Will Archer needs a bigger bedroom. The producer, who makes spacious, woodwind-flecked esoterica, has just moved house – and i-D online can barely get in the door, such is the number of battered instruments flung around.
Archer’s second EP, Increases II, occupies the point of overlap in a Venn diagram that takes in Dabrye, Yann Tiersen and Dauwd. In a similar mode to its predecessor the record wanders effortlessly between genres, with the collection tied together by a thread of smoky melancholia. Perched on the edge of his bed, i-D online spoke to Archer about garage roots, welcome mistakes, and blagging university.
The new EP is out on GetMe, whose previous releases have been pretty exclusively dance-oriented. Do you see yourself in that sort of scene? No. I’m not anything really. I’m just making music. I don’t really want to label anything; I think it’s unhealthy. How do you see it?
I pitch it close to Nicolas Jaar. There’s the same sense of space, the same jazz inflections. There are lots of foley sounds; it’s very filmic. That’s definitely a link. I do sound art and design as a degree. I like making music for scores, and the whole foley soundscape thing is something I’m interested in. I hardly ever go into university. I try to blag this as much as possible. I’ve got away with it a few times, but there are times when you submit it and they realise it’s just something you’ve done at home. I drum for Vondelpark, and one of my tutors came to a gig. After that I think he realised…
Does the second EP feel like a continuation of the first, as the name would suggest? The name’s shit. The only reason it was called that is because it was a continuation, but it’s really different production-wise. It’s still really minimalist, but it is different. I never write to do something specific. It’s always just for the sake of doing it, because it’s just what I do.
Do your ideas often come from the sounds of your equipment? Or do they tend to be melodic ideas first? Both. I know what you mean – the sounds of instruments, rather than the notes that were made on them. It’s really percussive. Some of the new stuff I’ve been doing, I’ve done loads of takes and just taken the mistakes, then put the mistakes up front and worked around them. If you can capture the mistakes it sounds much more real, much less rigid. That’s something I’m always trying to do.
Am I right in thinking your background is in garage? From a production point of view, definitely. In Newcastle me and a few friends made dubstep for ages, then I moved to London and thought dubstep was shit.
Presumably that’s a very different way of working. Yeah, it was all Fruity Loops. When you’re making specific genres of dance music you’re pretty restricted, even to BPMs. But if you don’t call it anything, you can do what you want.
Increases II is out now on GetMe
Text: Josh Hall
Photography: Chris Searle
