OWENS: Ironically, I record every day to capture random sounds that can inspire me.

HOPKINS: That’s a slightly different thing because I purposefully don’t take anything with me ever. I only use the things that appear when I can capture them. With my album Immunity and this latest release, any sound you hear was heard in the vicinity of this building. So, the last track on this new album entitled “Recovery” has an owl sample. The track is so simple it’s a like a meditation. I was sat working on the track and my friend who was in Greece had heard a Scots Owl, which is my favorite owl and she sent a recording of the owl to me and the way it sounded with piano in the background sounded so amazing. I just put it in there and it’s the only overtly obvious nature sound on the record.

OWENS: So is it the pure sound of it or have you affected it?

HOPKINS: All I did was stretch it out a bit, so there was more space. So even though it was recorded a phone adds to it. The rubbish quality of the recording.

OWENS: What was your background in music?

HOPKINS: No training.

OWENS: I’m anti-training.

HOPKINS: Me too. I was guided into piano lessons and ‘guided’ is a nice way of saying ‘forced.’ I don’t regret it, but I think music theory as a concept doesn’t work. Music is an expression, a deep-seated feeling. So, without training how did it all begin?

OWENS: Coming from Wales, which is known as land of song, everyone goes to choir from childhood, whether you can sing or not. The male voice is the main component. Older men are the main focus of the choir. In that moment, in that place, they get to express themselves and there is something so hauntingly beautiful about that and the same is true with the harmonies and dissonance. My training comes from that place. My first instrument was my voice.

HOPKINS: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, the fact that you are born with a musical instrument just in-built within every person. That is incredible.

OWENS: I have been reading this book called healing sounds and it explores monks and how they have all of these resonant frequencies in their voices. They only need around four to five hours sleep because the specific hertz, 10,000 hertz, can somehow charge the brain. There have been experiments in which monks were stopped from meditating or chanting and they became lethargic and depressed. There’s so much potential with sound vocally.

HOPKINS: I would like to know the specific hertz of that because I don’t sleep very well.

OWENS: I took music at GCSE and made some compositions with friends and I played the drums a little bit. There was a cupboard with 50 African drums at school. I asked if I could do an African drumming competition and my teacher let me do it. So we mixed it up and recorded it onto mini disk and at the time I thought it was wonderful. Then I met Daniel Avery and he asked me to come and do vocals for him and we wrote “Keep Walking,” which is on my album, only when I saw the process in action, when we were working together on analogue synths did I think, “Oh wow, this is something I could really get into. I can bring to life this technology and older format and combine the two.” I used my intuition and just perused whatever felt good.