The rising UK artist follows up his lauded LP, File Under UK Metaplasm, with excellent new EP, Obstacle Scattering. Hamish Mackintosh finds out about his love of Max and digital synthesis

Planet Mu are currently on a rich vein of form, releasing music from some of the most interesting and innovative electronic music artists around. None more so than the wondrous new Obstacle Scattering EP from Yorkshire’s Rian Treanor. The new tracks cement Treanor’s burgeoning reputation having received some serious attention and plaudits following his 2020 album, File Under UK Metaplasm, a rich melting-pot of dance music sounds old, new, and yet to be.

Obstacle Scattering takes no prisoners from the very off, with the frenetic pulses and FM tones of Obstacle 1 wasting no time in launching a blissful sensory assault. Obstacle 2 was written specifically for Rian’s set at Aphex Twin’s 2019 curation of the Warehouse Project.

Rian certainly has techno hard-wired in his DNA as his father (and sometime collaborator) is highly regarded music-maker Mark Fell (SND and Sensate Focus among numerous other projects) and the pair have recently been busying themselves in lockdown hours with investigating remote collaborative software and ways to keep things in the box… while inviting more people to join them in that box.

Rian has some fascinating insights into running a software-only approach to making his music and how you don’t need to shell out vast fortunes on hardware synths and samplers when you can deep-dive into software to design and build your own. As borne witness by the Max-created delights of Obstacle Scattering.

Have you found the lockdowns a blessing or a curse for your music-making process?

“It’s weird really as I haven’t been making any dance music… at all. But I have been working on lots of projects, so I have been busy with lots of stuff but it’s stuff that I wasn’t busy with before lockdown. One of the reasons I haven’t been making any club music is that I like to make music for specific places. Say, if I have a gig coming up then I’ll make a bunch of tracks for that. If it’s just me making music in my room then I don’t get as much direction for it and that seems a little pointless to me. I have been doing loads of other types of music stuff where it’s more collaborative, or workshops, and it feels more connected at the moment. Even though I come from a background of making solo music on a computer, I’ve always been into working with people and, in lockdown, I’ve missed being able to collaborate with other people. So, rather than, say, streaming something to 50 people, I’ve got into doing workshops with maybe five other people involved. And doing four sessions over a month, with the goal of making something together.”