"My approach is, make noise that sounds like you. That's it. Any more thought than that, you've overcomplicated it." This is Krust's gentle rebuff when asked to talk gear. For the veteran producer, inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere: film, design, fashion, finance, business. When the frame is so broad, why quibble about plug-ins?

It might also be that, at a certain level of experience and technical mastery, these things no longer merit discussion. And Krust has more experience than most. Born Kirk Thompson in Bristol, his career started in his teens, with his involvement in Fresh 4's breaks & bass cover of "Wishing On A Star," which charted in 1989 and helped put the city's scene on the map. From there he followed the full arc of jungle and drum & bass: the raucous early '90s, the mechanised funk of tech step (which he helped usher in with "Warhead"), auteurish albums (1999's Coded Language) and the aggy hype of the '00s (his Kloakin series). He co-ran the Full Cycle label with Roni Size and, as part of Size's Reprazent collective, won a Mercury Prize in 1997.

When you've done it all, what next? From the late '00s Thompson disengaged from music, diverting his curiosity down other channels. After a period of voracious research he founded a lifestyle coaching consultancy, Disruptive Patterns, turning insights from his career into teachable fundamentals. As his Adapt The Canvas talks show, Thompson's coaching addresses creativity in the abstract, tackling big questions—process, preparation, finding your voice—in a language that works for business types as much as underground musicians.

This could have been the end of the story, music-wise: '90s visionary has successful second career. But Thompson never retired Krust, and in recent years he's pulled off a shockingly good comeback. Last year's Edge Of Everything album picks up the wildest stack of Krust records—late '90s epics like "Soul In Motion" and Genetic Manipulation—and runs with them. The tracks are unique in structure, teasing out strange never-ending intros and abrupt denouements. The drum programming is pared back in the extreme, and the sound design is uncluttered but ravishing. Most musicians narrow their creative horizon as the decades wear on, consolidating their practice into a few signature moves. Thompson's just seems to keep widening.

In conversation he's not so much a musician as a philosopher, making engaging (and often funny) rhetorical moves that you can imagine him honing on his coaching clients, and ranging freely in topic from production process to education systems, global finance, his reading list and his wardrobe. There's a hint of the Silicon Valley visionary to his fast-paced collision of business theory and psychedelic thinking. The common root, perhaps, is a deep belief in the individual: to hear Thompson tell it, we are all originals whose edges have been dulled by a "cookie cutter" society.

Speaking from his home in London, energetic in spite of a late night in the studio, Thompson went deep on his unorthodox production method, which combines long-term preparation of mind and body with boundaryless experimentation, compulsive resampling and the juggling of dozens of track ideas in a single DAW project. Beyond the practical stuff, he addressed bigger themes with trickier answers, like identity, originality and the interconnectedness of everything. The key takeaway is that it's all Lego: recombine it any way you like. (And, presumably, have fun while you're doing it).

When you're making music, where do you start?

Before I even go to the [studio], I have a deep dive, and [try to] understand: What am I talking about? What's the best equipment to achieve that? That could be a two-year project before I even start making music. And most of that is unconscious.

I'm writing new music [at the moment], and I've already started this process maybe eight or nine months ago, where the wheels are turning. On the album [Edge Of Everything], if you listen to the beginning of the album, it's quite contemporary, jungle, drum & bass, one beat follows another. You could easily identify it with the genre. Then you get right to the opposite end with "Space Oddity" and "Only God Can Tell"—we've left the planet [laughs]. That was me really pushing the boundaries of what I could do. And for me, that's an indication of what I'm thinking about and where I'm going. So as I'm making new music, now, I'm starting from where I finished [last time].

And so I'm thinking, "Okay, what does that look like? What does that sound like? What do I need to carry on from this place?" I get my whiteboards out, my notepads, and I'm really in observation mode. I'm hunting for sounds, I'm hunting for experiences, I'm hunting for things that are worth me exploring. I'm in that learning space. And then I go back to the studio.

For instance, Sunday night I was in the studio and I watched an hour of MasterClass. They give you these little bite-size chunks that are really good. So I watched a little bit of Aaron Sorkin, the script writer, Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor. Dan Brown, who wrote The Da Vinci Code. As I'm listening to what they're saying, I'm immediately relating it to me as a producer and what I'm about to do. Anna Wintour's talking about leadership and I'm like, "What does that mean to me, leadership, in my music?" And so I'm getting this download and I'm going to go sit in that space and interpret what that means. For me, that's the starting point.

