HKE is a slippery fella. No sooner have you pinned him down than he’s gone again, lurking somewhere in the ether behind a vaporous cloud and a double-dozen masks. With countless releases under his belt and an endless list of pseudonyms, he’s something of an enigma in our digital times. He’s also a very busy boy, running the fantastic Dream Catalogue label alongside sidekick, t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者. Thankfully, I was able to capture him for long enough to try and peel back some of those layers and get an idea of the inner-workings of the man behind the masks. Check it out below.

Okay, we’ll try and keep the introduction brief as I’m sure you get sick of these sorts of questions. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your work and about Dream Catalogue?

I am known mainly as HKE, though some may know me as Sandtimer, Subaeris, the owner of Dream Catalogue or one half of 2814. Just a few names amongst probably 50+ more aliases I have out there online, most of them being disassociated from myself, although people have guessed a few now. I make all kinds of music, but I suppose you could classify it broadly as ‘electronic’. I’m fortunate enough to have turned it into being my day job – or night job rather, considering my fucked up sleep pattern. I make quite a lot of music and seem to never run out of inspiration and I work almost all my waking hours on music or on my label.

About myself.. right now it’s 10:39am in the morning and I’ve been up all night, just drank a coffee and now I’m chewing some gum while blasting Улучшенный жизнь by AUT2M for about the 20th time in the past 3 days – one of the best releases I’ve heard all year. Highly recommended… https://hvrfcentralcommand.bandcamp.com/album/–7

In January you dropped Omnia on OESBEE, which felt like a totally new path of exploration. There also seems to have been quite a noticeable shift in the DC releases so far this year. Was it an active decision to push in new directions? It seems you view the ‘dream music’ tag as something less defined stylistically than vaporwave, which unfortunately seems to have fallen into a kind of pedestrian safety zone.

Around early to mid-2015, I definitely had a hunger to push into different zones with my own music and Dream Catalogue. Although with the slower pace of the label these days, due to large backlogs and the length of time it takes to get physical items produced, the shift didn’t really start to become noticeable until the end of 2015 and early into 2016, as you noted with the likes of Diamondstein’s album and others like Yoshimi and wosX.

I felt as though the vaporwave scene was beginning to collapse in on itself a little bit and like many genres/scenes end up doing over time, retiring into a tired formula of rigid rules and bickering over what those rules are. My initial attraction to vaporwave was largely based on its ‘anything goes’ mentality, which I saw was beginning to die out in favour of simplified cliches. And this mentality in the scene was something I felt was beginning to effect my own work as an artist and a label owner too.. And so I did make a conscious decision to move away from vaporwave into creating something entirely new and different.

As such, I started creating Omnia around the summer of 2015, and finished it up in January.. I dropped it on OESB shortly after it was done and I think it was a bit of a shock for a lot of people who had previously only known me for my Hong Kong Express albums. Most of the work on that album was done in the month prior to it dropping, but it took me about 4-5 months of just thinking about exactly how I wanted the album to be, toying around with little ideas and such.

OMNIA by HKE

Omnia conjures some pretty strong mental images of inner cities, night time rides, of light speckling the night sky. Lots of roads and alleyways and, for some reason, rain. As subjective as they may be, I feel it’s a definite vibe that a lot of people will pick up on. What was your aim when writing the album? I also want to know about the little bit of text at the bottom of the Bandcamp page. It’s pretty philosophical stuff. Care to elaborate?

Omnia was mainly inspired by a series of nightmares and sleep paralysis hallucinations I was having just prior to me working on the main bulk of the album around winter. While I had been working on a possible sound for the album for months, I just couldn’t find the inspiration to put it all together until this series of dreams happened. Then it just felt like everything suddenly clicked and I knew exactly what I wanted to portray and how it should all sound.

With my albums, I often like to tell a story, but I don’t like to be too direct about it – I think of them as suggestive narratives. Just enough guidance in there to give a vague picture to the listener, but open-ended enough for them to interpret it their own way and let the album belong to them, so they can attach their own meaning and emotion to it.

But It’s interesting that you took that picture away from the album, because the final track ‘Awake’, was a musical recreation of a joyous dream I had, one that culminated the series of nightmares and hallucinations that inspired the album and gave me a sense of closure from the whole ordeal. I don’t want to go into the finer points of the dream, as it is quite personal to me and held a deep meaning, but it involved riding through a futuristic-looking Paris on a train. It definitely felt to me as thought it was more than a dream, some kind of spiritual awakening.

