversation across time, embracing and exploiting past recordings, their ‘faults’, distortions and noise – WILDER’s sound identity being a mosaic of downsampled clock jitter, bucket-brigade degradation, drifting analog keyboards, ground loops and magnetic ether.

Returning to and finishing WILDER in the (post-)pandemic-era gave new meaning to its source texts, with isolation becoming a near universal human experience and Ballardian weirdness a daily occurrence. It makes great accompaniment to quotidian libidinal repression, the politics of boredom, and bourgeois inconvenience in the light of frontline sacrifice.

Gear List:

ARP Odyssey. ALM, Doepfer, Make Noise & Mutable Instruments Eurorack Modular System. Ibanez RG 7-string prestige. Kawai SP-100. KNAS Moisturizer. Korg Minilogue, Mono/Poly. Moog Minitaur, Mother-32, MF-102 Ring-Modulator. OTO Machines BAM, BOUM. Roland VP-03. S+A Auras, Cycles. Watkins Copicat Super-IC.