Is it fair to say that these inspirations are usually outside of music?

They never come from music. I mean, in the beginning of my career I was mostly influenced by music and especially Wu-Tang. That would be my go-to for inspiration. And you can hear it in "Cold War," "Soul In Motion," "Warhead." That's heavily influenced by hip-hop. But then when you start listening to [2006 LP] Hidden Knowledge and this last album, that's really being informed by culture, film, technology, coding, the internet, blockchain, cryptocurrency, financial crisis, epidemics, pandemics. I'm really looking at how culture operates. Where are we moving to? Why are humans doing what they do and why are they affected the way they are? And I'm trying to weave that narrative into my story, to give it depth. I want you to be able to listen to it and for it to take you somewhere—not to be this very shallow experience that you just listen to and skip off.

Film was a big influence on those more out-there tracks like "Soul In Motion," right? And it seems like with the new stuff you decided to draw on that era, particularly these long, unusual structures, which aren't like conventional dance music structures at all.

It was quite clear to me that that was where I was the most experimental, the most free. And it was where I was being inspired by film a lot. So I used that as my jumping off point. I thought, "Okay, if I'm going to make this new album, I want it to sound a bit more out there, more spontaneous, more intuitive, more creative. I'd better find a source of inspiration that does that very well"—and great films do that. I was very much inspired by that on this project, looking at how you really take apart the genre, take apart the expectation that people have of what music is supposed to be. And then recreate it in a totally new form.

There's a lot going into what it is that I was creating, but the basic fundamentals are: you go from making music to taking people through an experience. That's the mindset shift you have to go through. When you're listening to other people's music for inspiration, you're painting yourself into a corner. If you're an artist that is genre specific, you're probably taking a lot of cues from people in your genre and you're subconsciously trying to stay within the boundaries of that genre, which is quite limited in a way, because you're not letting your creativity go full out. Your creativity is just being stifled. Whereas when you think about creating an experience, it could be anything. It's unlimited.

And so this is where the thinking behind it is. I want to create an experience with my music and my art that nobody else has. And so for that, I have to experiment with different ways of doing it. And it's not your standard arrangement because it doesn't take people on that journey. Maybe it did 20 years ago, because it was new. Like if someone did Alfred Hitchcock's knife scene in the shower now you'd be like, "What's this? We've come a long way since this bruv." [laughs] That's the same thing with doing standard arrangements. It was next-level 20 years ago. But today, 2021, it's not the future.

Like, Steve Jobs didn't go make another Nokia phone or another Sony Walkman. He didn't just incrementally improve it. He completely obliterated it and reinvented the genre or the category. I believe that's what we're supposed to be trying to do as creators. That's my mission. I'm not trying to be incrementally better than I was 10 years ago. I want to do something completely new that I haven't achieved before.

It's not so easy to sit down and do something new.

I'm looking for an entry point into a flow state, right? Because once I get into a flow state, I stop thinking and then it's automatic. And that's why the setup is important. You need to do all the prep work so that your subconscious is primed and ready to give you what you want. You never want to be going into a creative situation without the preparation. It doesn't happen in any other high-performance business where your creativity has got a high premium value on it. Nobody goes into that situation unprepared.

And then once you've got that done, it's elementary what happens after. It's like, if I drink celery juice every day and I run 50 miles, the obvious result of that is my body will be healthy. If I try and make my body healthy just by eating food on the day... right? You've got to do the groundwork, you've got to do the preparation and the result of all of that is an output. So that's the practice. That's the method.

[So] yeah, of course, my diet [has] changed. I don't eat a lot of processed foods. I try and eat more fruits, eat more vegetables. I pay attention to what I put into my body. I pay attention to what I put into my mind. I don't watch the news. I don't read negative press. I don't hang around with negative people. And it's a choice because I value the creative space that I have.

What other kinds of things feed into that preparation? I read that you meditate?

Anything that helps you stop thinking. You have to really practice the art of creativity. You have to look at what is involved in getting into higher states of consciousness and getting to the flow state. Meditation is a brilliant tool for that. I used to smoke a lot of weed and I used to spend hours and hours in the studio listening to loops [laughs]. Then I stopped smoking and I was like, "Well, I want to get back into that space." And so I discovered meditation and that really helps relax you, switch off the brain and empty the mind of any external or extraneous overthinking or brain activity. It gets you down to a state which I like to be in, which is nothing. Where I can allow what's going to happen without me consciously editing it.

