The album Epiblast begins with firm, declarative saxophone notes, announcing something larger than life itself. What immediately caught my ear were the synthesizer tones wailing in the background—oddly enough, I was reminded of Metroid. Something futuristic, yet grounded in an ancient civilisation that Samus Aran had crash-landed into and was encountering for the first time.
The drums hit hard. They pummel and build tension—an avalanche rapidly approaching—before pivoting unexpectedly, dancing with the synthesizers and woodwinds, locking step, then suddenly directing the entire show. I absolutely love the intergalactic introduction to this record. I understand these past few years have been tumultuous for you: the birth of your child, the loss of your brother, and your move to London from your home in São Paulo. The title Epiblast references the cellular layer in an embryo during the earliest stages of development.
Both musically and personally, in what ways did you feel yourself evolving during this period, and how did those changes shape the creation of such an exploratory and emotionally expansive work?
First of all, thank you for such a thoughtful description. It was truly beautiful to read such a thing! I have to admit that nobody has ever compared the opening of the album to Metroid before, but I immediately understood what you meant. This track was actually written by Mark Cake, my co-producer and saxophonist in my trio. When we were producing it, I wasn’t consciously thinking about science fiction or video games, but I was definitely interested in creating the feeling of entering an unknown world. Something mysterious, vast, ancient, and somehow futuristic. Also, I love that you mentioned a Nintendo game – my brother and I used to play Nintendo in the ’80s, so that took me back! Although I confess I haven’t played Metroid. 🙂
That idea you mentioned connects very closely to the title Epiblast. In embryology, the epiblast is the group of cells from which an entire organism eventually develops. It’s a stage that exists before identity, before form, before anything is fully defined. When I discovered the term, it felt like a perfect metaphor for the period of life I was going through while making this record.
Over the last few years, I experienced several profound transformations at once. I moved from São Paulo to London, became a mother, lost my younger brother after an unexpected and difficult illness, and went through major changes in my personal life. Each of those experiences challenged my understanding of who I was and who I was becoming.
I think that’s why the music became more exploratory. Rather than writing pieces that simply moved from one section to another, I became interested in creating environments and going to places where different emotions could coexist. Grief and joy. Fear and wonder. Stability and uncertainty. The album is full of moments where the music seems to change direction unexpectedly, and that mirrors how life felt during these past few years.
The electronics became an important part of that process. They allowed me to create larger sonic landscapes. But at the same time, I wanted everything to remain deeply human. The record is still rooted in improvisation and interaction.
Looking back, I don’t think Epiblast is about any single event. It’s about transformation itself. It’s about those moments when an old version of yourself is dissolving, and a new one is beginning to emerge, even if you can’t yet see what it will become.
I love the grooves on “The Right Side of the Escalator,” which skitter and skate alongside woozy grooves and what sounds like warped samples of woodwinds, but the dropout and inclusion of tumbling synthesizers made me take a momentary break from my chores to pause and groove. I was late for an event, but my tardiness was absolutely worth the dance break.
Listening to your discography, I hear the same energy, but your latest album feels more diverse, incorporating electronics and mixing dissimilar soundscapes together in creative, interesting ways. There’s a sense of space that feels more alien and vast than your prior releases, although I appreciate them as well for their grounded approach.
What were your favorite moments while creating these new soundscapes and palettes? Any particular techniques, melodic explorations, or tools that resonated with you during your evolutionary journey behind the record?
I’m glad “The Right Side of the Escalator” managed to make you late! That’s probably one of the nicest compliments a musician can receive.
One of the most exciting aspects of making Epiblast was allowing myself to be curious again. For most of my career, I’ve primarily worked within acoustic settings, where the focus was on the interaction between musicians, groove, improvisation, and composition. With this record, I started asking myself what would happen if I treated sound itself as part of the composition.
A lot of the new textures came from experimenting with synthesizers, pedals, effects processing, and layering. Sometimes we’d record an improvisation and then manipulate it until it became something entirely different. Other times, we’d stumble upon a sound accidentally and build a whole section around it. Many of the sounds on the record started as real instruments but were stretched, processed, or combined in ways that made them feel almost unrecognizable. The studio became a true sound lab.
One of my favourite examples is “In the Shell.” That piece wasn’t planned at all. We were working on a completely different track and created what was supposed to be a simple synth-pad texture. In reality, the sound was coming from an electric guitar that had been heavily processed and looped. We loved it so much that it felt like a waste to leave it buried inside another composition. So we opened a new session, recorded the loop on its own, and started building around it.
