"There's an extraterrestrial being—it's like Hellraiser—and when you play the record, you let the monster loose. Then, you have to play the game to bring it back. It's another dimension and it's all from a haunted library music record." This is Nathan Micay recounting how he tried to explain the story behind his new album, To The God Named Dream—and its accompanying board game—to the folks at LuckyMe Records. "I was really into the idea of building that lore and the weird mystery that a lot of the games I grew up with had," he said.

It was late afternoon on a weekday when I set out to meet Micay at his studio, in one of Copenhagen's last industrial areas not to fall prey to urban development. The sun was high and hot, and crowds were flocking to the popular street food stalls, hip bars and bakeries nearby. Tucked away on a nondescript street was an old building containing a number of artist studios, including Micay's temporary workspace.

Tall and brawny, Micay has an amiable presence. It didn't take him long to relax and open up about his new album, the soundtrack work he’s been doing over the past few years—including HBO's Industry series—and settling down in a new environment. Having moved from Berlin late last year and lived through Copenhagen's harsh winter, the Canadian producer is now getting used to the bright side of the city and its seemingly endless summer days.

While Denmark considers itself one of the happiest countries in the world, anyone who's ever moved here will tell you that it's also notoriously difficult to make new friends. When he first arrived, Micay didn't meet many people, but using his friend's studio opened things up for him.

"This building is very special," he said. "It's the closest place I've found that feels like Berlin." Case in point? Micay, who usually mixes his own music, entrusted the mixing duties for his new album to one of his studio neighbours, who records and mixes under the name Aether's Spring. Most of To The God Named Dream, which is out today, August 4th, was written at Micay's kitchen table.

The album is an exuberant mix of breakbeats, trance synths, sci-fi sounds, vocal samples and, somehow, live banjo. Although Micay calls it a "cursed library record," it's surprisingly warm and accessible. He said he wasn't necessarily going for suspense and scares, and we agreed that horror movies can be too scary to watch. "I'm really into this sort of kookiness," he said. "Horror movies from the '80s always start or end in some sort of warm family situation."

"I read a lot of sci-fi from the '60s, '70s and '80s," he added. "Just like all these funny retro, yet trying-to-be-futuristic themes. So I kind of try to take that onto the record." I told him I've also been having a lot of fun reading sci-fi from that era lately, like Philip K. Dick's Ubik and Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, both of which veer on the kooky side. His recent pick is Dan Simmons' genre-hopping epic Hyperion, which he called "ten out of ten."

We soon jumped a decade or two to discuss the echoes of the '90s, especially in regard to the ambient and downtempo influences in his music. "You listen to Boards of Canada, and that stuff sounds old," he said. "It's in the '90s and it sounds futuristic, but it also has a certain charm. It's sort of like the first Star Wars movies. The music feels lived in and experienced and not shiny. It feels like it's seen some shit."

Micay was going for this worn-out futurism on the new album, particularly on tracks like the gentle "You Can't Win But You Can Lose" or the blissful "This is Killing Your Gainz." But where Boards Of Canada's music is steeped in nostalgia, the retro schtick on To The God Named Dream produces a completely different result: a curiosity free of the emotional burden of longing for a bygone time.

When I first walked into Micay's studio, I noticed a Dune board game. "It's incredibly complicated, I've only tried to play it once," he admitted. (He's more of a Catan fan.) Role-playing games (RPGs) are a big part of the inspiration behind To The God Named Dream, and its vinyl version comes with a multiplayer board game on the sleeve, which can be played by six people. Even if it doesn’t take long to complete, the game still offers a physical experience alongside the album. "If in 20 years, I want to go back and look at what I did 20 years ago, I can do it without just pressing play on my computer, or whatever we have at that point," he said.

Micay's 2019 album, Blue Spring, came with a comic book. "People still write to me that they got tattoos of that comic, which blew my mind," he said. "I don't know if they would do that if it was just the album cover. I believe in the tangibility of music and objects."

This idea has played a key part in forming his musical path, along with playing a string of different instruments from a young age. He used to buy records from second-hand stores every day after school. Most of the stuff in his impressive collection of classic rock back at home was picked up for as little as 50 cents. "I still have those records, and I have CDs from back then," he said. "If you asked me to find my MP3 player and my MP3s from back then, I don't know where they would be. It's really nice to have a tangible thing that you can read or play in relation to the album."

