Blawan is coming up for air

Over the past 15 years, Blawan’s feral techno productions have taken him into ever stranger and more unhinged territory. His new album, SickElixir, marks a return – in spirit – to his hometown of Doncaster, and to the raw emotions it continues to evoke.

“Shh! Be quiet,” whooshes in a voice at the end of Weirdo’s United, a throaty, spurting moment of vocal nuttiness from the new album by Blawan. He has been UK techno’s most influential figure over the past 15 years, but making this monstrous machine of a song left him feeling miniscule. “That was me telling my dog to stop snoring,” the producer laughs, chatting to us over Zoom, dressed in a sleeveless, cream-coloured mage hoodie from the future. “I wrote the track when I was living in Leeds, in this tiny, tiny flat. It was the only place I could find quick, because I needed somewhere to live.” The place was so small that wherever Blawan perched, his dog, Crispy, could still be heard on the recording. “I was in Leeds on my own – no friends, family – looking out of my window going, ‘What am I doing in Leeds? Why am I here?’”

As Blawan, Jamie Roberts is no stranger to venturing beyond familiar ground. Raised in Thurnscoe, a village near Doncaster (Donny, if you’re local), he switched from the post-dubstep he debuted with almost as quickly as he stormed dancefloors with deep, layered kicks that seemed to impale the Earth, and alien vocal manipulations that precede Two Shell’s humanity-sapped vocaloids. The creeping dread and brutal physicality of his productions refocused attention on techno from the Isles, after years of hyperfixation on the German scene.

When his 2012 song Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage – a writhing, sample-driven piece of industrial techno with slasher-B-movie campness – became an uncontainable smash, he waited three years to follow it up with the crisp, earnest Warm Tonal Touch EP, made using analogue synthesisers. Alongside his creative soulmate Pariah, he’s maintained an irregular but prized label in Voam, practised the art of hardware-based improvised techno as Karenn, and even explored their mutual love of industrial hardcore and metal as Persher. This is par for the course for an artist who is constantly shifting his own goalposts. One year, he’s wary of “overdoing” releases; the next, he says he needs to stop being so “tight”. Nothing about him is sacrosanct – he is both the child building a sandcastle and the bully who comes to kick it down.

“I never want to have a plan,” he says about his creative process, sitting in front of his glowing blue PC rig. “Music-making for me is always just getting there and letting it flow. I’m actually a religious guy, so it’s a bit of a higher space when it comes to that kind of stuff.” It’s this casual interrogation into his sound and creative impetus that’s given him a discography full of contradictions and a sonic footprint that can’t be distilled into just one song.

His latest shift unhinges from techno altogether, developing across the trio of EPs released for XL since 2021, which gradually sink into a roiling bubble bath of morphed rave sounds, subtly sharpened with metallic textures. “The problem with techno is there’s a lot of people who are just doing what everyone else is. I think at some point, I found myself also being guilty of that, and I thought: ‘This is not what I started to write music for,’” he explains. So, in 2021, he moved to XL and broke down everything he had built up. The producer who had long been the poster child for techno gearheads fetishing the “realness” of modular synthesisers headed back to the PC. “You can make any sound with a computer,” he said. In hindsight, it almost sounds like a threat.

His new album, SickElixir, caps off that run of loose bass EPs with his most confrontational sounds to date. Across 14 short, dense tracks, he channels his usual intensity into a seething brew of gurgling industrial machinery, mid-tempo broken rhythms, electrostatic bass, skin-tearing drums borrowed from YHWH Nailgun, and voices extracted from your deepest, darkest nightmares. Diligent production collapses into black holes you fall into, like the junkyard landslide of Creature Brigade. There’s hardly a moment where a tail-end fill or sonic detail isn’t wedged in. It’s fitting that Roberts describes each track as “their own creature”.