So what I ended up taking from these dreams and hallucinations was mainly about how there is something much deeper to reality that lives beyond the limitations of our senses. I was also wondering a lot at the time about how rapidly our technology is evolving, to the point where it may be possible one day to open up a portal of some sort to this other world that exists around us, which is what influenced the hi-tech sounds of the music. But right now, the only portal we have into that world is in the mind – dreams, visions, which was the ultimate influence like I say.

‘Omnia’ is latin for ‘everything’ or ‘all things’, and in context of this album I mean how it is influenced by both positive and negative energy, nightmares and dreams, or yin yang, to create a perfect circle. Some parts are tender, other parts are aggressive, brutal. Just like life. I find that all my personal philosophical quandaries end up coming back to the same idea of balance and duality.

The vision I had during sleep paralysis that was the first inspiration for Omnia, it felt like a demon – and this demon whispered into my ear before trying to choke me, which was a real physical sensation I experienced. I’ve never felt anything like it before, even though I’ve been suffering from sleep paralysis since I was a teenager. And whether or not you want to take this experience literally or metaphorically, I could tell there was something dark going on inside me.. then the dream of joy I mentioned felt like it relieved me of whatever that darkness was, hence the title ‘Awake’ at the end – awake from the nightmare, but the cycle always repeats, such is the nature of life. Everything runs in endless circles. Even the universe itself cycles.. that’s something that was known in ancient hinduism, many thousands of years before scientists theorised it. It just is a constant truth I see in life.

This answer is something of a ramble, but hopefully it answers some thoughts – and also, hopefully raises more questions. Like I mentioned, I prefer my work to be open to interpretation, so people can let it belong to them when they listen, as that’s how the best music always is.

You are well known for your numerous aliases, most of which are still unknown. You have also run various other labels in secret alongside DC. I’m curious as to whether the different projects represent different parts of your persona, or whether it is a case of keeping the different musical entities pure. Also, will there ever be a time when you might reveal just how much music you have out there?

I made a funny tweet the other day that read “MAD: Multiple Alias Disorder”, so I do think what you’re saying is somewhat true – that each alias represents a different part of me in a sense. I approach creating music under each alias sort of like method acting, in that I adopt a completely different mindset for each one, but all those mindsets have to come from somewhere within myself too.

These characters evolve over time as well. HKE is the only one that is just myself, which is perhaps why I struggle the most working under that name now. Hong Kong Express was made under a certain mindset too, but more of a dream or a vague narrative than a character, so it was much simpler. But HKE being just my normal self I sometimes find it harder to make music as, perhaps because I’m naturally inclined to keep things to myself despite being quite extroverted and outgoing. The tracks tend to have a lot more meaning to me as well than any of my other work.

The track ‘Memories’ for example off my new album, was a song I created out of an 8-bar loop I wrote, about 15 seconds long roughly, that I listened to almost non stop for over 24 hours, before I deconstructed it and rebuilt it into an entire song. I even left it on while I slept, and had one of my strangest nightmares ever, no doubt due to the influence of the music while I slept. I finished the song right after and then made another track off that album, ‘Ghost Dream’, which tried to capture the feeling of that dream using the same methods of listening to a single loop for hours. Someone posted a comment on the Soundcloud version of ‘Memories’ saying that the track was haunted — well, I think they might be right. It definitely had a lot of powerful emotion put into it.

Sometimes my aliases will come to an end as well. I have killed some off before, without people ever knowing it was me. They all have their own stories and life cycles, which I try to tell through the course of their individual discographies. Some have their own unique fanbases outside of my own as well. It’s definitely refreshing to release something completely unattached from your name to see how people react to it.

As to whether I will reveal them all one day, I’m not quite sure. I have definitely considered it and come close to it before, but also it would ruin the mystery of it, perhaps ruin the music for some people. When I first found vaporwave, it was so non-human to me that I was instantly compelled, and I think finding out who everyone is over time as I got more involved in the scene ruined that enigma for me a lot and killed a lot of the music. For many others, it enhanced their music when I found out more about them though, so it could work either way. I’m still undecided.

Cycle by Subaeris

As we’re predominantly a cyberpunk website, I thought it’d be worth us talking about some of this stuff. You reference futurism and surrealism quite a bit. I wonder what some of your bigger influences under these tags may be, both all-time and current?