This is multidimensional. Once you start doing the practice, you get into a habit, you get into a pattern where you go into a flow state. And when you get into a flow state you rely on your unconscious mind, based on your preparation, to give you whatever it is that you want to to create. But they're also healthy byproducts of eating healthy, of meditating and drinking water. And these things now become part of your new process, your new way of living as it were. And lots of things change. The way that you approach your creativity changes, because you don't need to go hard or spend hours and hours grinding. You start to rely on a different way of operating.

Once you start thinking like that, it starts to produce the goods for you, because it's a self-referential loop. You're getting the dopamine rewards, and so the subconscious mind says, "Oh, I like this. I'll give you more of it." And then there's a cycle.

So would you say that, if you get this stuff set up right, making music or art needn't be a difficult, tortuous process, as our society often says it should?

No, not at all. I'll tell you a story. When I made "Soul In Motion," it took me maybe a month to find all the samples, all the records. Two weeks to do all the sampling, another week and a half to do all the editing. And then arranging in the sampler. This is the old days when I'm using a hardware sampler, mixing desk and Atari 1040ST. So by the time I actually started doing the track, it was half finished. It was almost done. And I could hear the track every time I was messing around with the samples. It told me what it wanted me to do. Whenever I don't do that, I'm sitting at a blank screen. That's happened a few times, when I don't do the process. And then I quickly remember: "You've got no set up, bro."

In no other business in the world can you go in to do work and it just works. It doesn't happen. Every business in the world needs preparation, needs a set up. You need to have a business plan, right? You need to know what you're going to do. Making music is exactly the same. You need to prime your subconscious because that's creativity. You need to put in the stuff so that your subconscious mind can give you what you want. And when you do that, it spits out 50% of what you need to do. It just does. Because that's the automatic response to putting the stuff in. So I don't spend time spinning my wheels.

When you sit down to produce, having set things up this way, what happens next?

One of the things I learned in Full Cycle, when we used to make music, is resampling. You find something you like, resample it. That's been ingrained in me, to resample and create libraries, and that's a staple of my sound. Even when I'm making drums, I'm resampling at every stage. I'll get a beat, chew it up, resample, chop it up, resample. I've probably got a million different versions of Amen, a million different versions of Hot Pants, and whatever breaks I use. And because of that, whenever I start a project, I go to my library. That's my sound, right? So I go to my library and I'll look for sounds I haven't used. For instance, on this project [I'm currently working on], when I went through my library, there's obviously sounds that jump out to me, that sound like the direction that I want to go.

Is there a risk of things getting stale if you're going through the same library of sounds each time?

No. I mean, I've very, very rarely used the same sounds twice in any project. I'll use the sound as a jump-off point, as inspiration, or I'll use it to make another sound, put it through another drum mangler or something like that. And so rather than stare at a blank canvas, I keep moving. I'll get something I know, and then put it through some new toys that I don't know. And then something new will come out of that. My thing is momentum. I know just to keep moving, even if you don't have any ideas or anything fresh, just push forward, just keep doing something to keep your brain active. Eventually the creative juices start flowing and a new doorway opens.

A couple of weeks ago I found some beats. Started doing some processes with it. And maybe for the first hour it's pretty standard stuff, you know? And then all of a sudden, an idea will come—put that effect on it with that delay, with that side compression, and a gate. And all of a sudden the thing changes and now you're off to the races.

So a lot of it's about how you process things?

I have a processing chain that I always use. It varies in some way, but it's always there. It will be a compressor, an effect, some kind of distortion, some kind of pedal, whatever it is. But there's always a chain and my stuff always goes through it. And so I'll get my drums or whatever it is, and I'm just continually recycling through this chain, figuring out ways to do what I used to do in my analogue studio.

What happens if I put this lead there? What happens if I take those drums and put them in that? And it's like, beginner's mind. Make mistakes, push buttons. Like last night, a string chord played all the drum samples in Kontakt all at once. It was a mess, but I kept listening back to it, seeing if I could hear something. So I just bounced the whole thing down. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but that's how I think. Bounce, bounce, bounce. If you're not sure what you're gonna do right now, resample. And so that becomes part of your library.

A couple of months ago, [I was] going through my library. Press a button, this noise comes out. It's like, "Wow, what's that?" Use it, put it in a sampler. I couldn't hear what I was going to use it for when I made it, but when I listened to it a few months later—"Yeah, I'll use that in this track."

