"I don't have a Walkman or anything."

How many tracks did you have to choose from when you compiled the album?

There's about a whole album leftover- 12 tracks leftover, a lot of stuff. There's a couple of tracks that might make it as B-sides because they're the ones that just aren't on the record...but I'm quite up for just moving on and getting some new stuff on the go. I've got some new ideas and I'm pretty excited about that really.

With your engineering job and your recording as Architeq do you ever feel the need to escape from music?

Oh yeah, totally. I don't have a Walkman or anything. I like to listen to music but I take the opportunity to not listen to music as well. Yeah you can get completely fed up of it, but that's you and your personal thing. Am I really going to get fed up of producing and engineering for a living? I'm not, because I love it, but you get tired from the amount of work.

Were there any particular points during the making of this album where you needed some time out?

Yeah, it was good, because I went back up to Scotland a lot and spent a lot of time up there, did some recording up there. Recording up there is so much more relaxed, you're not on downtime or anything with 2 hours to go.

When you say downtime, do you mean recording when the studio is not being used?

Yeah, basically. Jerome the drummer engineered at the studio as well. He produced a lot of stuff with Angele who's on the record, at the studio. The studio had been open for about 6 months when I moved in there and that's how I met him. When we actually started working on stuff together it was just....it got to 12 at night and it was like 'fuck it, let's set up a drum kit and record some stuff'. I'd go away and make a tune with it and come back. Jerome has got a perfect symbiosis and taste in music with me, we just sort of click completely. He wasn't doing the production side of it, but he was implanting the ideas with his drums, because his drums were the starting point most of the time. There's a tonal quality to his playing, you can almost start to find a melody from what he's playing. It's like Steve Reid or something, his playing is very melodic. The 'Babylon' track on the album is an example of that.

Most of it was recorded digitally down at the studio. Certain busses I mixed down onto tape, certain busses I kept digitally and mixed them all together. But for the next record I've just ordered a multitrack reel-to-reel so it'll be entirely tape.

So where was it mixed and mastered? On a computer?

Essentially, yeah. A lot of the mixing we did down at the studio. A lot of the stuff has the processing recorded onto it, like nice compressors, nice pre-amps..that's the engineering part of it...and then I bring it up here and mix it with the UAD plugins and this outboard stuff here.