Micay's passion for these objects—and his "love to buy"—led him to start three different labels, beginning with the reissue outlet Eternal Schvitz, which has released music from obscure artists like Love Boat People and Earthlink. "I feel like Carmen Sandiego, trying to find these hard-to-find people," he said. "Then you have to convince them that people actually want to hear their music, and a lot of them don't believe you. I've had some long conversations where people just want to tell me for three hours about the heyday of playing The End in London in 2000 or something." He also runs Schvitz Edits, for his own bootleg remixes, and Original Schvitz, which so far has only put out one record, from Micay himself.

The labels slowed down when the pandemic hit, giving way to a different flourishing interest. In February 2020, just as the virus was spreading around the world, the opportunity to score the HBO drama series Industry came along. As Berlin went into lockdown, Micay holed up at home and began working on the soundtrack.

"When I was writing Blue Spring, I was subconsciously trying to make it like a calling card that hopefully someone out there would hear," he told me. "And that's what happened, in a funny way." The album's title track ended up as the main theme for Industry. Micay's glittering synths capture the show's icy corporate setting, as well as the characters' tingling hope for success that always seems just out of reach, balanced between the twists and turns of business.

Although Micay's solo records are often described as "cinematic," his approach to writing soundtracks was totally different. "Once you're scoring, you want it as stripped back as possible," he said. "All my solo music is so maximalist. So I've had to really learn how to approach the term cinematic in a very reduced way." Nailing a musical theme often means producing a track "that has like five elements and it still portrays an emotion," said Micay.

The biggest difference between scoring and writing your own music is that the former is part of a collective effort. "I think a lot of producers in electronic music think that you just go in, lay down some hot stuff, and then they put it in the movie," he told me. "But it's not like that at all. You lay down some hot stuff, they tear it apart, and then you try to lay it down a little colder. There's like 60 percent writing music and 40 percent just keeping track of all the versions and all the notes."

While working on the soundtrack for the Sydney Sweeney-starring docu-drama Reality, Micay spoke with the director Tina Satter every day for months. "You build this intense working relationship for like three to six months, and you slowly build this cache of music to then be edited throughout the film or the TV show," he said. When Reality premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, there was a big dinner for the people who worked on the film. While everyone chatted about their own role in the process, Micay felt like he was one of the few people who hadn't been on set. "I was in Berlin or Copenhagen writing music and it's like you're by yourself—but at least you're on a Zoom call with ten people sharing ideas," he said.

Another major challenge was translating the soundtrack into a finished album. "It's funny because you work so hard on all the little nuances for the show, but that doesn't always translate to a soundtrack [album]," Micay said. Working on the Industry LP took a lot of effort. He had to work with a lot of very short tracks, which he then combined into medleys. "I got that idea from Thomas Newman, who did the score for Less Than Zero in the '80s," he explained.

The score for the dialogue-heavy Reality is made from two 14-minute tracks that Micay will have to break apart for the album. In the actual film, these long pieces go through a lot of changes. There might be an overall dark mood in a scene, "but then, if a character appears, you want this one light brushstroke of happiness, and then it's gone again," Micay said.

Because he was writing his own record while working on the soundtracks, the two worlds occasionally and inevitably overlapped. "There are a lot of things on this new album that are leftover threads that were just too crazy for soundtracks," he said. After months of working on a score and being given detailed instructions, it was difficult to go back to being the one in charge of the creative vision. "Suddenly it's like, how do I use my hands?" Micay said.

"I guess that's probably why a lot of this album is… I wouldn't call it disjointed, but there are a lot of changes and sudden switch-ups," he said. There's even a track with around 95 channels in Ableton. "'It's Recess Everywhere' and 'Fangs' are the two tracks I tried to make the most like the essence of just throwing the kitchen sink in. I've been playing banjo for years and I thought, 'what if I put banjo on a breaks track and just added samples of kids playing recess?'"

The idea of mixing together disparate sounds has followed Micay ever since he started making music. But the more he got into it, the more he felt like he had to at least match certain palettes with certain styles. Then he found that, in recent years, some music got more serious while the fun stuff got even sillier. He found himself looking for a space in between. "I got really into the idea of trying to create playful electronic music with a sort of naïveté to it," he said. "It's a post-pandemic world now. I think everything is out the window!"