What fascinates me is that the entire track is essentially built around that loop. Then, almost as an experiment, I started layering a Brazilian rhythm called Partido Alto on top of it. On paper, it makes very little sense: this hypnotic, ambient, almost floating texture combined with a rhythm that is deeply rooted in Brazilian tradition. But somehow the combination worked beautifully. Those unexpected collisions became one of the defining characteristics of the album.
I was particularly interested in contrasts. I love the idea of placing something organic next to something synthetic, something rhythmically precise next to something floating and ambiguous. A saxophone can suddenly feel electronic. A synthesizer can feel strangely human. Those blurred boundaries became a big part of the album’s identity.
The UK jazz scene also had a huge influence on me during this period. Moving to London exposed me to artists who were fearlessly blending jazz, electronic music, broken beat, ambient music, and improvisation. That gave me permission to follow my own instincts and stop worrying about stylistic boundaries.
The best moments on the album were the ones where experimentation generated entirely new music. Those moments of discovery, when an accident suddenly reveals a new musical path, became the creative engine behind Epiblast.
The ocean waves crash as my friend stumbles down a cliffside, trying to capture not just any photo, but the photo that will keep him awake for hours. He’s passionate about photography, but doesn’t plan to make a living from it or share anything he takes with the world; it’s his search for pearls only, and those pearls will stay on his neck until he dies. We discourage him from the treachery he embraces to take these precarious photos, but he wants to clutch those pictorial pearls at night. He slips and nearly slides into the waves below. It’s over 50 feet down, and the rocks are jagged. We run to him and pull him to safety, cursing him for his stupid passion.
Oddly, this was the imagery that your song “Fifth Life” created for me as I listened. There’s an adventure, but also a sense of danger and urgency behind the track. I don’t believe in a second, third, fourth, or, much less, a fifth life.
I’m curious about why you titled this song as you did. How does the concept of “rebirth” inform your worldview and, potentially, your approach to creating music?
Love that image. The combination of beauty, danger, obsession and curiosity feels very close to the atmosphere I was trying to capture in the music.
As for the title, it’s not meant to be taken literally. The idea of a “Fifth Life” comes more from a metaphorical place. There is also a musical reason behind the title: the entire piece is built around quintuplets, so the number five was already embedded in the DNA of the composition from the very beginning.
Over the last few years, I’ve often felt as though I’ve lived several different lives within a single lifetime. Moving countries many times, becoming a parent, losing my younger brother, and experiencing major changes in my personal relationships all transformed me in profound ways. Looking back, each of those transitions feels almost like the death of one version of myself and the birth of another.
In that sense, “Fifth Life” is about reinvention. About reaching a point where life asks you to become someone you weren’t before.
What I find interesting is that these transformations are rarely comfortable. We often talk about growth as something positive and inspiring, but in reality it can be disorienting, painful, and even frightening. There’s a period where the old map no longer works, but the new one hasn’t revealed itself yet. That’s the space that interests me artistically.
I think that’s why your description of someone risking a fall while searching for something meaningful resonates with me. Creativity often feels like that. You’re stepping into uncertainty without any guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Sometimes you discover something beautiful. Sometimes you get lost. Usually it’s a bit of both.
As a musician, I try to embrace that uncertainty rather than avoid it. Improvisation has taught me that some of the most meaningful moments happen when you stop trying to control everything and allow yourself to respond to what’s unfolding in real time. The same is often true of life.
So while “Fifth Life” isn’t really about reincarnation, it is about the idea that we can be reborn many times during a single lifetime. The person who emerges on the other side of a major life event is often not the same person who entered it. Epiblast as a whole is deeply connected to that idea. It’s an album about transformation, and “Fifth Life” is perhaps one of its clearest expressions.
“Under the Quiet” turns the glitchy electronics up to eleven! The grooves feel punk rock, and the vocal manipulations and synthesizer riffs soar. While running, I was reminded of moments of Daft Punk, but with a melodic flair inspired by your experiences growing up in Brazil. This track transitions smoothly into the smooth, sexy “Familiar Stranger,” which creates two spaces for the listener: the improvisational soloing and drums that hold my attention, and the layers of electronics and organs(?) swirling in the background that give me a weightless sensation. I’m dancing, but suspended from wires and hanging above the ground. I’m Charlie after guzzling fizzy lifting drinks at the chocolate factory, but unafraid of the consequences.
I understand Mark Cake was an important collaborator behind Epiblast. Can you please describe that collaboration and how it broadened your musical sound palette during the creation of this record?
