The ninth album from Stereo Minus One, aka Dan Haines Cohen, arrives in September 2023.

"I'm nearly always making music for a freaky sort of chill-out room, off to the side of a rave somewhere," Dan explains. "But it's that time of the night when all your senses have been overloaded. You find yourself in a quieter space but, rather than relaxing you, the relative quiet confronts you with the sound of your own heart-beat, the racing of your pulse, the feeling of sweat on your skin. Being alive is endlessly intense in the rare moments when we actually grasp it. Sound, noise, and music don't recede at those times, it turns out the universe is really noisy even in the deepest mental depths."

"The album is made for those ecstatic moments. Those moments when you become aware of the millions little things and sounds that normally don't enter your awareness at all. By the time you see your mates again, you might not be too sure what tunes were being played or what just happened. Blinding night though!”

Dan has been releasing music on Machine Records, and elsewhere, since founding the label in 2001. Live performance highlights have included supporting the likes of Mira Calix, Mike Paradinas, and with Shoji Hano and Gary Smith. He ran the monthly Terminal club night from 2003-2006, bringing ground-breaking live electronics like Chris Clark and The Doubtful Guest to Cardiff's legendary Clwb Ifor Bach.

Dan sat down with Kevin Sorsby (aka Starlings, Cape Canaveral) to talk about his new album.

Kevin: This new album is appearing less than a year since Lodestone, but that itself was a good five years since your last album proper. Why so quick (in SMO terms!)?

Dan: Yeah, this has been surprisingly quick. And these tracks are all from the last year or so, as well, whereas the material on Lodestone was five years in the making. I guess it is partly the result of renewed focus and effort on making music and on the label since 2020. Coming out of lockdown I felt I needed to re-commit to music, which had faded away a bit. I invested in some better studio equipment and gear and more importantly made more time for this. I also have tried to up-skill myself as to what I was doing. As a result I have been able to capture more ideas and get more momentum, and this album came together quite quickly in March/April this year as a clear idea formed, which was able to act as a kind of glue for pieces I'd been working on over a longer period.

Also, you teasing me about buying new gear but not having finished anything was actually really galvanising.

Kevin: You’re welcome! The clear idea is apparent, there is a sonic consistency throughout. But a danger with this is that ideas which don’t immediately fit, or are on the fringes of, the idea can be disregarded. It seems the tracks that are presented happened naturally? Or did they require graft to fit?

Dan: I have been working partly on a MacBook, using only Ableton, and partly on an iMac that is set-up as the heart of my studio with various MIDI controllers and analogue synths (and Ableton). The tracks on the album come about 50:50 from those two ways of doing things. I've also been spending a lot of time working quickly to generate ideas, so these tracks are a selection from perhaps 100 quick 'sketches' that I have then developed. In the process of finalising the album I discarded about five fuller tracks that I didn't think worked in this context. I felt like it came together pretty easily at the end, but there was a lot of work to lay the groundwork and have choices. There are definitely some other possible projects that would be quite different.

Kevin: I always tend to think if the fundamental idea is good then it is easier than trying to force an idea to work because you want it to.

Dan: Yes, I think so. It's not always easy to know which are the good ideas though, you have to put them through their paces a bit.

Kevin: …and also what ‘good’ means to you, or the end listener. Is there a thematic link between the titles? What does ‘Two-Three-Seven-Folds on the Four-Eight-Nine….’ mean? It’s a different kind of title for the album, more…technical, rather than a ‘scene setting’ kind of style. I think it’s my favourite track on the album.

Dan: I can see how that one would appeal to you. I have to tell you, it is almost accidental. But Stereo Minus One has always been about welcoming randomness and accident into things. When I first heard it back I was amazed.

You asked about the title. Well, it's a little hard to explain.

Kevin: Try! In one sentence.

Dan: One sentence.... hmm! It's the super-imposition of several different things, each unrelated, logically, but somehow connected in my brain. One reference point is the KLF's album Chill Out, and the way it invokes space, trains, and movement and this emotional resonance. It's also a sort of science fiction story inspired by visiting Puzzle Wood, which is near where my parents live, a forest which has grown over old mines to create this unique landscape where nature and industry are fused together in an upside way in overgrown ruins. As you move through the wood it's really hard to distinguish what is 'made' and what is 'grown', what's natural or artificial. It makes it feel much more ancient than it is, like a lost civilisation, hence the science fiction element. The name came naturally out of those references, which are coordinates or codes that fit together. And it just sounds right.

