Archetype

“Looking at the shadows can make you see the light,” Maxwell Owin tells Apple Music. “In dark music we can find joy and acceptance of our sadness.” The South London-based DJ and producer Owin and his longtime collaborator, keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, spent six years probing this instrumental moodiness to create music that straddles the introspection of jazz improvisation and the hedonism of the dance floor. Following 2017’s house- and broken-beat-influenced debut EP *Idiom*, the pair became housemates, splitting their time between touring with the likes of Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective and working on new music in their home studio. The fruits of this labor coalesced during the forced isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, creating this: a complex and deeply personal debut album. Across its 12 tracks, *Archetype* delves into the bass frequencies of dub on the languorous “Ikigai,” the freneticism of grime and drill on “Sisyphean,” and the warped percussive thump of rave on “Lost in the Function.” Emotionally, meanwhile, the pair drew on the grief and isolation of the pandemic, working and reworking tracks until they became a perfect encapsulation of their moods. “It’s about feeling as much as it is playing,” Armon-Jones says. “This record is about letting go—a surrender.” Read on for the pair’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Archetype” (feat. O the ghost)** **Maxwell Owin:** “Many of our tracks begin with me sifting through the loops I’ve made, then Joe improvises over them with keys until it hits the right feel, evolving that snapshot into the seeds of a whole track. With ‘Archetype,’ that beat was made as a love letter to 2-step, since I’ve always been so influenced by the likes of Burial. We didn’t get the chance to put much of that feel into *Idiom*.” **Joe Armon-Jones:** “Luke, aka O the ghost, has known me and Max for so long and is an incredible musician. He felt like a natural part of the soundworld for this record, which is why he pops up a few times on the album. His verse here really solidified the track.” **“Ode 2 Reverb”** **JAJ:** “This is one of our oldest tracks on the record, which started during a jam in 2018 or 2019. We were recording in our friend Rago’s garage, who made the cover art for the album, and I was basically playing on a kids’ keyboard, reharmonizing Max’s loop live in the room.” **MO:** “It was insane watching Joe do that in the moment, feeding off the energy of the people who were with us and locking in on their enjoyment. He was playing keys like a DJ controlling the dance floor.” **“4Seasons” (feat. Rocks FOE)** **MO:** “When the coronavirus pandemic first hit, I unfortunately got COVID and was stuck in my room ill for around a week. Since I had nothing else to do, I became obsessed with putting drum loops down, and this was one of those ideas, where I got really into a specific hi-hat pattern. I’d been a fan of Rocks FOE since around 2016, and as Joe and I began work on this track, he messaged out of the blue saying he wanted to collab, which was perfect. He is such a versatile MC; he traverses all four seasons in his bars, changing his delivery and imagery, which we ended up reflecting in the instrumental too.” **“Don’t Tip Me Over” (feat. Fatima)** **JAJ:** “I’ve worked with Fatima before on the EP *Tinted Shades* and she’s one of my favorite people in the world. She is a proper light to be around and a very genuine person. She was living in the same area as us, so we saw her a lot in the pandemic to hang out and collaborate—she got us through it!” **MO:** “I almost threw this beat away but Joe loved it, and when he brought it to Fatima, she just brought it fully to life, singing over Joe’s playing that weaves between the loops. It ended up becoming some of my favorite drums on the record, going through swing and heavy-stepping.” **“Lost in the Function”** **MO:** “This might be the oldest loop on the record, from late 2016, and it ended up being one of the simplest tracks we’ve made. It’s inspired by the old rave cassettes and mixtape packs I used to pick up as a kid, when I would listen to these pirate DJ sets that really gave me a hunger for the dance floor. During COVID, when there was no dance floor, working on this track was like making our own club to dance in, and the 808 beneath it really gave it that heavy, rave-influenced warp and distortion.” **“Ikigai” (feat. Mala, Marysia Osu & YUIS)** **JAJ:** “I was working on an EP with Mala at the same time as the album and he was sending me a lot of ideas, one of which sounded like it would be a better fit for this record. I’m really inspired by the ways that dub and dubstep use space in their soundworld—how the use of silence in the beats is almost more important than anything else. That atmosphere is what we wanted to communicate through ‘Ikigai.’” **“Grief” (feat. Lex Amor)** **MO:** “This track was made in a dark time, when I had COVID and my gran had just died. I was listening to a lot of drill and grime and trying to reverse engineer the productions to create this moody music. Lex is one of the most incredible MCs I know, who is also very inspiring to be around, and we’re blessed to have her on this one as she wrote such a madness. She put down a soft and heartfelt verse to counter the instrumental and it was like finding joy in the sadness. I’ve never heard a performance like that. It blew me away.” **“Pedal Bike”** **MO:** “This came out of a time when I was really into sampling and chopping up free jazz drum solos. This one actually originated from a drum solo tutorial that I relayered with three or four others to make the beat. We then did a day of piano recording with Joe and he came up with the track’s beautiful melody, another mad synth line that went through lots of patches.” **JAJ:** “I’m proud of this tune for being a real harmony of our two sounds. We played it at Printworks just before it shut, and the audience had no idea what to do with it—I love its conflict of softness and heaviness.” **“Sisyphean” (feat. O the ghost)** **MO:** “I wanted to have one track on the album that had this grime heartbeat, like a sped-up dancehall percussive pattern. We recorded loads of percussion and extra parts that got all chopped up with the electronic beats, like pieces of steel being forged and folded back onto themselves to create the perfect sword. That was the process of the record—working and reworking to make polished chrome.” **JAJ:** “Max also wrote a poem for this that he fed into Google Translate to make it Mandarin, and that’s what you hear chopped up in the background.” **“Rago’s Garage” (feat. Shabaka Hutchings)** **JAJ:** “There’s a video on my Instagram page from ages ago of us making this tune in Rago’s garage—just like ‘Ode 2 Reverb.’ Shabaka was amazing and went really angular with his part on the clarinet, attacking to go head to head with my busy piano lines. It took a long time to map out what he was doing on the track because it has so much movement in it. It was crazy, since all we said to him was to get the woodwind involved!” **“Do I Keep Going?”** **MO:** “We got invited a few years ago by a group called ESP to go on a writing camp in Kenya, which was a life-changing experience. There was an incredible vocalist from Nairobi there called Xenia \[Manasseh\] who we made a track with called ‘Probably Never.’ In one of the ad-libs on that tune, she sang the hook, ‘Do I keep going?’ between the takes and that then became the seed of this track, which I built an entire other beat around. It has the feeling of being uplifting in a dark space, going to and fro between different aspects of life and moods in the music.” **“Adrenaline / Oxygen”** **MO:** “This track is all about finding pleasure in horror and making something awful sound nice. The chord sequence is something we’ve had for years but it came together thanks to this ‘blizzard synth’ I made, which is a sample of the horrible screaming sound that the \[underground train\] sometimes makes between stations in London. I then EQed and reharmonized it to create an amazing ambient feel.” **JAJ:** “The end of the tune is one of the last things we made—a perfect closer and transition to the next stage in the future.”