"The people are the best thing about London..."

It's interesting that you're leaving London...

Yeah it's funny man. The thing about London is the scene is what people are here for, and I'm not sure how bothered about that I am. To be a part of it is to just....I dunno....[laughs]....I'm not that fussed, I'm quite happy to just make tracks and do my thing, and do it with the friends that I meet. That's my kind of scene.

How would you describe your experience of London?

It's great, there's so much I love about it, but at the same time y'know there's only a certain amount you can concentrate on while you're working here. It's really easy to get distracted. The people are the best thing about London- so many interesting people and they're all very close to each other. But it's just a distraction, I find. That's why the last record took so long, I was just getting distracted [laughs].

How long did the last record take?

'Birds of Prey' was finished in 2006. There was a mission trying to get someone who was confident enough or willing to put it out. That took 3 years.

So you were putting Architeq stuff together before you had a home for it then?

Oh yeah, definitely. I've been doing it since I was 17, so that's 6 or 7 years. It wasn't as seriously back then, but making tracks as Architeq along the same vibe- slow hip-hop stuff, dub influences, synth library influences....nothing fundamentally has changed since then, just tracks have got better or whatever.

How did you hook up with Tirk?

It's quite a weird story really. I was gonna be doing a record with another label at one stage and they seemed a good place to go, it seemed to fit me well. But we kind of clashed when we got together- they wanted me to fit a certain thing. So I went away and it turned out I met Sav from Tirk. He was more than happy to release it straight away, he was just like 'how quickly can we get it together?'. But Tirk are magic, man, they're just like 'do what you like, we'll give you what you need'. We developed it together but I was mainly just going away and then coming back and getting a bit of an objective opinion from Sav at the label, getting bits of feedback. He was deliberately trying not to get involved to where he was telling me to change the structure or sound, he was using very general terms whenever we met, which was cool. It was a great way to do it, he really just gave me my space. And that's what you need really, just the space to concentrate and get on with it [laughs].

Did you shop it around to a lot of labels before Tirk?

No I'd kind of given up on it. I was quite happy to do what I was intending to do, which was just finish the record and then shop it around, if I was going to do it at all. The whole experience just made me like 'I'm not going to go begging people to release this', because if you're in the position where the label isn't with you from the word go, then you are immediately fighting something. It should just be there between the two of you immediately.

So you would say that you can't really compromise on that?

No, no you can't. This is funny, 'cos I'm kind of talking about another album or something like that, and I'm not up for chasing people and trying to get them to listen to the record or whatever. I've got friends who can put out records and stuff, it's not going to be hard to put out another record.....it'll come.