Outside of music, I used to be quite a big film buff and I’ve watched a lot of Chinese cinema. I only stopped in recent years because music has overtaken my life so much now. But the film that’s had the most effect on me was Wong Kar Wai’s ‘2046’, which is kind of cyberpunk in its own strange way, and most certainly surrealistic. I felt deeply inspired after I watched it in about 2010 or 11, and that inspiration has never waned since then. I’ve been creatively working like a maniac ever since, whether it be music, coming up with ideas for films or half-writing novels that never get finished. Other cyberpunk/surrealist films I like are the usual ones – Blade Runner is a big influence of course, Ghost In The Shell, Fallen Angels, Lost in Translation. I’m a massive fan of kung-fu fllms and samurai films, but not too many of them apply to those descriptors, but I had to mention them. Although there’s an underrated kung-fu film directed by Keanu Reeves called Man Of Tai Chi which is pretty cyberpunk and worth a watch if you’re a fan of the style. For a lesser known cyberpunk film I like, the Takashi Miike film Izo is incredible and that definitely crosses into both cyberpunk and surrealist territory, especially the latter.

I really like Phillip K. Dick as far as cyberpunk novels go, although haven’t read as many as I would like to. I’ve become more of a reader of non-fiction as I’ve got older, and I read a lot about history, science, religion, politics. But I still want to finish one of my own cyberpunk-esque novels, although they also tend to stray into surrealistic/dreamer territory when I’m writing them. I really like the video games Tekken and Metal Gear Solid as well, they’re both actually quite a big influence to me despite the fact I’m not very much of a video game fan. But really, I can pull influence from all over the map. Even that Gummybear song on Youtube got me going on some kind of existential crisis about civilization a month or two ago.

Music-wise, probably the artist that has inspired me the most in my life is Telepath. I could go way back and point to Vangelis, a lot of Warp Records and 90’s/early 00’s IDM stuff, mid-2000’s dubstep scene and Hyperdub — Burial, Zomby, Kode9, lots of ambient music, drum and bass and such – vaporwave and hardvapour too quite obviously – but really above all else, Telepath is probably the greatest artist I’ve ever heard in my life and has been a massive inspiration to me. Really, meeting him in January 2014 and finding his music before heading down this whole Dream Catalogue thing changed my life quite dramatically. His music is some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. It’s amazing that we’ve come up together over the past two and a half years, and in that time I’ve noticed the power of his music isn’t really a subjective thing, as I’ve seen so many people across all cultures and backgrounds practically fall to their knees in worship of his stuff. He’s a once in a generation artist and the best thing going today.

Aside from that, I’m just really inspired by the entire ‘vapour’ scene, or whatever name we’ve come up for ourselves this week. Neon Dystopia is a cyberpunk site as you mention – well, you can’t get more cyberpunk than this scene really. Everyone is for the most part anonymous, just working on music in their home studios and posting it online when it’s done, creating a huge volume of content, constantly evolving every day. Speaking of which, I’m now listening to ‘There Is Truth In Fiction’ by Chungking Mansions on Antifur as I write this answer, another artist I greatly admire from this scene. Every day there’s new albums to listen to, new ideas being pushed all over the place and it’s just so refreshingly different from the ’traditional’ music industry where publicity photos and PR matter more than the contents of an album.

That sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier – my disappointment when people began to get lazy in vaporwave last year is what urged me to want to make a change. wosX was a huge part of instigating that change as well with ‘End Of World Rave’, and ever since then things have just exploded into a million new directions – for the better.

新しい日の誕生 by 2814

You and Telepath recently released the latest 2814 album, Rain Temple. The project has received some pretty high praise in the past, so expectations were high with this one. I feel like Rain Temple has really stepped things up; it feels a lot more ‘songy’, if that makes sense, and the production is less of a distant dream and now more crystalline as if held in your minds eye. Can you tell us a bit about this release, and also how yourself and Telepath work collaboratively?

Yeah, it was actually the first time I’ve had a small amount of nerves before releasing an album. Because ‘Birth Of A New Day’ was so well received and easily the biggest album I’ve ever been involved in, I knew the follow-up was going to have a lot of eyes on it to see what we would do next.

