In The Studio With

Sunroof duo Gareth Jones and Daniel Miller have finally released their debut electronic album 40 years after they first became friends. Danny Turner reveals how the iconic producers’ modular jams finally saw fruition

Gareth Jones, famed for his production work for Depeche Mode, Erasure and Einstürzende Neubauten, first became acquainted with fellow producer/label boss Daniel Miller when requested to work on Mode’s 1983 synth-pop album Construction Time Again. At the end of those sessions, Jones and Miller would stay behind and playfully experiment with sounds at The Garden – then studio of synth pioneer John Foxx.

Despite naming the project Sunroof and later remixing artists including Goldfrapp, Can and To Rococo Rot, the duo refrained from releasing their own studio jams for almost 40 years. However, that changed in March 2019 following various improvisations using modular suitcases. This time they made plans to record their sessions, resulting in Electronic Music Improvisations Volume 1 – eight extemporary modular pieces recorded live in various studio spaces across London.

Can you remember the circumstances behind the two of you first meeting?

Daniel Miller: “We were starting to plan working on the third Depeche Mode album Construction Time Again. Up to that point we’d been working at a great studio called Blackwing but felt we needed a change of scene so finally landed at John Foxx’s studio The Garden because it was so different from a conventional studio. It had daylight, which was unusual in those days, a relatively big control room and a small live room, but we didn’t have an engineer. John suggested Gareth because he’d help set up his studio and worked with him on Metamatic. Gareth had a very enthusiastic vibe, so we decided to work with the Mode together and it all became very natural and fluid with a lot of experimental processes.”

Gareth Jones: “In a way that was the start of the Sunroof project because, quite quickly, Daniel and I realised that we liked hanging out in the studio after Depeche Mode had gone home. They usually got the train back to Essex and as we were both living in London we’d spend the odd hour or two doing jam sessions and playing around with synths and effects. We were just mucking about and wouldn’t even record them, but this improvisational record grew out of those early seeds so they were useful.

DM: “We worked very intensively with the band so it was a good head-clearing exercise and we both had our own modular synths at the time. I had an ARP 2600 and a Roland System 100M, so we were already in that world.”

How would you compare the electronic music scene now to how it was back then in terms of the availability of instruments?

DM: “Electronic music in the broader sense had been going on for years before that with Stockhausen, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and producers like Joe Meek who were using strange effects. Unless you could build your own synths, which I wasn’t capable of doing, making electronic music was a distant dream, but before the second half of the ’70s the tools became a lot more accessible. There’d been some Japanese releases from Roland and Korg especially, and they came on the second hand market and were already a lot less expensive than the Moogs and the ARPs. For a young band, the only option was guitar, bass and drums, but now there was a new option so it was all very exploratory.”