PIECE OF ME, 10 YEARS On

Ten years ago this month, I released Piece of Me.

There are records that capture a particular period in an artist’s life, and there are records that change the direction of it. For me, Piece of Me was very much the latter.

By 2015, I’d spent close to twenty years making and releasing music as Elite Force and Zodiac Cartel. I’d run record labels, released well over a hundred records, toured relentlessly around the world and built much of my working life around the dancefloor.

It had been an extraordinary ride, but somewhere along the way I’d begun to feel constrained by the very thing I’d become good at.

For years, almost every piece of music I made began with some version of the same question: will this work on a dancefloor?

With Piece of Me, I stopped asking that question as my default.

I started sitting at the piano and following ideas wherever they wanted to go. Electronic music collided with guitars, songs, layered vocals and ambient textures. Genre became largely irrelevant. For the first time in years, I wasn’t writing for a scene, a DJ set or a record label. I was simply trying to make something that felt true.

At almost exactly the same time, the foundations of my life outside music began shifting dramatically too.

What started as a creative experiment became something far more important: a place I could retreat into while many of the things that had previously defined my life were disappearing.

Photography became part of that process as well. Those solitary pre-dawn expeditions around the Kent and Sussex countryside gradually developed into a parallel creative obsession, and eventually the photographs and music became inseparable. Every track on Piece of Me received its own artwork, created from photographs I had taken and manipulated myself.

Looking back, I realise I wasn’t simply making an album. I was building an entire audio-visual world, one that I could disappear into while trying to work out what came next.

Ten years later, Piece of Me remains one of the most important records I’ve ever made.

In my latest Substack essay, I’ve gone back to the period in which it was created: the strange 3:30am photography expeditions, the unraveling of an old life, the loss of my studio, the creative freedom I’d rediscovered at Burning Man, and the circumstances in which I eventually finished the most ambitious record I’d attempted.

It’s the story of an album, but also of what can happen when the structures you’ve built your life around begin to disappear, and creativity becomes somewhere to live while you figure out what comes next.