When we first started planning the album last year, we knew that we wanted to go somewhere different with it. In fact, the original plan was to make something under an entirely new project name and leave 2814 to rest, but quite early on into the album we started to realise that it was impossible for us to break from the 2814 concept since it just works so perfectly for us both. But it was always our plan from the start to not make BOAND pt. 2, which Rain Temple certainly didn’t end up being.

Like you say, it’s a lot more involving than BOAND. Definitely a lot more intense, dramatic and cinematic I feel, and I think that’s largely due to a lot of the things myself and Telepath were discussing through the course of making the album. We talk a lot about life, dreams, the universe, the entities beyond our perception and such and these thoughts and emotions directly inspire 2814.

We both use a program called Reason to work in, which makes working together quite easy as we both have a firm understanding of it and we just tend to approach music in similar ways too which helps a lot. I’ve been doing lots of collaboration projects over the past couple of years, mostly just one off tracks here and there with people, but working with Tele is definitely the most enjoyable experience I have had when it comes to that kind of stuff. It’s just a case of us sending things back and forth over email until we’re both satisfied with it.

Rain Temple by 2814

Can we touch on hardvapor? I perhaps wrongly dubbed Omnia as such, apologies there. After checking out the comp that Antifur put out I kind of better understood the picture. The hardvapor sound makes me think of gatherings in abandoned tower blocks, stereo blaring from the trunk of a burnt out car. Some guy with gold teeth and a tracksuit snorts brickdust from a window ledge. The glass of the window is smashed but the reinforced bars remain in tact. He grasps them as his face shakes and his eyes bulge from the hit. Where do you stand on this emerging sound? It reminds me a lot of gabber, there’s a very 90’s vibe to it, only more smacked out and rotten.

I actually don’t mind when people categorize my music under any tags they like, as ultimately the tags/genre names are meaningless and just there to help people understand what’s what, so people can feel free to call me vaporwave, vapour, hardvapour, ambient, electronic or whatever fits for them. I joke around on Twitter sometimes about it, but ultimately I don’t really care. I just think it’s when you begin to define yourself as an artist of a certain genre that your work can become stale, as you will naturally resort back to the clichés of that style – which like I mentioned, I found myself doing when I called myself a vaporwave artist. You end up becoming more of a product designer than an artist expressing something true to yourself. But yeah – there was somewhat of an influence from wosX and hardvapour on Omnia, but musically I pulled influence from all over the map for that album really, that was just one small element. wosX has definitely been a big spiritual influence to me in the past year, however, he’s a highly intelligent guy.

The picture you painted of hardvapour is pretty apt though and a great interpretation of it, but I think it’s actually becoming even more than just that now. Nobody can deny that the entire world is just heading down a path of utter insanity and chaos, socially and politically, and it feels to me that hardvapour is the new global music that represents this rapid change in things. It’s the sound of the World War 3 pre-game show, which I think we’re currently in now unfortunately the way things are looking. If vaporwave was the sound of the American dream of the 80’s and 90’s entering a strange state of sleep paralysis, then hardvapour is the sound of being fully awake from the blissful ignorance and looking at the world for its cold, harsh reality, but also trying to find solace in that fact and realise that we’re all on this earth together. Maybe it can save the world. A new form of global music, for the entire world. That’s just my current interpretation anyway, people are bound to disagree and that’s cool with me.

Either way, hardvapour has generated some of this year’s best music – wosX, DJ Alina, AU2TM and many others. I’ve been more of an appreciator than an active participant though, but I’m enjoying that.

HK by HKE

Picking up on your earlier point about the vapour scene being cyberpunk – I have to agree. It’s been dubbed the first truly digital music scene because it didn’t stem from any particular physical location, unlike most scenes. I find that quite fascinating. I’ve long been a proponent of the DIY aspects of music and I see a lot of that in the various scenes and people that congregate around the catch-all term vapour. Where do you see it heading in the next 5+ years?

It is really fascinating about how it has blossomed almost entirely online without much real life presence, and I think that aspect of it is what drives the growing popularity of the whole scene. It’s certainly one aspect that attracted me to it all – I’m just not big on live shows and stuff to be honest. I don’t mind doing them sometimes if the feeling is right, but it’s not something I actively pursue too much. I’m definitely more into just making music and keeping on the downlow. I’ve done a few live shows and some art exhibitions, and while I mostly enjoyed them all I still prefer to just make music at home, which is where my real passion is. I think that would be true for most people in this scene too if you asked them.

