Amp//Xist on ‘Shadow Jerk (Ya Body)’, Distorting the Obvious and the Freedom of Starting Again
Amp//Xist might be a new name, but its arrival was less a carefully planned beginning than something its creator eventually had to follow.
Behind the project sits a musician whose relationship with dance music stretches back to the 1980s. Years spent drumming through clubs and festival circuits, predominantly alongside dance and bass music projects with some jazz thrown into the equation, placed him inside other people’s musical worlds. Production had quietly existed alongside that work since he began experimenting with Ableton in 2012, moving between early 4/4 ideas and deeper nu-jazz territory, but it took an enforced interruption for those experiments to become something more concrete.
“Covid happened and things stopped, and after Covid I wanted a rest from drumming gigs,” he explains. A soundproofed garden studio followed, initially intended simply as somewhere to play at home. Instead, it unlocked something.
“No sooner was it built I sensed a strong urge to actively make and finish some 4/4 tracks, probably something i'd wanted to do for a while.”
That became Amp//Xist. After years primarily operating as “a part player in someone else's project”, sitting alone with a DAW provided an unfamiliar degree of autonomy.
“Having only my own voice involved, that was and is freedom.”
The first result is Shadow Jerk (Ya Body), a two-track introduction that moves between the immersive warmth of ‘Resodrum’ and the brittle, unsettled electronics of ‘Diffusion Network’. Despite the history behind it, Amp//Xist has deliberately arrived without a lengthy résumé attached.
“A blank palette with no baggage or expectation felt correct,” he says. “The music i'm making with this must be the point of interaction to the wider world, before any brand or identity.”
It makes ‘Resodrum’ an appropriate introduction. Hand-played drums are recorded and processed until their acoustic beginnings become difficult to place, leaving traces of human movement inside something considerably stranger.
For Amp//Xist, that ambiguity feels increasingly valuable.
“It feels like mystery and intrigue is being stripped from the human experience today, what better way to counter that as a programmer and drummer than to distort the obvious.”
There is a wider philosophy behind it too.
“For me 4/4 music was and is and should be an anti-ordinary experience.”
That does not mean obscuring sounds simply for novelty. If a track needs drums that sound unmistakably like drums, he is happy to leave them that way. The objective is to introduce enough unfamiliarity to provoke what he describes as “some unconscious curiosity in the listener” without sacrificing the record itself.
His relationship with rhythm has always existed on both sides of the acoustic-electronic divide. Hearing techno and acid during the 1980s, particularly the unmistakable impact of Roland machines, was formative.
“Stomping kicks and blasting hats, that utterly thrilled me and hooked me in into the music.”
Yet physically playing drums offers something a machine cannot reproduce exactly. Timing and dynamics become specific to the performance, while the physical act of moving air through a microphone adds another dimension to the recording. He remembers live percussionists being commonplace alongside DJs in clubs during the ’90s, singling out Natural Life’s Shovell as an “omnipresent” example of how much that could elevate a room.
That human looseness runs through ‘Resodrum’, while ‘Diffusion Network’ seems to occupy its opposite pole: sharper, more skeletal and increasingly uneasy.
Interestingly, the contrast was accidental.
“I never (yet) write tracks that have a connection or anti connection to a track i've previously written,” he says. Instead, he describes creating “in the now”, allowing each idea to exist independently until it reveals where it belongs.
Only when asked which two of three completed tracks should form the debut EP did the relationship become obvious.
The restraint within ‘Diffusion Network’ also reflects a lesson learned much earlier. Amp//Xist admits his “overactive brain wants all sorts of madness going on”, something exposed particularly clearly during a remix commission around 2013. After five or six attempts, each version came back from the label with essentially the same response: “WOOAAHHH thats too much!”
Eventually, stripping things away produced the version that worked.
“That was a strong lesson which is with me and my Amp//Xist productions.”
His method today can be remarkably physical. Arrangements are played repeatedly while he stands up with the computer screen switched off, waiting for the sections that drag to reveal themselves. Rather than constantly introducing dramatic changes, he has learned to trust smaller interventions.
“Tracks don't need much drastic stuff to keep us engaged, and with a carefully placed push forward, as you say, well, less is more isn't it.”
Despite decades of references sitting behind the project, nostalgia holds little appeal.
When Amp//Xist first encountered dance music, it sounded futuristic, as though arriving “from outer space or another dimension”. He still wants electronic music to carry that possibility rather than becoming an exercise in recreating previous eras.
“I am the least nostalgic person you will meet. I'm definitely not in the ‘it was better in the old days’ camp.”
History still leaves an imprint, though. House, techno, dub and decades of club culture inevitably form part of his musical vocabulary, and he believes there is an underlying quality dance music cannot afford to lose.
“Dance music should be shamanic, it has an essence that has to be integral and eternal, and you can only stray so far before that can start to be diluted.”
That creates an interesting tension at the centre of Amp//Xist. He wants to distort familiar sounds, blur boundaries and allow strangeness into the music, but never at the expense of its fundamental purpose.
“One must always serve the music, the dancefloor, the listener, the vibe and the essence, and without a groove the feet don't move.”
The experimental side instead emerges through play. Plugins are added and removed, processing chains rebuilt, sounds resampled and arrangements manipulated until something clicks. Accidents are welcomed.
In fact, while answering these questions, another one happened.
Working simultaneously on a new track through headphones, Amp//Xist pasted several bars of a duplicated lead into the wrong order and immediately realised the mistake sounded better than what he had intended.
“It's quite thrilling when it happens.”
For a project founded on creative autonomy, perhaps that willingness to relinquish control is fitting.
Two tracks are far too little material to determine exactly where Amp//Xist will ultimately land, and that seems to be precisely the point. What Shadow Jerk (Ya Body) does establish is an unwillingness to chase an obvious genre or contemporary trend.
“I don't wish to confuse people, but i'd want to blur the boundaries further I suspect.”
The sounds may change. The balance between warmth, abrasion, acoustic performance and electronic manipulation may shift with them. What matters is retaining the thing underneath.
“As long as the essence remains, that which takes people to a higher place and moves people, whilst keeping the body moving, then that's the right direction, regardless of what sound i'm creating.”
For Amp//Xist, starting again does not mean forgetting everything that came before. It means having enough freedom to stop worrying about where any of it is supposed to lead.
