In His Own Words: SBTRKT Takes Us Behind The Scenes of "Wonder Where We Land"

SBTRKT says: 

"So, this one features Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, and it was probably the last track I wrote on the record. It came at the tail-end of a bunch of studio sessions where—and this sounds a bit fancy—I kind of went around the world traveling and doing studio sessions in different places.

"I started in the UK, then went to LA, and then did a couple in New York in Downtown Studios and worked with a few different people, but this track basically was the last one that came out of that. It's got a kind of rappy sound to it. I had never met Ezra before and we were talking about some of the other collaborators and artists on the album—the song with A$AP Ferg and another with Raury from Atlanta—and the fact that I'd basically done a couple of rap tunes.

It's kind of my ode to New York with Ezra's lyrical idea on it.

"Then Ezra was telling me about how he used to be a rapper in school. So basically he came and gave us all these lyrics, these raps he'd written, and from that came this song, which probably doesn't sound anything like what it should have sounded like. It's kind of my ode to New York with Ezra's lyrical idea on it. I didn't know what New Dorp was when he first said it, but then I found out it's a small place in Staten Island. Then I realized a friend of mine actually grew up there and went to school in New Dorp. So we have this weird relationship where somewhere along the line this music is tied to real life somewhere. I like that.

"The other singer on the song is Caroline Polachek from Chairlift, who ties into another song on the album. One thing I tried to do on the last record and this one is tie the strands together, get someone else from another part of the record to be involved in a song that they might not have actually been there when we were writing. I try and really mold a record together and build multiple layers.

"The other important thing to say is that I'll only do collaborations by starting in the studio with someone from scratch. So, for this song there was nothing when we sat in the studio and then he had a vocal idea and I had a kick drum and that's kind of where it came from. I played one bass note and expanded on that."

SBTRKT says:

"There's this track called 'Lantern,' and this is one which shows where I came from in dance music terms. It's a more instrumental track. It's my club track on the album, I suppose. It's quite short actually, so if you play it in a club people would wonder where the ending was but... here it is."

SBTRKT says:

"This one's called 'Temporary View' and it features Sampha who I've known for six or seven years now—we've kind of always worked together. The premise of every track we ever do together is that we just do anything rather than repeating ourselves. We like experimenting and messing about with keyboards and synths and drums and vocals, and neither of us have a clue what we're gonna do in the studio. Generally we just jam stuff out like that.

"This is actually one I wasn't totally sure I was going to put on the record because it ties into a bunch of EP tracks I did before called Transitions. Weirdly, everyone says, 'Oh, you just stuck a vocal on this old beat,' but the vocal was done before the EP track instrumental. I kind of released them the wrong way round, so people always think the opposite is true."

SBTRKT says:

"This is a track called 'Higher' and we gave it that name in New York. But the collaborator is a kid called Raury, and he's about the same age now as Sampha was when I met him when he first started out. He's 17 years old, from Atlanta, and he had to get his mom's permission to even come to the studio which is quite funny, but he's super cool.

"Actually, a friend of mine put me on to a video by this kid called 'God's Whisper' and I was just blown away by his voice so I got him into the studio to do something. I really wanted him to do some singing and then he didn't, he just did some rapping! [laughs] But, it turned out really well and something so unique came from it."

SBTRKT says:

"This is a track that features Caroline Polachek of Chairlift and I suppose it's where the album started. Initially, my concept was basically to dream up a list of people I wanted to work with, and then start emailing them and seeing if I could do a session, or fly them somewhere to work together. I really wanted to build things up and create a record. Doing live touring for three years, which I got to do with Sampha, we just jammed stuff out every night and day. We were literally just pissing about on instruments and making tunes up and playing in a really free-form way.

We were literally just pissing about on instruments and making tunes up and playing in a really free-form way.

"Before that, I had been working with laptops and it just became so structured and too... Everything was too boxed-in, in grids, and it didn't really leave space to have more expression in the ideas. I wanted to take everyone to an environment where you could just jam ideas out and see what happened. So, I found this obscure place off the coast of England, off the county Essex, which, if you know England, you know is where a certain type of weird person comes from. Anyway, there is a tidal island that you can only get to four hours out of each day by a road, and then the water floods it.

"There's a weird film with Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter, it's a horror movie, and it was all filmed on this island. So it's a bit strange because that kind of set the tone of the trip. I had a DJ gig the night before in Norway and we flew back to Heathrow and this tidal road was only open from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. We ended up driving across this ocean road in the pitch black, and the lights had gone on the bloody van we hired. So we're crawling along in the pitch black, using iPhone lights to try and light the road across the sea—it was a bit random.

We ended up driving across this ocean road in the pitch black, and the lights had gone on the bloody van we hired. So we're crawling along in the pitch black, using iPhone lights to try and light the road across the sea.

