Lost Beneath The Stars

If you're looking to get lost in a record this year, then Tremors is for you. The debut from South London-bred, Vienna-based electro-soul creator Sohn, aka Christopher Taylor, is a direct product of its surroundings, the music drifting with a comfortable loneliness; analogue-centred melancholy which the striking cover shot all but suggests. Not that Taylor ever felt this was a special collection of songs. Doing his best to avoid loading in before a show in Portland, he admits with a laugh that he dived so deep into the record that he almost forgot it was going to be a tangible entity, let alone a body of work that would be fawned over upon its April release. And in London – home of his lauded label 4AD – there was also the billboard thing. “I never thought about those things happening,” he shrugs. “It's just weird. I'm comfortable with it, but it's just very bizarre.”

Creatively nocturnal, the young Brit made the most of the night, working on Tremors from sundown till sunrise. Without such a schedule, Taylor doesn't think the record would exist. “I'm just really bad at following things through so that was one of the main reasons I made it at night,” he explains. “After about seven hours I always get to a point where I'm banging my head against a wall and so I'll stop and try again the next day. This time, I knew that seven-hour point would come about one or two in the morning, which meant there'd be no public transport and no way of getting home, so I'd have to carry on until the morning, and that's literally the reason why I worked at night.”

Walking home from the studio as most of Vienna's citizens were on their way to the office, Taylor was able to decompress and reconnect with real life once more: “Putting your feet on the pavement and feeling the world a little bit.” During this time he also squeezed his obsession further, dragging his tracks around in his headphones, analysing, sequencing and working out how to bond his body of work. “I'd only get to know [the album] on the way home actually because I was working on songs all the time in the studio,” he remarks.

Balance and variety is at the core of Tremors. Darker moments like Paralysed, where Taylor's falsetto sings morbidly, “Nobody can slit my throat/Nobody can leave me lying by the road like you can,” are levelled out by lively numbers such as Artifice, which is rooted on Northern African/Middle Eastern percussion and textures. And, impressively, for all the electronic elements, he's still managed to make the record feel very human.

A few artists have set the bar for Taylor, namely Kanye and Radiohead. “Yeezus has massively changed what a lot of people feel like you're allowed to do, which is great,” he gushes. “A long time ago Kid A was a big inspiration in terms of how you get songwriting to be electronic music, in terms of actual songs.” And of course, there's James Blake's emergence, which has made a huge difference to the electronic world as well. “Those three, for me, forged what's now being made by most people,” he adds, “but there is just overall growth in electronic music at the moment, and it's becoming the foundation for lots of different types of music.”

Taylor, however, admits to a lack of technical knowledge, surprising when you consider that as a producer he's worked with and remixed for the likes of Banks and Lana Del Rey. “My way of recording is really scruffy, really instinctive,” he concedes. “A lot of it is just based on playing around with analogue synthesisers, while the vocal-chopping and voice manipulation stuff I'm doing in probably the most basic way – I literally just get a pair of scissors out and chop things and move them around, then tune them note by note.”

Where he's found his self-belief it seems is his adopted home of Vienna, Austria. Here, Taylor's managed to soak up the city's thriving electronic scene and avoid an existential crisis in the process. Here, he's found Sohn. “I would have never learned to be comfortable with myself had I stayed in London, I was way too hyperactive and needy,” he levels. “I'd be too busy pushing myself around and showing people that I could be something. Moving to Vienna took all that away – I just felt like I didn't have anything to prove to anybody. I got to grow up and actually become a man.”