Process, collaboration and the making of Quiet Fire

In 2012 I released Flight, my last album under my own name. It was written at the piano, notated by hand, given to musicians, and recorded live over two days.

Since then, my creative focus has been on the seven albums we've released with Slowly Rolling Camera.

Towards the end of 2024 I began to feel the need to return to my own music. I started developing ideas, which eventually became a new album, Quiet Fire, released later this month.

It's an album shaped by evolution in a very practical sense. Years of running Edition Records and producing records for others, have quietly reshaped how I hear music. Quiet Fire is the first time I've allowed that experience to feed directly back into my own writing.

Some of the material looks back deliberately. Recall, for example, grew out of the track, Between the Lines, reworking the same harmonic structure through a completely different lens that didn't exist for me at the time. Similarly, When it Rains, is a re-working of the Slowly Rolling Camera track 'Rain That Falls', from our debut album.

The writing and recording process for Quiet Fire, was completely different from anything l'd done before. In the early 2000s, and again on Flight, I wrote at the piano, directly onto manuscript.

Slowly Rolling Camera moved that process into Logic, building the tracks with layers of instrumentation. With Quiet Fire, I've taken that further by treating the studio itself as a compositional tool.

All of the music began with two four-hour sessions - one in December 2024, one in February 2025. I took those recordings away and treated them as raw material, cutting, splicing, sampling and rebuilding them with layers of harmony and melody. The mindset was closer to an electronic producer, while still holding onto the feel of a live band where possible.

At the time, I was listening to a lot of electronic and beat-led music, particularly Yussef Dayes and Tom Misch's What Kinda Music, alongside early Bonobo, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins.

For me, the interest is around the process and the learning i can take from it, which also informs me with my label hat on.

Thope you enjoy it!