Twenty-five years is a long time to stay ahead in electronic music, especially considering how quickly genres mutate and scenes evolve and collapse. So I sat down with North Carolina-born beatmaker Travis Stewart, better known as the inimitable Machinedrum, to ask what his secret is.

Across records like Room(s), Vapor City and now the new mini-album BL00MS, Stewart has melded influences like jungle, footwork, UK bass, ambient, juke, techno, hip-hop and R&B into his own distinctive sound, and always managed to sound fresh and exciting. Along the way, there have been collaborations with Azealia Banks, A$AP Ferg, Tinashe, Dawn Richard and Hudson Mohawke, plus an insane catalogue of remixes: Solange, Boards Of Canada, The Glitch Mob, Bonobo and Johnny Cash (yes — THE Johnny Cash).

We talk about the cities that shaped him, from North Carolina to New York to three formative years in Berlin. We unpack how “gateway” sounds can lead people into deeper listening (and possibly — begrudgingly on both our parts — how brostep may have acted as a catalyst for deeper listening), and how he’s kept his work connected to his root influences without getting trapped by any one lane.

The second half goes deep on independence and the modern music business. BL00MS is his first self-released project after years with Ninja Tune, and he’s thinking hard about direct-to-fan release strategies, touring systems, and treating streaming like marketing rather than a lifeline. We also get into authenticity on social media, how to promote music without turning it into a clown show, and why self-imposed limitations inside Ableton Live can be the difference between endless tweaking and finishing a record.

So, it’s great to be back. Lost and Sound is now monthly. I started making episodes way back in 2018, and it’s gone on a real journey since then. Now totally independent, I rely on listeners like you to help keep the project growing.

If you enjoyed the episode, follow Lost and Sound on Substack and me on Instagram, subscribe to the RSS Feed, and share the episode with someone who’d be into it. Independent journalism and independent podcasting still run on word of mouth.

BL00MS on Bandcamp.

He’s a one-person portal into rave history: childhood mornings at Goa beach parties, teenage years in Montreal throwing Canada’s first proper rave, a run of records that helped define the electroclash era and collabs with everyone from Hudson Mohawke to FCUKERS. I sat down with Tiga to follow that thread from cassettes and sunrise dancing to global club circuits and a new album that’s unapologetically his.

We talk about what it meant when house and techno first landed like a cultural shock and how a “punk spirit” can live inside electronic music. Tiga also gets specific about craft: why playfulness belongs in dance music but humour can destroy the trance, and why he once said real DJing is like stand-up comedy. Along the way we chew on  DJ technique, set pacing, reading a room, and the strange relationship between performer confidence and crowd response.

Then the conversation turns personal. Tiga describes “vibe fog” as his shorthand for the brutal reality of long COVID and the slow return of basic function and creative joy. We connect that recovery to making new work, including his INXS “Need You Tonight” rework, and to how flow state behind the decks has changed from vinyl intensity to today’s faster, bigger, more concert-like parties.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps others find the show. You can do that here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Tiga on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/tiga/

Tiga on Bandcamp:

https://tiga.bandcamp.com/album/hotlife-2

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

Techno doesn’t need more rules, it needs more nerve. On Lost and Sound, I’m joined by Copenhagen-based DJ and producer Anastasia Kristensen, an artist whose work sits right on the edge between club functionality and something far more exploratory.

After approaching a decade in the spotlight, her debut album Bestiarium Sombre (out 8 May on Intercept Records) is the perfect entry point into that mindset. Every track is tied to an animal, some real and some imagined. Anastasia uses this as a tool for storytelling, sound design, and rhythm choices that feel tactile, dark, and playful. Anastasia breaks down how field recordings and found sounds become musical material, how a hydraulic mechanism can turn into a “whale”, and why not overthinking is sometimes the most disciplined creative choice.

We also get into the lived reality around the work: touring and crowd connection, how she prepares music without over-preparing a set, why atmosphere and darkness change what people hear, and what it meant to clarify her Ukrainian background after 2022 while staying focused on meaningful local action. We finish with thoughts on AI in music, not as an artistic replacement but as a wider economic and climate question, plus where she wants to take her sound next.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps others find the show. You can do that here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Anastasia Kristensen on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/anastasia.kristensen/

Anastasia Kristensen on Bandcamp:

https://anastasiakristensen.bandcamp.com/music

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

Episode 200 calls for a guest who thinks towards the future. DJ and musician Yu Su has a composer’s ear for detail and a chef’s instinct for serving up textured sonic platters.

We talk about sound as material, about burning and melting ideas down, then reshaping them into something new, and about why minimal arrangements can feel more dynamic when every layer has room to breathe. Along the way we get into dancefloor culture as a sensory ritual, the strange power of rules and instructions, and Yu Su’s “polyphonic eating” dinners where silence becomes part of the experience.