So what's the short version of that? It's an ancient alien mining colony. But I should add, in the context of the album, that's all just a daydream.

Kevin: It’s an ancient alien mining colony. Apologies, I should have worked that out.

Dan: The track titles for the KLF Chill Out album are things like ‘Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border’ and ‘3 AM Somewhere out of Beaumont’. I was riffing on the style of these, the names reflect segments of a journey. Mining is a bit of a thing in Wales, obviously.

Kevin: There is a dreamlike quality to a lot of the tracks or sections of tracks through the use of synths. This dreamlike idea seems almost the opposite of early Stereo Minus One which, to me, was discordant and uneasy in places. In a good way.

Dan: Yes, it is less abrasive. On the whole these are quieter, more interior reflections.

Kevin: Do you sleep better these days?

Dan: Not especially! I was definitely exploring more peaceful or low-key states of consciousness in these tracks, rather than harsher noise from the outside world. The alien mining colony is just a stray train of thought, triggered by who knows what. As you say, this is a huge shift in focus from earlier albums.

Kevin: The club and rave scenes aren’t something I’m especially familiar with but it is hugely influential on you, but you don’t make (to my ears) rave music, as you say it’s off-to-the-side, sensual, environmental effects of it. Can we expect a rave album?

Dan: I wouldn't rule it out. I actually make a lot of more beats-oriented music, but it rarely gets finished or put into the world in that form. I find it hard to find my voice within dance music genres that are more dancefloor oriented. It's easy to programme a beat, but it easily becomes generic and a poorer version of something else someone has already done better. When I try to stay true to myself, rather than to work in a genre, Stereo Minus One is how it comes out.

A couple of tracks that really inspired me to get into music-making are 'Ventolin' by Aphex Twin and also 'Bucephalus Bouncing Ball'. Ventolin is from about '94 or '95 and is quite punishing and noisy. It's just a massive “Fuck you”. But also sounds great. 'Bucephalus Bouncing Ball' is from '97 I think. It struck me as quite unusual in that it takes a series of compositional detours from which it just never returns. I remember when I was listening to one of those Aphex tracks very loud, my landlord - I was living in a shared student house - was around for some reason and hearing it through the walls he seriously thought I must be operating some sort of heavy machinery. Both those tracks seemed really exciting and opened up possibilities to me. Just a total refusal to follow expectations, I guess. Which appealed to me partly as a non-musician.

Kevin: You’ve mentioned before about, in your past, being a non-musician, not understanding music in a technical sense. Do you still consider yourself a non-musician?

Dan: Yes. A non-musician, but doing music. The Italian Futurists are my fundamental inspiration - Marinetti and Russolo, The Art of Noise. Apart from their appreciation of mechanical noise and sound, I love how they reject a view of art and music that is just safe and comfortable and middle class. Mostly just for being boring.

I do try to make something new, not something that fits with an existing genre. We’re so weighed down by the past, past culture, it’s suffocating at times. I may not always succeed but that, to me, would be the goal. To express something new, in a new way.

Kevin: I think that’s a worthy goal. I can’t think of anything worse than listening to common-or-garden rave but you do have an off-the-side aspect which I love and really drew me to Stereo Minus One at the outset. Do you miss ‘the old days’ of Stereo Minus One? As in, before the kit, musicianship, maturity and so on. If you’re anything like me, there’s music from your early past that I simply can’t make now, wouldn’t make now and don’t want to make now.

Dan: It does change, the more you continue. Once you have committed to a release and said "This is me" that first time then of course you have completely changed what is possible for the next time. I am still happy with all my albums, although I sometimes wish I could apply some of the production knowledge I have now to some of my earlier work. It's odd to hear something you made 20 years ago. I would definitely have no idea how to recreate those albums now, it's a good job I own my own masters!

I think in the last couple of years the thing I'm most pleased about is that I've managed to centre what I'm doing back into "now". It's inevitable that the early days of anything are most intense and what you remember. But it's been like working under the shadow of my earlier self until recently. I did a lot in 1999-2006, then things tailed off in 2007-2010, really to a standstill, until 2015-17 when things got started up again. 2018-2020 was another hiatus, for various reasons I couldn't sustain it. As of now, both for Stereo Minus One and for Machine, there have now been more releases since 2016 than there were before, so I feel like the scales have tipped. I'm already working on the next album.