SickElixir was written at a time of personal upheaval in the 38-year-old’s life. “I was living in Berlin for many years, and basically shattered my life through drug abuse,” he admits, still trying to keep the mood light with his tone. The situation became untenable for Roberts. He fell back to Leeds, where he spent his student days, then to Paris, before winding up in Lisbon, where he is today. All the while, he maintained a rigorous touring schedule, leaving little time to settle. His relationship with drugs was further marked by the deaths of several old friends from Doncaster, who overdosed during the making of the LP. “[The music] was an emotional response to it all. Me coming to terms with my position and all my problems and my friends’ problems, and a reflection of me being a million miles away,” he explains.

SickElixir mirrors the whirlwind spinning in his head – and around him – made real through his immersion in the club circuit. Chaotically constructed compositions, such as the patchwork of angular chops on Birf Song or the deep, watery pocket interrupted by a fidgety drum fill on Rabbit Hole, mimic these pressures. Album opener The GL Lights pairs a thunderous bass rhythm with what sounds like a boat straining against a storm. The feeling of instability is accentuated by its sequencing, as elements from the next track stagger into the outro of the previous one, like a drunk actor jumping the gun at the matinee.

The album was constructed in Blawan’s usual method of creating batches of tracks in quick succession, which typically lead to complete projects. However, without the cache of analogue equipment and the perfectly tuned studio he had in Berlin, Blawan resorted to the nomadic producer’s setup of laptop and headphones. Without equipment and relying solely on the sound libraries he had previously created in his studio, his voice becomes the driving force in these songs. While his trademark used to be extraterrestrial voices, here they are overtaken by monstrous grunts – slurring words into blotches and smears, tarring tracks with a blackness that seeps into the eyeache of colours. Don’t Worry We Happy twists the jovial goofiness of older tracks like Under Belly into an impish sing-song that skips around your head like a galloping, undead marching band (“Are you happy? Are you happy?”). “It was a really, really tough endeavour,” he exhales. “There were times when I felt like I was having to learn how to write music again.”

Doncaster preyed on his mind throughout the making of the album, but he never visited, partly because his feelings were still raw. “I don’t have any mates or anything there [any more], so I don’t really have any reason to go there,” he says. “It seems like a very different place to what I remember.” South Yorkshire is the seventh highest UK county for drug-related crimes, which increased by 13.3 percent from 2023 to 2024. Doncaster is where Roberts first developed his drug addictions. “We were all really troubled, including myself… still am. We all have our ailments, and drugs were a big problem where I grew up – still are,” he lifts the corner of his mouth, as if to say, ‘What can you do?’ His hometown weighs on him with survivor’s guilt, especially after losing friends to fentanyl, ketamine and heroin. “I live in Lisbon, so it’s like sunshine, beach,” he lists. “All my mates were stuck with having really hard lives back in Donny and Barnsley.”

The album’s closing title track is something of an homage to one of those friends – his childhood best friend, who introduced him to club culture. “He used to get these happy hardcore tapes of Helter Skelter and Dizstruxshon from the Donny Dome raves,” Roberts allows his mind to go back. “As we got older, I moved away and we just drifted apart, but I would’ve still counted him as my best mate. We were inseparable.” The track burns with a beaming hardcore melody, warped by time as though it’s been left out in the sun. “I just thought about how that one little moment, when he was showing me these tapes, had a huge impact on my life.”

The album may be turned in, but Roberts’ calmer, healing time in Lisbon is one thing he isn’t willing to deviate from just yet. “I’m still battling it now – my entire adult life, in and out of sobriety and all sorts of stuff,” he tells me frankly. “But I live in a really nice area, I have a park right next to me, and my dog loves it here. We’re just chilling, man. Seriously chilling.”

He’s still a techno head, though. Flexing his mammoth vinyl collection, he claims, “You won’t find a single record in there that’s not techno.” After months of playing and workshopping tracks live – something he was once averse to – the roller-coaster of SickElixir’s creation can stop, even if it’s only the beginning for listeners. As for his next step, Roberts lets slip it won’t be where you expect. “I’ve started to write a lot of techno again.” He’s grown certain enough of himself to kick the sandcastle down again.