Music can be wildly intricate and still sound like the most natural thing in the world. That is the sweet spot Brooklyn-based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and curator Taja Cheek, better known as L’Rain, hits. This genre defiance reaches a new high on her fourth album Fata Morgana.

We get into the uncomfortable backdrop that sits behind making any art right now, and how a record can be “about the world” through the experience of living through it. Taja shares why her process is intensely intuitive, how collaborators have to trust her when she is “following a light through a dark tunnel”, and how she keeps genre from turning into a costume by staying close to the centre of her own matrix.

We also talk field recordings, realness and self-awareness, including voice messages, strangers, and the intimacy of cab driver conversations. Taja’s music has often been called experimental, and we dive into what this label does for an artist, where it becomes limiting, where it can also be suprisingly freeing and what it means to build a sustainable career with few obvious models, especially for women of colour making work that is hard to pin down.

Lost and Sound is now fully independent, and listener support helps keep the project alive and growing. You can support the show for as little as the price of a coffee. I can’t offer Patreon-style bonus content at the moment — life is already too hectic to promise things I cannot properly deliver — but every contribution makes a real difference. Support the show

If you enjoyed the episode, follow Lost and Sound on Substack and me on Instagram, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and share the episode with someone who’d be into it. Independent journalism and independent podcasting still run on word of mouth.

L'Rain on Bandcamp

Support the show

Support the show

Lee “Scratch” Perry reshaped how people think about the recording studio. So when I heard that his final official album project came out of a three-day session in Berlin with legendary electronic duo Mouse on Mars, I headed over to Kreuzberg to talk to Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma to find out what happened.

The duo have worked with everyone from Bon Iver to Stereolab to Mark E. Smith, made classic leftfield records like Niun Niggung, Idiology and Dimensional People and have always approached their work with irreverence and invention.

We talk about their decades-long creative partnership, the studios they’ve built and rebuilt, and a philosophy of working that can sometimes mean throwing ideas away rather than trying to force them into shape.

When Perry arrived at the Paraverse studio in 2019, Mouse on Mars had prepared for almost anything. What followed was a constantly moving recording session, with microphones set up across different rooms and musicians ready to follow wherever Perry took things. There was no conventional idea of a song, or much interest in making another reggae record. Parts of the record sound like an alternative reality Can record, where Damo Suzuki has stepped aside to let Perry take the vocal helm.

Jan and Andi were genial hosts during our hour together, and it’s obvious that spending those three days with such a legend at such a point in his life left an impression.

Lost and Sound is now fully independent, and listener support helps keep the project alive and growing. You can support the show for as little as the price of a coffee. I can’t offer Patreon-style bonus content at the moment — life is already too hectic to promise things I cannot properly deliver — but every contribution makes a real difference. Support the show

If you enjoyed the episode, follow Lost and Sound on Substack and me on Instagram, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and share the episode with someone who’d be into it. Independent journalism and independent podcasting still run on word of mouth.

Mouse On Mars on Bandcamp

Support the show

Visible Cloaks’ music has long occupied a space between the natural and the synthetic: sounds that can feel tactile, architectural, intimate and slightly impossible all at once. With the release of Paradessence — the project’s first full-length album in nine years — I spoke with The Cloak’s Spencer Doran for a wide-ranging conversation about process, perception and the increasingly complicated act of listening.

Spencer talks about the strange malleability of recorded sound; about mixing as an endless field of decisions; and about the practical reality of finishing work (drawing in a neat lineage lesson about Yellow Magic Orchestra). He reflects on presenting Paradescence through listening sessions, and on the possibilities opened up by spatial sound, ambisonic recording and binaural listening: technologies that can make a stereo field feel less like a flat image than a space you can move through.

The conversation also traces the cultural histories that sit around this music. From Japanese ambient and environmental music to Jon Hassell’s Fourth World ideas, Spencer talks about the difference between meaningful exchange and easy aesthetics. There is also a discussion of ambient music’s current place within streaming and playlist culture, where music designed for close attention can so often be repackaged as background atmosphere or lifestyle utility.

On July 9th Lost and Sound celebrates it’s 8th birthday! As you probably know, the show is now monthly and has gone on a real journey since that heady time in 2018 when I left behind being a London DJ, moved to Berlin and started making these programmes.

Lost and Sound is now fully independent, and listener support helps keep the project alive and growing. You can support the show for as little as the price of a coffee. I can’t offer Patreon-style bonus content at the moment — life is already too hectic to promise things I cannot properly deliver — but every contribution makes a real difference. Support the show

If you enjoyed the episode, follow Lost and Sound on Substack and me on Instagram, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and share the episode with someone who’d be into it. Independent journalism and independent podcasting still run on word of mouth.

Paradessence on Bandcamp.

Support the show