"That was the first experience of getting there, and then we had Sampha and another guy from the label called Tic in the back of transit, coming through shouting obscenities, because they just kept bouncing around. It was a funny place to go to, it was totally out of anyone's comfort zone. On the island there's a house, it was dressed up as a studio but it was really a glorified garden shed, it was just a very tiny room, but it had giant open doors and a field out the front. We brought a bunch of keyboards, drum kits, synths, and everything else, and about five microphones and set them up so we could just record all day long, and there would be no stops and starts. Then we could just  see what came out of sessions, in a much more free-form way then, say, starting by programming a beat and going from there.

"This track came out of that. It's called 'Look Away' and it features Caroline. She flew in from New York but missed her flight, which then meant that she missed the tidal road, which meant, basically, that we were on the island and could see them standing on the other side two miles away. They were about to drive across the road, and then suddenly this flash of water comes whooshing across it and we realized that she's totally stuck on the other side for another eight hours. The guy on the island told her she should go into a pub across the road and find a guy smoking a pipe—seriously—with a hat on in the corner. Then, and this just sounds like such a movie stereotype, but it was a fisherman who had a boat. He brought her over on this little tiny fishing boat. She turned up to the island with her suitcase from New York on the back of this one person fishing boat!

"So that was her first experience of it but then this track came out of that night. It's a funny experience, some people are very much about jamming music, some people want to hide away in a studio. Because I work with so many collaborators I see these people all working different ways. Some people like to go away and write their lyrics on their own, they can't work in front of you, but this track was made very much jamming in the middle of a room in the dark."

SBTRKT says:

"This is another one with Sampha. It's a 3 a.m. in the morning jam. It was really strange, because it was raining like crazy and then we could hear these owls in the distance but there was nothing there! There was literally nothing for five miles each side.

"I brought these films with me, these animations by this French guy in the '70s called René Laloux. There's a film called Fantastic Planet, well La Planète Sauvage really, as it's called in French, but it's this amazing sci-fi thing about a human race who meets these aliens and what happens between them. It's got this sci-fi feel, a mixture of futurism and a sort of tribal thing going on. That film was projecting in the studio from these mini projectors plugged into my laptop onto this weird glass bit in the middle. It went off the glass weirdly and just started shining all over the room.

"So I have myself in one room playing the synth, if I remember correctly, and then Sampha was in the middle... Actually no, I was on the piano, Sampha was on the synth, and Tic was sitting and playing a Tempest drum machine in the other room. So any weird squiggly noise you hear on this is him playing the drum machine, and then Sampha says, 'What the fuck is that?' in the middle of the song. That's cause he was in the dark, in the middle of the night, and he was hearing these weird noises going on. And we kept that, you can hear that in the song."

SBTRKT says:

"Before, we were trying to make dance tracks, making these heavy club tunes. But this one is really slowed down, so it's a bit weird, slightly different. Although, it's got this dance intro which then switches. My point was with this was that I wanted to confuse people, so I put the dance intro and then it changes."

SBTRKT says:

"I asked Stella from Warpaint to come in and play this drum riff, so she came and jammed some drum ideas for this track I'd been working on. I don't really ever use big studios because I feel a bit uncomfortable, but I had the pleasure of using this really nice mixing desk. I've been reading about Abbey Road, and those kind of records, that were made on these amazing quality desks.

"We managed to patch up this drum kit through it, so i really wanted to record the drums so I could put it on the album. That was one part, and then Emily from Warpaint did this weird hypnotic vocal thing on top. So I had that base and I took that to New York and Ferg literally jumped in and said, "Well this is the one I want to work with." We took it from there and intertwined what I had with Ferg's part. I think it's the first time I've ever heard Ferg actually fully singing which is kind of interesting."

SBTRKT says:

"It was a really weird meeting for this one. Boogie's got a manager who you've got to contact, and I don't think he had any interest in doing something with me, to be honest,  but I kept pushing him like, 'I really like his voice I want to make this happen.' I think it's the juxtaposition of our two worlds that made something kind of weird and in the middle, something neither of us would ever create on our own. I really like when that happens, that's what making music is about for me."

SBTRKT says:

"I started mastering this stuff at home on my computer, but the right master engineer can bring a new perspective. On the first album, I had a guy called Neil from The Exchange in London, and he's done albums like The xx records and he did the classic Daft Punk album—the first two records. Sadly he passed away about two years ago. I was looking for something different on this record, and I started out with a UK engineer but the songs ended ups sounding quite clinical.

"It's weird, you wouldn't think mastering would make that much difference to music, but it can be like night and day. I wanted to make this album sound really punchy and it just clicked for me that there is a difference between a UK master engineer and a US one. So I took the approach of listening to people who Kanye or Drake would master with and seeing what that would sound like.

"Obviously, they cost millions of dollars—basically that's the reason their albums sounds like they do—but actually we found this guy called Vlado Meller who mastered the entire record. He's based in New York and he did Kanye's Yeezus album and has an A-Z of classic records. It was just like night and day compared to the other mastering, this came out super punchy in all the details, in the bass, in the treble, and it just gave the album a more immersive feeling.

It seems important to tell people that. I wanted as much attention to that sonic, to feel like the song is presented in the best way possible sonically, not just musically."

Listen to the entire album below and buy it here.