Interview

Matt Mullen catches up with William Phillips on lockdown limitations, Logic and latest LP Inside Out

We spent a lot of time with Tourist’s music during the first UK lockdown. His 2019 album Everyday, grounded in the minutiae of life, depicted a simple domestic scene on its cover: coffee pot, bananas, a half-open window with grey morning light streaming in. As the world shut its doors and our own days spent inside began to bleed into one another, the record’s attempt to find beauty in the mundane gave the bleak and uncertain time a new sense of meaning. But while that album was providing solace to locked-down listeners, the British producer was also shut inside, piecing together his next one.

A deeply personal record written in response to the loss of a close friend, Inside Out was recorded at home, using a modest set-up – just a laptop, an OP-1, a phone and an audio interface – to explore big emotions, and even bigger themes. Like much of his radiant, panoramic electronica, it lives on the boundary between melancholy and euphoria, repurposing the rhythm and pulse of club music to evoke feelings beyond the buzz of dancefloor hedonism.

Speaking to the Grammy-winning artist in his South London living room, we discussed the endless possibilities of sampling, the joys of disavowing timbral snobbery, and how working within limitations can inspire a new kind of creativity.

We’ve really enjoyed listening through the new record. Could you tell us a little about the background of it?

“Most of my records tend to be rooted in stuff that’s going on in my life. This one was a weird one, because this was literally smack bang in the middle of a pandemic. And also, I had something sad personally happen, I lost one of my best friends, right at the beginning of the pandemic. We were all by ourselves in lockdown. Writing music became quite a healing process for me during this period. I couldn’t see his wife because she was literally on the other side of the world. I couldn’t do the usual things you do when you’re grieving. You go and see people, you’re with family, you have a funeral, all that stuff – but none of that happened.

“So I’ve kept myself half-sane by writing music. A lot of these pieces of music on the record are really in reference to this person and to how I was feeling – without wanting to go too heavy ,that was it, to be honest. Also, the fact of not being able to be at my studio also informed the production process greatly, which was something that I hadn’t anticipated, but was really liberating, actually.”

So you’re working in a commercial studio space?

“Yeah, I have a studio in Hackney just about 15 minutes from where I live. It’s filled with nice stuff that I love using that I’ve accumulated over the last 10 or so years of being a professional musician, but I didn’t really have access to that because it didn’t feel appropriate. We’re told to stay at home – so I thought, ‘OK, well, I’m gonna stay at home’.”

What kind of setup were you working with at home and how does that differ to what’s available at your studio?

“This is quite crucial, in terms of this record. All I had was my phone, an OP-1, an Apollo Twin, and a Mac. That was it. There was very little hardware, and very little in the way of synthesisers, things like that, very little outboard. Obviously, the Apollo is great. But the majority of this record was really formed from sampling. I found this quite interesting way of working. I got this adapter for my phone, and I plugged it straight into the Apollo. Then I would just go to Spotify on my phone, I could just sample directly in and you didn’t have to go through the whole process of downloading from YouTube, converting to WAV.