I gather that when you rebuilt your studio you were inspired by the '70s and artists like The Doors and Miles Davis. Were you getting equipment that was used back then? Or was it more about channeling an ethos?

Both really. Looking at the old equipment and really just being more analogue in your approach. So getting loads of outboard gear, pedals like the [Moog] Minifooger Delay, Digitech RP3 [Multi Effects], the Way Huge Swollen Pickle Smalls and Ringworm Ring Modulator. I already had a [Mini]Moog and the ARP Odyssey, ARP Solina, [Novation] Bass Station, the [Arturia] Minibrute. And then putting them through cabinets, speakers like the Yamaha NS-10s, recording them loud, distorted. Really not obeying the rules. It's about having a no-rules rule [laughs]. And having fun, being creative. Miles is probably one of my favourite musicians because he had that mindset. So I listened to a lot of his albums, like Bitches Brew, over and over again. Just trying to understand the spontaneity of it.

Once you got your studio set up, then you're really asking what are you putting through it? And how are you building the chains? One chain I built was [with] a Urei 1176 copy and a Neve mic pre-amp for level. Then that went through to the Waves NLS emulator, and then Softube has got a free saturator [Saturation Knob], and then the Waves SSL stereo buss compressor. And so that will be the input chain. Then I would bust that out to another auxiliary with a similar chain. And then it just sounds stupid [laughs]. And I will push everything into just crazy levels, like into the reds. I would go from normal, safe sounds right through to ridiculous distorted sounds, pushing the levels just to see what will happen. You put a bass through it, a kick drum, the snare, breaks, whole patterns, and just see what happens. So I'm going to put my stuff through that and then start processing and then create patches and libraries.

The jump off point is: the '70s had a great sound. But I want to see what happens when I do my thing through it. I like the organic, sort of analogue softness, because that's what those devices are trying to do. They're trying to soften the sound, trying to take the squareness off of the digital stuff.

I guess a big factor is that software emulations do a much better job of recreating those sounds than they did, say, ten years ago.

I mean, that is true, but also I think that the idea isn't to try and... my approach is, make noise that sounds like you. That's it. Any more thought than that, you've overcomplicated it. What you're trying to do is to find something that really reflects who you are. So the gear is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the gear does.

So you've talked about an earlier stage in the process, where you're generating sounds, things are going into a library for later use. What are the subsequent stages that a track goes through?

The way I work, I work on about 40 or 50 tunes on one screen. 32 bars at a time. With no real reason, or idea of what's happening, just sketching these ideas out and just creating, you know. Why I want to make sketches on this one page is because for me, it's about momentum. I just want to keep that flow and I want to keep this level of excitement going so that anything can happen. If I have it all on one screen, then it's easy for me to access everything. It's easy for me to go from there, to there, to there. I'm then going to go: maybe that goes there, and maybe that goes there. And I'll just keep building from there.

You can imagine, I've been doing this since we started this sort of music game, you know, since it became a thing. So I started using a Casio FZ-1 sampler with an Atari, where the approach was, work on one tune at a time. And I think that worked fine for years. It's just that as technology developed and as we developed as creators, I found myself stuck working on one tune at a time. It wasn't inspiring anymore. I was trying to finish one tune and if I couldn't finish that one I didn't want to start another one, you know what I mean? The energy wasn't there to start another one.

And so what I found really stimulating and exciting was to have loads of ideas and not just work on one thing. I've got to a point where I don't try and finish music. That's not what I do anymore. I don't try and go into the studio and make a track. I go into the studio to explore something. Maybe explore some breaks, maybe some basses, maybe some arrangements. But I'm not going into the studio to make a track or to finish a track. And in that process, I finish music. I find it exciting being open to letting that teach me or guide me wherever it wants to guide me.

You might expect the finished tracks to sound chaotic as a result of this process, but they don't: they sound very refined and carefully structured. Is there a streamlining stage at the end where you tidy things up?

No. I know what I'm trying to achieve. I just don't know how [I'm] going to do that. So, I'm a film director. I've written a script, but I'm open for the actors to improvise where they can because we all know we're going to make a great movie. We've worked together before so I know their work. And the colour and the grader, I know what all their roles are going to be. The lighting guy. We've all worked together. I know that they're going to do a good job. And then my job at the end is to come in and say, "Oh, let's try moving that piece there. Let's try moving that piece there."