Yu Su’s story stretches from Kaifeng to Vancouver to London, with early years of classical piano and a lasting love for Debussy that later makes sense as a bridge to ambient, dub techno, minimal tech house, and leftfield club music. She explains why certain styles only click with the right context, how an early electronic music experience at a Floating Points night rewired her ears, and how she learned production by reverse engineering beats until the logic revealed itself.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps others find the show. You can do that here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Yu Su on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/yusu_suyu/

Yu Su on Bandcamp:

https://yusu.bandcamp.com/album/foundry

Yu Su’s new LP Foundry is out on May 1st on Short Span

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

José Gonzáles makes quiet music full of loud ideas. I sat down with him in person to trace his journey from playing in hardcore punk bands to the intimate arpeggios that turned Veneer and Heartbeats into global touchstones. Jose opens up about writing “humble accusations,” using minimal sound to deliver maximal ideas, and how a scientist’s method—shaped by his biochemistry background—helps him build tension, release, and meaning inside quiet music.

It all gets a bit Dawkins: Jose unpacks meme complexes, the cultural building blocks that replicate from brain to brain, and shows how his work recombines influences from Latin America, Sweden, and shelves of philosophy and science audiobooks. We explore the thread that runs from early relationship sketches to pointed critiques of dogma, moral relativism, and “doomsday dudes,” all while keeping the songs spacious enough to live at dinner tables and in headphones after midnight.

We talk about how on his new album –  Against the Dying Light, José connects Enlightenment values—reason, empiricism, individual liberty—to today’s urgent questions around AI, engineered risks, and human flourishing. He celebrates breakthroughs like AlphaFold while calling for alignment, transparency, and calm public reasoning. The result is a rare balance: optimism without naivety, warning without hysteria, and art that invites you to think without telling you what to think.

I've re-activated the show's Substack newsletter. Give it a follow for extra bits about the guests, thoughts on music culture and creativity and whatever else. Nothing is behind a paywall yet, so it's a great time to get on board.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps others find the show. You can do that here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

José Gonzáles on Instagram:

www.instagram.com/jose.gonz.music

José Gonzáles on Bandcamp:

https://josgonzlez.bandcamp.com/album/against-the-dying-of-the-light

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

Alexis Taylor has somehow racked up 25 years now as a founding member of Hot Chip and is about to release his seventh album, the rather magnificent Paris In Spring. How did that happen?

I spoke to Alexis about balancing songcraft with production. We talk about how a busy year sharpened his focus, why finishing isn’t real until the music meets an audience, and how a strong melody and a few true lines can carry a track across any arrangement.

Alexis opens up about writing from feeling without turning songs into diary entries. He shares the stories behind darker cuts that circle self-distraction and drinking without exploiting pain, and he explains how Scott English’s Brandy and pop’s long history of reinvention influenced his approach. We get into one about how to approach covers: taking the Stones’ Wild Horses into a dub-soaked slow-burn shaped by Rhythm & Sound textures and Euro-pop reggae echoes, built with producer Pierre Rousseau and recorded at Nicolas Godin’s studio.

We also rewind to early London shows and why refusing the uniform of the era helped Hot Chip find its own lane—irony beside tenderness, dance beside detail, authenticity without cosplay. From Beastie Boys devotion to Royal Trux revelations, Alexis maps the influences that mattered and how they were absorbed rather than imitated.

Alexis Taylor on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/alexishotchip/?hl=en

Alexis Taylor on Bandcamp:

https://alexistaylor.bandcamp.com/album/paris-in-the-spring

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press

Follow Lost and Sound on Substack

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

Everything is political, even nature. That spark leads us into a wide-ranging conversation with Green-House—Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan—whose new album Hinterlands on Ghostly International proves that quiet, spacious music can still carry teeth. We trace the project’s beginnings in LA: Olive escaping a soulless service job by walking Griffith Park, Michael offering early tech scaffolding, and the two slowly dissolving roles until the songs breathed on their own. Think Japanese environmental music and library records as wayfinders; sampled and real guitars treated like synths; textures that breathe, 

We dig into labels. “Ambient” doesn’t fit sonically, but its non-hierarchical ethos does. “New Age” is another story: we talk wellness capitalism, spiritual packaging, and the lazy use of eastern signifiers, especially glaring in LA where cultish histories still hum under the surface. From there, we examine the streaming economy that rewards backgroundability, how algorithms sell artists their own data back, and why Green-House resist being flattened into spa-core.

Green-House on Instagram:

Hinterlands is released on Ghostly International on March 20th

Green-House on Bandcamp:

https://green-house.bandcamp.com/album/hinterlands

https://www.instagram.com/green_house1976/?hl=en

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press

Follow Lost and Sound on Substack

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

I sat down with Parisian‑born, Brussels‑based producer UFO95 to trace the line between brutalist architecture, Detroit machine soul, and live techno. From early days in punk bands and birthdays above his parents’ club to a Tresor residency and a nerve‑tight Berghain performance, he unpacks how structure, space, and human error can turn a set into something physical.

