[Cover photo credit to Paul Heartfield]
Sunroof, consisting of duo Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones, have announced details of a new album, Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 2, that will be released on limited edition white vinyl and digitally on February 17th, 2023 via the Parallel Series of Mute. They’ve also released the single and video for “January #2” from the new collection.
The new album is a set of eight “improvised modular electronic music instrument pieces” recorded at the duo’s respective home studios following the release of their debut, Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1 (2021). Where Vol. 1 was the result of four decades of friendship and collaboration, this new album came together in a relatively short space of time.
Recorded in the same spirit as their previous sessions, with no pre-planning and no rehearsal, they met up with “unpatched” modular systems, and began improvising. Without any of the parameters they followed in the first sessions, the duo allowed the pieces to expand naturally, keeping editing to a minimum.
Gareth Jones comments:
I suppose this is the difficult second album. It took 40 years to make the first album and just nine months to create this one!
Daniel Miller adds:
We got on a roll and didn’t really stop recording once we had that momentum.
The video imagery, created by Sunroof, depicts “manipulated sequences triggered by software connected to the audio”, a technique that they introduced into their live performance during a short run of live shows around Vol. 1’s release. The album artwork, a watercolor painting by Gareth Jones, draws an extra line between the visuals and the music.
Daniel Miller, founder of Mute, the “accidental label” that began with the release of his own 7” single The Normal’s T.V.O.D / Warm Leatherette, met Gareth Jones, the innovative Producer, engineer and artist, back when Miller asked Jones to work with him in late 1982 on what became Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again. After Depeche Mode had gone home for the day, they would stay on to work on their own sessions, a practice that continues to this day.
By the mid-nineties Sunroof had emerged as a remix project going on to rework the likes of Can, MGMT, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler and Goldfrapp, their first recordings appearing on a compilation paying tribute to Neu!