I just started using the phrase ‘ghost tech’ to describe my stuff lately. Future music for ghosts – anonymous, away from the mainstream, hidden in the shadows. I saw a guy by the name of Derek Dewbre on Twitter recently call it ’screengaze’ which I loved as well, a clever play on shoegaze. I think this aspect of it is all quite a sign of the times right now, which is why this scene just won’t go away quietly into the night like a lot of internet things do, and like a lot of people expected us to do. The themes and beliefs present around it just hit all the right points.

I have no idea where all this will go in 5 years, though, it’s almost impossible to predict given the ever-evolving nature of it. I’ve started seeing a lot of people compare Dream Catalogue to what Warp Records was like in the 90’s, which is quite flattering to me as a big fan of Warp. But, I also don’t want myself or anything I’m involved in to take any traditional music industry routes. I’m always thinking of ways to try and break the mould and do things opposite of what’s expected. I think people are sick and tired of the music industry and have been craving something different for a long time and that’s what I want to deliver.

With both your own work and the DC output, I get quite a unique vibe. It’s definitely urban music, in the sense that it belongs in the concrete and digital realms, but it’s not urban music like you might say of grime or even hardcore punk. At the same time there’s this heady dreaminess that feels more in line with the kind of spiritual exploration you might find in new age music, or even the kind of existential side of black metal, but again, it’s nothing like either of those. It exists in its own space. Was this an intentional move for you?

I suppose it was partly intentional and partly unintentional, now that you mention it. What you spelled out in your question is really just a summation of my character in general.. I’ve always lived in big cities and have always been a spiritually-inclined dreamer kind of personality, lost in my own thoughts a lot. I think those aspects of myself being coupled together naturally led me down this path of creating the music that I do. As I have alluded to, the majority of music I make often comes from some kind of deeper inspiration inside me, so those influences of where I live and my own thoughts will naturally come out in the music I suppose.

I’ve always been really fascinated with electronic music and synth sounds from a young age though and I just gravitated towards that being my style as I got older. I can play guitar and I can play piano to a lesser extent, but I barely ever pick up my guitar anymore and I only usually play keys these days to lay out midi notation into Reason 9 (my music program). I’m much more interested in sound design, making my own synth patches and experimenting with things.

I’ve actually released tracks that I haven’t even heard before I released before — for example, I’ll spend an hour making a really complex self-evolving ambient pad, then I’ll just draw out a chord I like using that patch and hit render because the LFO’s and programming will do the work for me. I don’t do it often, but it’s a fun and usually successful experiment, although I get the occasional miss.

Loop Matrix by HKE

With all of the DC releases, the aesthetics tie nicely with the sound and formats, with nods to both the past and future (and even those imagined futures of the past). I find it really interesting that there seems to be this element of nostalgia in a lot of the music, nods to the 80’s and 90’s through muzak, game samples, and the like, yet I imagine some of the artists might not have even been alive to experience those decades. Do you think that history has inadvertently created this future through the kind of science fiction that existed in those eras? At times I feel it all gets quite literally like something out of a cyberpunk book or movie.

Yeah I think there’s certainly truth to what you say – it’s easy to fulfill a prophecy if you do everything the prophecy tells you to do. But I do think some people like William Gibson were well ahead of their time in predicting what today’s modern cyberpunk world would be like. And we are definitely in the cyberpunk age right now, all you have to do is look at the world around you to see that.

Stylistically, I think a lot of those old visions of the future came back in vogue just because there’s been such a leaning towards fantasy and escapism in all forms of media in the past decade. Even in something completely different to cyberpunk, like Game Of Thrones or Walking Dead on TV, that rings true. Perhaps it’s just a sign of these dark times we’re living in, because it’s easy to lose yourself in your imagination when the whole world is crumbling around us.

But yeah, it is interesting to see the generation younger than myself adopting things that were the norm when I was a kid growing up, then putting their own surrealistic spin on it. The teenagers of today just seem so out of their mind compared to what life was like when I was their age, but they’re also smart and aware of things a lot more it seems. COCAINEJESUS for example, one of the top artists on Dream Catalogue right now, he’s half my age but I can talk to him for hours at a time about spritual matters, Ancient Egypt, gods, cycle theories, astrology, astronomy, neuroscience and yet he’ll always manage to twist his insane brand of millennial insanity onto it all. It’s both hilarious and enlightening. I know a lot of kids like that from this scene, and think they’re all pretty cool and I like seeing them grow both as artists and as people.