Your descriptions are seriously incredible. “Familiar Stranger” being described as Charlie and the fizzy lifting drinks made me laugh, but I immediately know the feeling you’re talking about!
Mark’s contribution to Epiblast was enormous. Beyond being the saxophonist in my trio, he was also my co-producer, and in many ways the album became a conversation between our musical personalities.
One reason the collaboration was so valuable is that our backgrounds are quite different. I grew up in São Paulo, immersed in Brazilian music and rhythm, while Mark is English and grew up within the musical culture that I was only beginning to discover after moving to London. Many of the sounds and artists that were exciting me at the time—the blend of jazz, electronic music, broken beat, ambient music, and experimental production—were already part of his musical world.
That made him the perfect person to explore these ideas with. He brought knowledge, instincts, and references that felt new to me, while I brought my own experiences and influences. What’s interesting is that despite those different backgrounds, our musical tastes overlap in so many unexpected places. We can spend one moment discussing an ambient electronic texture and the next talking about Brazilian grooves, jazz improvisation, or classic rock.
A lot of the album’s most interesting moments came from that exchange. One of us would bring an idea, and the other would take it somewhere unexpected. Sometimes a composition would inspire a sound experiment. Other times, a sound experiment would become the composition.
During the making of the album, we learned that Ozzy Osbourne had passed away. We ended up spending part of the session talking about him, listening to music, and remembering how much we both loved his personality, his uniqueness, and his complete lack of concern for fitting into anyone’s expectations. Somehow that conversation seeped into the music. We got so carried away that we ended up recording these huge, heavy, almost metal-inspired organ parts for one of the choruses. We didn’t plan it at all, but it felt right.
That’s probably the best description of how the album was made. We followed our curiosity wherever it led. Sometimes that meant experimenting with electronics and sound design. Sometimes it meant drawing from Brazilian rhythms. Sometimes it meant being unexpectedly inspired by Ozzy Osbourne.
I think that’s one of the reasons the album feels more expansive than my previous work. Mark helped create an environment where experimentation was central rather than occasional. Epiblast wouldn’t sound the way it does without that collaboration.
Your record, prior to the outro track, “In the Shell,” has an emotional heft that harkens back to prior recordings; however, the sounds are more reflective. The pulsing tones and wails are forlorn, cascading and colliding with each other beautifully. The warbling textures—with pitches oozing in and out of frame—give the record a stretched sensation. I feel my mind stretching, but then stretching further as the drumming increases in intensity; my hand reaches towards the exit—a shaft of light beaming in from the outside.
The title of the song is interesting because it feels as though whatever is inside its shell has decided to crawl out, and the track’s progression documents its journey to freedom. The storm has long broken, and the shellshocked creature who’s waited for safety has lost track of what “safety” means after hiding for so long. Perhaps it’s time to go outside.
What imagery did you have in mind as you made this evocative closure to your album?
Your interpretation is remarkably close to how I think about the piece. What’s funny is that “In the Shell” is actually the first part of a trilogy.
The second piece is called “In the Current,” and the third is called “In the Light.” Unfortunately, they didn’t make it onto Epiblast because we simply ran out of space on the vinyl! But they’ll be released as part of the next record.
So in a way, you’ve instinctively picked up on a story that continues beyond this album. What’s fascinating is that your interpretation introduces something I hadn’t consciously thought about: the moment when staying inside the shell stops being protection and starts becoming a limitation. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. There comes a point when safety and confinement begin to resemble each other.
“In the Shell” is exactly what the title suggests to me: a place of protection, introspection, and incubation. It’s the moment before movement. The moment before a decision is made. A space where something is quietly developing but hasn’t yet emerged.
“In the Current” is what happens next. It’s the moment of stepping out into the unknown. There’s excitement, but also fear. The current carries you whether you’re ready or not. It’s full of movement, twists, waves, unexpected drops, brief moments of calm, and then movement all over again. It’s unstable and unpredictable.
Finally comes “In the Light.” For me, that’s the arrival. Not perfection, but peace. The result of persistence, courage, and trust. It’s about facing uncertainty and believing that eventually something meaningful will reveal itself on the other side. Musically, it’s much more melodic, gentle, and luminous. Almost like a lullaby. In fact, I wrote it for my daughter, Rita.
So when you describe “In the Shell” as something preparing to leave its shelter and move towards freedom, you’re actually describing the beginning of a journey that continues through the next two pieces. The shell isn’t the destination. It’s the starting point.