Remember the prep, right? In my mind I've been doing this for two years, prepping. I want to make something new, original and unique. If I'm doing that, I cannot know what it's supposed to look like until the end [laughs]. But I just know I've used all the tools, I've used the practice, and I'm already in this new space. So anything I do in this new space will be different, will be unique.

You can hear it on Edge Of Everything. That album was probably the most uniquely me this time round. I think I've got as close as I could possibly get right now to the sound that I really want. It wasn't planned to sound like that. That's how it came out and because it's different and new, and I hadn't heard it before, I was like, "That's what I want." I don't want to have an ordinary tune with the same intro, the same drop, the same middle bit, the same end. That's what I've been doing since I started. And the Krust brand is: pioneer, be on the horizon, do things other people aren't doing. So I'm completely off brand if I just do what I've done before.

How does a producer go about making something that's unique to them?

First of all, you've got to try and understand who you are as a creative and as an artist. And then, what does that creator and artist sound like? And then, what's the best way to go about getting there? And that comes from who you are as a person, your beliefs, your habits, and your psychology—cause it's 80% psychology and only 20% mechanics. It's the difference that makes the difference [laughs]. Right? And that's not what you use. Because we all use ProTools, Logic, Ableton. So it ain't the technology. The advantage when I started was the technology because no one knew how to use it. That's why there were creators who had the unfair advantage: they could understand how to use the equipment or they got schooled in it. Now that secret's gone, you can go learn that. That's not your unfair advantage anymore. The next line of defence is you. Who are you?

As you say, there are loads of resources out there now to learn music production, whether on YouTube or through production schools. But these questions—how to be original, how to come up with your own sound—seem mostly outside the frame of that education. It seems like you're willing to tackle them more directly in your coaching, right?

That's all I teach. There's no point in me teaching you how to make bass sounds because you won't learn how to do it for yourself. You'll just know, "Oh, well, Krust does that, Krust does that." That's not what you want. You need to understand how you want to show up in the world. That's got to be your first and primary goal. Like, look how I'm dressed. I wear my beret. I normally have a weird haircut, I've got my top button done up, my collar's up. This is me. There's not many people who look like that. This informs my identity and helps keep me in K mode when I go to the studio, when I go do a DJ set. I'm living this persona. And you can see that when I do my talks, when I do my interviews, there aren't many people who sound or look like me. And that's part of the story and the brand. And when I'm in the studio, that's what I'm channeling. I'm not trying to do that. I'm very comfortable in my skin now. So it's automatic that, when I'm hitting that key, I'm looking for a Krust sound. It's like that [mimes hitting a high key on a keyboard]—that's not my sound up there. But that's my sound [hits a low key]. I don't use those effects, I don't use those plugins. That's not my sound.

But this is through trial and error. That is from research, meticulously going through lots of ideas. So many drum sounds, so many variations with EQs and layers and trying to find something. And when I do find it, it's like pattern recognition. My unconscious has been going, "no, no, no—warm, warm—good, good... Got it."

So your advice to a producer starting out would be that originality has to start in yourself? It's more about understanding who you are and what's original about you and then bringing that into the music making process?

Yes. We've been tricked to think that being original and having creativity is something outside of ourselves or for special people or for creative people. The reality of it is everyone is unique but we've been put through the same cookie cutter society because of ease of use and to manage large numbers of people. School is a signalling for obedience and for people who can understand how to take orders. That's all school is, right? I was a disruptive element [at school] because I was no good at taking orders or listening. I was just interested in my own thing. That's a story you hear of most creatives who didn't get on in school. They're just interested in their own things. I left [school] at 14 and I knew I wanted to do music and I've done it all my life.

I don't need to try and be different. I can just be myself. And as a unique person, I'm already different. So there's nothing else I need to do. I just need to follow my intuition. Our intuition is informing us all the time. The more you ignore it, the quieter it becomes, because it realises after a while that you're not paying attention. It just goes. If you don't use it you lose it.

You've been talking a bit about Krust as a brand. These days it's often considered more common, or necessary, for musicians to see themselves in those terms, rather than simply making records and putting them out. Is that a big change from when you started out?

I think it's more common now, but it's always been like that. If you understand how the entertainment world works, you have to have something that people recognise is you, as a sound. I think intuitively creators know, or at least the good ones know, that you have to create a brand. Because of social media, that's become more apparent. Because we're in saturation. Back in the day it wasn't so apparent because the landscape wasn't as cluttered. Brand[ing] at that time was only used by big corporations because they knew about that. The little people didn't necessarily know how to create a brand. But: Krust, "Warhead"—brand. Goldie, Timeless—brand. Method Man, Wu-Tang Clan—brand. So intuitively you're doing it, but everything isn't together at that point. Now it's just gone to that umpteenth level where the camera's always on.

