With guest appearances by Clark and Wizard Apprentice, Nathan Fake’s latest release is a euphoric rush of techno, house and even jungle hues. Get thee to a dancefloor!
This is undoubtedly a landmark year for Nathan Fake. He’s just released an excellent sixth studio album, ‘Crystal Vision’, on his own Cambria Instruments label, and 2023 marks 20 years since the release of his debut EP, ‘Outhouse’ – his first flush of success.
As well as all that, Fake recently turned 40, a surprising milestone given his enduring youthfulness. He’s been around the block several times, always in demand for remixes from artists such as Radiohead, James Lavelle and Luke Slater, and yet he still has the aura of an affable, and occasionally flappable, student. You get the impression that organisation isn’t his strong point when, for instance, he finally turns up for his interview with me 24 hours late.
“Sorry about yesterday,” he mutters, shaking his head. “I completely forgot.”
Still, Fake seems to be in a good place right now, releasing his own distinctive music from the margins or, to be more precise, from the flatlands and vast skies of Norfolk. It’s where he grew up, and he moved back there from London around 10 years ago.
“Doing what I do, you can sort of live wherever,” he reasons. “I just wanted to be somewhere quieter than the places I was travelling to on tour. Let’s face it – London is busier than any other place and bigger than most European cities. I found that a bit exhausting after a while because I’m a country boy.”
Bucolic surroundings are better suited to his environmentally focused acid techno, which is as much a product of the land as the electricity that powers his laptop. Fake seems to revel in his solitary working methods, getting lost in his own world and headspace as he rambles through forests, capturing breaking twigs with a handy recording app on his phone, then repurposing and manipulating the sounds into punishing, propulsive, organic beats.
“I really like nature,” he admits.
Yet technology has also been his friend, especially in reaching out for virtual partnerships. ‘Crystal Vision’ is a home-grown album with tendrils creeping into plenty of other fascinating areas. Take the standout track ‘The Grass’ – the result of a hook-up with Wizard Apprentice, aka Tieraney Carter, from Oakland, California.
Carter describes herself as a “structural minimalist but a micro-genre maximalist”, and she’s been releasing determinedly obscure works on Ratskin since 2018. ‘I Am Invisible’ is a particular highlight of her oeuvre, with its sardonically delivered lyrics: “I am free from the pressure of being special / I welcome the potential of being mediocre”.
“I know her stuff through a mate in Norwich, actually,” says Fake. “He was DJing at this bar and played one of her records. I was like, ‘What’s this?’.”
Fake’s youthful disposition clearly extends to an unquenchable zeal for new and sometimes recherché music. He bought a few EPs from Carter’s Bandcamp before deciding to make his approach.
“I just dropped her a line saying, ‘I really like your music. Do you want to work on something together?’. And she was like, ‘Yeah, sure’. She lives in the US, so I’ve never met her. I sent her a demo version of the track that became ‘The Grass’ – she recorded some vocals over it and I liked it a lot. It ended up being a very smooth little collaboration.”
‘The Grass’, perhaps the finest track Fake has ever been involved in, is an enticing crystalline fusion of beauty and mystery, where the bars seemingly hang for ages to ramp up the cosmic tension.
“It is 4/4, but it’s not very regular,” he divulges. “There are five bars of one chord and then two bars for another.”
It’s also odd that he doesn’t ordinarily work with vocalists and is reluctant to sing himself.
“I’ve probably done three or four vocal collaborations in my life,” he says after some thought.
Fake then sheepishly brings up ‘Coheed’ from the ‘Dinamo’ EP, released on the German electronic label Traum Schallplatten in 2005. He gets up-close to the microphone and croons intimately over a broken beat for that one, but he clearly still has misgivings about it.
“It’s got my vocals on it, which is a bit cringe because it’s so long ago,” he winces. “It’s the only track I’ve ever done vocals on, and I don’t like it anymore.”
Chris Clark is the other featured artist on ‘Crystal Vision’. The final track on the album, ‘Outsider’, is a musical meeting of minds and something Fake and Clark had been intending to work on for some time. The pair already knew each other well.
“Yeah, Chris has been a good mate of mine for years,” reveals Fake. “We met through music, and I was already a big fan of his stuff. A really big fan.”
Turns out Clark’s ‘Body Riddle’ is one of Fake’s favourite albums.
“Then we ended up playing together in Reading,” he continues. “I used to live there as it’s where I went to university. We got chatting and sort of became mates over the years. We’ve remixed each other, but that was probably over 10 years ago. We’ve always talked about collaborating, and then eventually we did. It’s really nice to have finally done it!”
I’m intrigued by the title of ‘Outsider’. On Fake’s Bandcamp page, his personal profile reads: “Growing up in Norfolk and attending a school where being into music made you an outsider, Nathan Fake’s early interest in the electronic scene came from hearing acts like Aphex Twin and Orbital on the radio and reading about the equipment they used in music magazines.”
“I think that the biography was written quite a long time ago, when I was still on Border Community,” says Fake, bashfully. “But I mean, yeah – that is the case. When I was a kid, no one else was into music. I grew up in a little village in rural Norfolk, and I basically heard Radio 1 and not even any underground radio stations.”
Fake began to absorb dance music through friends, particularly from the Ministry Of Sound stable.