We dive into the design choices behind the new UFO95 album A Brutalist Dystopian Society Part 2: concrete‑solid kicks, saturated drones, and spacious pads that carry the grey, functional, futuristic mood of brutalism without ornament. He explains why half his shows remain improvised, how shrinking his hardware rig sharpened the energy, and what different cities teach him about pacing a room. Expect thoughtful nods to Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, Surgeon, and Regis, reframed through a personal lens that swaps copycat nostalgia for living lineage.

We also explore the craft behind the scenes: producing with the live arc in mind, writing twenty‑minute passages that breathe without a kick, and treating the club as a place to express, not excess. UFO95 talks candidly about resisting trends, favouring slow, minimal, and mental tracks while much of techno chases extremes, and why keeping protest and experimentation at the heart of the genre still matters.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support the podcast is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps new listeners discover the show — on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

UFO95 on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ufo95live/?hl=en

UFO95 on Bandcamp:

https://ufo95.bandcamp.com/

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press

Follow Lost and Sound on Substack

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

I sat down with Nathan Fake, one of the UK’s most distinctive electronic music producers, to chart his journey from rural Norfolk to the forefront of techno, IDM and experimental electronic music — and to unpack Evaporator, his seventh studio album. The record marks a clear pivot away from drum-heavy habits toward mood, melody and atmosphere, growing out of an intentional “ambient-only” brief.

We dig into the nuts and bolts of music production: why Nathan still sketches ideas in old versions of Cubase, how cassette saturation, cheap gear and sonic imperfections add human friction, and where modern plugins genuinely earn their place. He talks about contrast as a compositional tool — lush pads against tough drums — and traces a lineage from Border Community’s trance-tinged techno through to echoes of Warp-era electronic atmospherics.

There’s also a candid look at playing legacy tracks live, reshaping classics like “The Sky Was Pink” and “Outhouse” through improvisation, memory and feel, rather than carbon-copy recreations.

Beyond sound design, the conversation opens out into bigger questions about electronic music today. Do long-form tracks still survive in a scroll- and swipe-first ecosystem? Nathan answers by doubling down, placing a nine-minute centrepiece at the heart of the new album. We reflect on working with small independent labels versus larger music organisations, and he shares pragmatic advice for staying singular: ignore trends, set your own constraints, and let the idea dictate the tool. We also probe the monoculture of online tutorials and ubiquitous DAWs.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support the podcast is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps new listeners discover the show — on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Nathan Fake on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/nathanpaulfake/?hl=en

Nathan Fake on Bandcamp:

https://nathanfake.bandcamp.com/

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press

Follow Lost and Sound on Substack

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.

Nikki Nair gets serious about fun — the formerly Tennessee, formerly Atlanta, currently LA-based DJ and producer talks about how a punk sense of purpose, Detroit and Chicago foundations, and a love of “broken” sound converge into sets and tracks that surprise without losing the groove. Nikki gets into how a recent UK residency sharpened his instincts, the studio sessions that kept his mood afloat, and the tiny cultural artefacts (hello, Percy Pigs) that colour the journey as much as any plugin.

From a life-changing afternoon at Submerge with Underground Resistance legend Mike Banks to late nights in Knoxville and formative trips to Atlanta, Nikki maps the lineage that informs his playful, left-turn club and electronic music. We get into the tension between function and originality, how drumming shaped his breakbeat brain, why he chases flow states that make him literally laugh at the DAW, and how he decides when to risk losing a slice of the crowd in order to move the culture an inch forward.

There’s a wider lens, too. Nikki is candid about the modern reality of nightlife — selling tickets and telling a human story — while keeping the focus on service, community, and sincerity.

OK, housekeeping: I've re-activated the show's Substack newsletter. Give it a follow for extra bits about the guests, thoughts on music culture and creativity and whatever else. Nothing is behind a paywall yet, so it's a great time to get on board.

If you enjoy Lost and Sound and want to help keep it thriving, the best way to support is simple: subscribe, leave a rating, and write a quick review on your favourite podcast platform. It really helps others find the show. You can do that here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Nikki Nair on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/nikki__nair/?hl=en

Nikki Nair on Bandcamp:

https://nikkinair.bandcamp.com/

Huge thanks to Audio-Technica – makers of beautifully engineered audio gear and sponsors of Lost and Sound. Check them out here: Audio-Technica

My book Coming To Berlin is a journey through the city’s creative underground, and is available via Velocity Press.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @paulhanford for behind-the-scenes bits, guest updates, and whatever else is bubbling up.