You often draw parallels between music and the business world when talking about creativity and originality. Do you think there's a point where those things diverge? Is the idea of being creatively original and the idea of being successful in a marketing way always in alignment? Or can there sometimes be conflict between them?

Of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, you can take it anywhere you want. My awakening in the business world happened when me and Ron[i Size] used to have these heated debates about business and running the label. And one day he said to me, "Why don't you run Full Cycle?" And I was like, "What? Why would you say that to me?" I was totally insulted by the fact that he thought I would like to run the business. I was like, "No, I'm a creator, I'm an artist." And that was my stance.

Then years later I found myself in Heathrow airport buying Harvard Business Review, doing it every week. I would be interested in all of the creators in it, the design companies like IDEO, or some of the advertising agencies. I'd be engrossed in it. And it suddenly dawned on me: I do like business but I only like a certain type of business. So that was my awakening. And I devoured it after that. I read this book called Blue Ocean Strategy, and in it they talk about how you diversify yourself and how you create a brand. And I just realised that this is what we've been doing for years, right? They've just got a name for it. And that really opened my mind and made me understand that everybody is always marketing. They just don't know it. When you're on your first date, that's marketing, when you're in the club trying to get a date, that's marketing.

Andy Warhol said, "Good art is good business." Meaning that it's good business to make art work for you, and it's good business to make your business work. The bottom line is, if you're a creator trying to make your way in this business, you've got to understand the fundamentals. How you use those fundamentals is up to you. And as soon as you get to understand those fundamentals, then it's like Lego. Music's like Lego, business is like Lego, culture is like Lego, planet Earth is like Lego, consciousness is like Lego, the universe is like Lego. There are no rules. When you start getting into that level of understanding of the concept, the wheels start turning.

And the problem is we go back to the programming. Where were we programmed? In a school system that's built for compliance. And we all revert back to that. That's when you get creatives who say, "I'm stuck." Because they've been programmed for 18, 20 years that only these people can be creatives, only these people can run a business—and they're not the same people. And so, "Oh, I don't want to do business," or, "I'm a broke starving artist but I'm going to be successful." These are the programs that we have, artists aren't rich, artists sell out if they get money. And it stops you from doing the one thing you want to do: be creative. So I put all those things in one box now, and I just shuffle them around and see what comes out. This is art, this is creativity. Good business is creativity. Good business is art, that's it.

What you're saying about escaping our programming makes me think of psychedelic culture—people who would escape these pigeonholes through acid or mushrooms, for instance. Is that something you're interested in?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I've experimented with all those things because I'm interested in creativity. I'm interested in art. I'm interested in innovation. I'm interested in disruption by any means. I'll study deep sea fishing if I could learn something that I could take back to making beats, or into a business, or into parenting. That's how my mind works. I'm always thinking how that relates to this and how I can use that experience to inform another experience. That's what I'm teaching on my platform: how to think differently. How to change the experience, how to deprogram, how to be creative.

You mentioned that you're currently working on new music. Do you have a sense of what shape it might take?

It's too early to say. The initial stages are really encouraging. I've been very fortunate to get a lot of stuff from manufacturers now that I'm using. There's so much new stuff out there. A lot of the new analogue stuff's amazing, a lot of the new plug-ins are amazing. A lot of the new ideas that people are coming up with now for software are just nuts. I'm exploring blockchain, I'm exploring AI, I'm exploring storytelling, filmmaking, design. And I'm figuring out, how do you take these things to that next level? How do I do that within what I'm doing?

At the same time I'm creating a new business as well. I'm creating a sort of incubator lab where I can do more experiments and get companies to pay me for it [laughs]. So that helps with the music, that helps with thinking differently, working with teams.

I've probably done about 20 ideas at the moment. I'm just sort of seeing where that goes. I've been in the studio for the last six days, every night until three or four o'clock in the morning. So I know now I'm in that mode again. I'm excited to go back to the studio and to carry on working. I left [the studio] at seven this morning, and I wrote on my pad before I left the four ideas that I wanted to develop: What's the project name? What does it look like? Where's it going? And what tools do I need for that? So I'm putting myself in that creative space and getting ready for whatever's next.