“My tastes have slightly crossed over into that area, but I like more the techno side of things,” he says.
Discovering Orbital, Aphex and acts like The Chemical Brothers inspired him to assemble his first studio set-up – a drum machine, a Casio keyboard and a Boss SB-202 sampler.
“I’ve done it totally on my own my entire life, save for the odd collaboration,” he asserts. “So I’ve always felt a bit like an outsider with the whole electronic music scene. And that’s not a bad thing. I’m very aware of the scene and I’m friends with a lot of people in it, but I’ve always felt a bit detached from it… which is fine.”
I wonder if Clark, who grew up in St Albans, experienced a similar sense of being an outsider and whether they ever discussed this while making the track? Naturally, Fake says he can’t speak for his friend, although he suspects Clark’s upbringing might have been similar.
“He very much does his own thing. The difference is that he’s clearly a big, well-known artist and he’s on Warp. But Chris himself has always done something on the edge.”
There’s a far more prosaic, less Camus-like angle to the title ‘Outsider’, too.
“I like being outside,” says Fake, matter-of-factly.
Nathan Fake has released several lauded albums, including ‘Hard Islands’ and ‘Steam Days’, which are the source of some of his most recognisable tunes (‘The Turtle’ and ‘Paean’, respectively). But it’s probably his 2006 debut, ‘Drowning In A Sea Of Love’, which has endured above all the others, being earmarked as the “essential” listen on streaming platforms. Some of its free-form goodness definitely infuses ‘Crystal Vision’.
“It’s funny, because ‘Drowning In A Sea Of Love’ is sort of the standout one,” he says with refreshing honesty. “Obviously every artist’s debut album is usually of note because it’s the first one, but it’s quite different from the others I’ve done.
“It’s weird when people say your first album is their favourite, and you’ve done five more. So it’s like, ‘Is everything I’ve done since then not as good?’. But I have artists whose old stuff I like, and there are others where I prefer their latest stuff, so I can’t complain.”
Fake’s surroundings provide the textures that form the basis of nearly all of his music.
“The sound sources I use in my stuff are quite varied,” he says. “I’ve got a massive folder of WAV files recorded on my phone from being out and about – I make them into kits and drum sounds. And I also use my mouth. I’m not very good at beatboxing but I like making singular sounds for hi-hats and snares.”
I wonder if he views using presets as cheating?
“No, not really,” he says, hesitantly. “I mean, it depends how they’re used.”
When he came to record 2017’s ‘Providence’ album for Ninja Tune, he’d been wrestling with writer’s block for a couple of years. It was the Korg Prophecy that saved him, despite an ambivalence to the way it sounds.
“The Korg Prophecy is incredibly hard to program,” he says. “I actually ended up playing with the presets and editing them, although ordinarily I never use them. The thing with presets is that they’re mostly ugly, unusable or over-the-top sounds. But with that album, I presented myself with the challenge of taking these horrible sounds and making them somehow alright.
“Otherwise, I’m really into synthesis, so I don’t have many synths. The ones I do use are basic analogue things and I’ll just make stuff from scratch, which I prefer.”
I mention that Jean-Michel Jarre considers the piano a preset, implying that the old musical instruments we take for granted have sounds that were intended by their inventors centuries ago.
“It’s like sampling,” offers Fake, brightly. “The whole reason people use the Amen break is because it’s very distinctive, and you can hear what it is. It’s a sort of tool that people use to display their cutting-up skills.”
For Fake’s previous album, ‘Blizzards’, he released a Loopcloud Drum Expansion kit featuring three kit presets and a plethora of one-shot samples for use within the VST plugin. Has he heard anyone else use them in their music?
“Not to my knowledge, no,” he replies. “They’re quite distinctive to my ears.”
After ‘Outhouse’ blew up in 2003, another track followed that would become Fake’s most recognisable tune, with Border Community’s James Holden providing a transcendent club remix.
“People still talk to me about ‘The Sky Was Pink’,” says Fake. “It’s funny, because on Instagram I get tagged to it an awful lot in stories where people have taken a picture of a pink sky saying, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful’, or whatever. Every other day I get that. Given the fact it came out in 2004, that’s insane.”
Fake hooked up with Border Community the way he has with so many others – via email. He was a big fan of Holden, sent him a demo, and the rest is history. He says he was very lucky to get in touch with Holden when he did, and for him to respond almost immediately with nothing but encouragement.
“Border Community ended up being this cult label – we never could have imagined it would get as big as it did. Amazing times.”
As well as his brief forays with Ninja Tune and Traum Schallplatten, Fake decided to set up Cambria Instruments 10 years ago with another Border Community alumnus, Wesley Matsell, launching the label with the collaborative 2014 single ‘Black Drift’.
Since then, he’s released two albums via his own imprint, and if ‘Crystal Vision’ is anything to go by, he can certainly trust his own instincts. What’s more, he cuts out interference from other parties, and relishes how it has consolidated his independence.
“Self-releasing is a big weight off my shoulders because I don’t need to worry about whether the label will like the music,” says Fake. “When I did ‘Blizzards’, it was a really nice experience putting it together because it was, ‘I like it, and that’s all that matters’. So I can just do it how I want. It worked out very well, and that’s why I’ve done it again with ‘Crystal Vision’.”
‘Crystal Vision’ is out on Cambria Instruments
