Watch The Video For Illum Sphere's Otherworldly "Love Theme from Foreverness"

To Illum Sphere, nothing is quite clear. His DJ name doesn't have a meaning. Love is an expanding and contracting reflection of blurred lighting, music is an indescribable mix of feelings, and dancing always comes when he leasts expects it. He just kind of floats along, observing how everything fits together, with no overbearing convictions to weigh him down. Just take his video for "Love Theme from Foreverness," off of his recent debut album Ghosts of Then and Now.

It's an animated rendition of all of the unspoken blurring that goes on between thoughts, people, and emotions. Nothing is black and white and nothing is one crisp, straight line, so Illum stands strong as an electronic outsider, making his best music out of everything in between.

For this interview, we caught him in another in-between state - two months after his debut album, and just weeks before his follow-up release, an eight-song "mini-album" Spectre Vex due out on April 19, Record Store Day. He'd spent some time away from Ghosts and struggled to remember parts of the album, but that's fine. Illum works best in the haze anyway, finding his true sound and voice amidst the confusion.

THUMP: Ghosts of Then and Now, your first full-length album, came over four years after your first EP. Why the long wait?

Illum Sphere: I just didn't feel like I was ready to do it, really.

Why?

Mentally, maybe? I don't know. I was just trying to write a different way and see it as a whole - like one piece as opposed to 13 or 14. I also don't make music every day. I can't just switch on at 9am, and make music till 5pm. I needed to find the time to naturally gravitate towards a sound and place. It also wasn't a real conscious decision to be like, Now I'm going to make an album. It was sketches first, then thinking of it as actually starting to take some shape, and then revisiting it from that perspective as opposed to just finishing track after track after track. In hindsight, I'm quite pleased I waited.

What drives you to make music?

I started playing instruments and experimenting from a young age. You tend to find that when you don't know anything about what you're doing. That's arguably your most experimental time, because you're just running in the dark. Back then, it was all more instrument-based, and not to any particularly high level. Then I started getting into electronic stuff; hearing certain records, feeling a certain way about those records, and hoping people may feel a similar way to my music.

You mentioned that you have a lot of ideas you wanted to convey with this album and I'm wondering how you're able to do that with an electronic palette.

I always wanted the first record to be listened to in a way where people could trace potential reference points to jazz, dub, techno, psych or film music. The only thing I really wanted was to create something that could be listened to as a full thing. That would feature where I come from in terms of my own musical evolution, as it were. Not just making tracks track-for-track with really different genres, but fusing all of them together.

Reading the song titles, it sounds you're having an existential crisis.

Maybe.

Are you?

I'm not sure if I am right now.

Were you?

Probably. I think everyone does all the time in their own way. Merely worrying about things like how many "likes" you get is an existential crisis now. People are having them every day. Existential crisis sounds like such a hugely important thing, but I think you can have varying degrees in it.

There were undoubtedly moments of questioning what I was doing, but that was just because certain things weren't coming out how I imagined them to be. I just worked with it, and worked with it - and it happened. Song titles-wise, it was just to nudge people into a certain place without laying everything onto a plate. The song titles, the album title and the artwork are a tool to do that, as opposed to writing some huge accompanying story.

Was the album an emotional release for you?

I started making music just to vent. It's a way that I haven't found I could vent anywhere else. I could go a long time without making music, but maybe that's just because I don't need to vent. But when I do, I really do. That may have come to an end now, though. I think now it's progressed into more of I just really love doing it and experimenting again. Doing the first album was a real mental weight off my shoulders.

Had you ever experienced that kind of liberating feeling through music before?

I still remember the first time I figured out how to record an overdub on my little shitty hi-fi when I was 12 years old. It felt like this massive technological breakthrough. That progressed into something quite therapeutic—that's the word I was looking for.

Before the album came out I started messing around with other more focused things, potentially other alias stuff, but now it switched back almost full circle again. It's super fun experimenting and trying to strike that balance between doing something that you really want people to appreciate, and feel the same way that you felt about certain records. I'm not doing it to meet the approval of others, but I hope that what I do does in some way kind of do that. It's a real balance.

You and Jonny Dub started your own club night, Hoya:Hoya. Do you like to party?

Yeah. When it's your own thing you stress out about it, but it's always fun.

What's your favourite music to dance to?

I don't know. There's so much stuff. When people play things that you really wouldn't expect to hear in that context - that tends to really grab me.

Any examples?

Blue Daisy played at Hoya once and he finished on 'The Great Gig in the Sky' by Pink Floyd. I was just like, "What?" It came out of nowhere because he was doing his Blue Daisy thing, which was quite intense and raw, and then out of that was just this euphoric fucking Pink Floyd song. The sheer surprise and timing and setting was really perfect. It's quite a hard tune to dance to, because it's more of a sway-er.

Your album comes off as pretty mellow, but I was thinking if I heard that in a club I'd dance to it.

You'd probably be the only one. People miss out on such an amazing amount of stuff that on paper might not be the most danceable thing in the club, but then when you put it in a certain way, or you present it between two other records that support the strength of that piece, you tap into something that's really fucking amazing.

I really love those moments in clubs. They're the ones that you can't really describe to people. They're few and far between, but when they happen they just stick with you. I'm not saying I only ever fucking dance when those moments happen, because that's stupid. I'm not much of a dancer anyway, but just being caught off guard in a club, in a good way, is such an amazing thing.

How do you create that when you DJ?

To be honest, there's not much of an agenda when I DJ. There's never really a "Yeah, I'm going to smash this crowd", blah blah blah. I think a really good thing to do sometimes is to pick out three tracks that you know you really want to fucking play, and then consciously program everything around those three tracks. They might be spread out 30 minutes apart, but then you have these reference points to structure where you're going to go and that's really fun - especially if it's something that you just got for the first time, or it's something that you're revisiting. If you then can structure the set in a way where you hit those points and it works, that's really cool.

Lauren Schwartzberg likes dancing. @LaurSchwar