Where do you stand on multimedia projects? Is it something you would ever consider personally or with DC? I know things like dreamfm.biz exist, and there are videos to several tracks from the Catalogue, but how about other means? What about installations, zines, apps or fiction? Is moving beyond just the music something that interests you? Could you see it working cohesively with other art forms?

Multimedia stuff is desperately where I want to go next, actually. I’m not content with just being a music artist, and I really want to push out into several other areas soon. Like I mentioned to you in a private conversation recently, I’d love to finish writing one of my novels one day, and that’s definitely on my agenda for the next few years. But as you and any writer will know, writing a book is a hell of a lot of work and not something you can treat lightly.

After that, I’d truly love to get into film-making. I think it’s the thing I want to do most, but it’s just a case of having the right kind of funding from a producer or the money to be able to do it myself and create the film I want to make. That might not happen anytime soon, but I’m determined to write, direct, edit and soundtrack at least one feature-length film in my life, auteur-style.

Another possibility for the future is VR, and/or video games. That one might be a long-shot as I have no programming experience at all and barely like any video games, but I think the potential of gaming is far from being realized and I do have some ideas for it. I’d like to write and direct a video game, but it definitely wouldn’t be like any video game seen before. In fact, you can just rule the word ‘game’ out straight away.

I’ve actually done some art exhibitions before though, one in Manchester and one in Paris and I soundtracked one called Vaporents in Glasgow recently for an artist called Dane Sutherland. But to be honest, unless I was offered the right type of money by an institution to create something massive that was truly immersive and life-affirming in the sense of a Ryoji Ikeda thing (or greater) then I don’t think I’d have much interest in doing it again really. It’s just like, I can’t write a 200-page novel either, it’s probably going to be closer to 2000 pages when I finally finish it.

I suppose my ultimate goal is just to create the most transcendental artistic experience I can, and everything I’m doing is just a journey to reach that point.

What does the rest of this year hold for HKE, 2 8 1 4 and Dream Catalogue (plus any other projects you may be involved in?)

I’ve just started my new label PYRAMIDS which is sort of a digital-only sister label to Dream Catalogue, somewhere to explore new concepts and push out album drops as soon as they’re finished. Some people think that you should restrain yourself and only release one, or a maximum of two albums a year in the music world, but quite obviously people like myself and Telepath think the opposite.

I’ve always approached things in music unconventionally and the way I want to do it, and I’ve never really cared for the traditional methods of the music industry, they don’t work for me. I make and do exactly what I would like to see and engage in if I were not an artist, and some people like it, some don’t. I’m fortunate to have a fairly large fanbase now, but unfortunately have a few people who resent me too. Either way, music has been quite successful for me, so I will continue doing things the way I do them. The internet has liberated both artists and fans in that regard. PYRAMIDS will be quite unconventional.

As for Dream Catalogue, expect a bigger shift towards vinyl releases in the coming months and lots of great releases lined up that have been in the backlog for months already, waiting to be unleashed. Also a big new website redevelopment myself and Telepath have been working on.

For 2814, there may or may not be something new before the end of the year, but we’ll see how it goes. There definitely won’t be another new full length LP from us until 2017, though. However, there is a brand new track on the upcoming BLCR compilation from us which is a really nice floating piece that those who preferred Birth Of A New Day over Rain Temple will enjoy a lot, I think. It sounds much more like our original stuff.

I doubt I will release a new HKE album before the year’s end now, but there will definitely be one or two more Sandtimer albums and a few more albums under my other aliases. There’s going to be a big Sandtimer one out in December, actually, but that lunatic may also drop another one before then.

I just put out Loop Matrix though, which will fill the gap between Omnia and my next big thing as HKE. The next one’s going to be really huge and I’ll probably start working on it soon in time to release it for the start of next year. I may retire from music for a while after it’s done, but I’ll see how it goes. Aside from these projects, It’s hard to predict what I’ll do next because I always just go with the flow and do whatever I’m feeling any given day. I can, and have started, finished and released albums in the space of 1-2 days before, and they’re not even throwaway things. I just work really hard and fast because I know exactly what I’m doing in regards to producing, having been making music for well over 15 years now. It’s the ideas for music that may take the longest part for me, sometimes months like I mentioned with Omnia, but once I know the sound and feel of what I want, I can finish it in no time.