Sunroof, the longstanding partnership project of Mute founder Daniel Miller and producer-engineer Gareth Jones, will release Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1 on Mute Record‘s newly revived Parallel Series imprint in May.

The idea for the album was birthed back in 2019 following one of the pair’s regular improvisation sessions on a modular system—they regularly meet up and jam when in the same city. This particular session was recorded, which sparked an album concept with a set of rules.

“We said we’d work in a number of different physical spaces but always together, in the same room,” Jones explains. “We were keen to do shorter pieces because we were both very inspired by Chris Carter and Martin Gore’s electronic music projects, where the pieces were very concise and compact.”

Each of the album’s eight pieces was recorded live, with no pre-planning or rehearsal, “using a limited number of channels,” we’re told. As a result, the album is a constantly evolving set of soundscapes and adventurous electronic wanderings.

“What they accumulated during the course of those 2019 sessions was a suite of evolving, restless pieces, each one containing layers of pulsing, atmospheric sounds,” the label tells XLR8R.

Tracklisting

01. 1.1 – 7.5.19
02. 1.2 – 30.5.19
03. 1.3 – 30.5.19
04. 1.4 – 18.6.19
05. 1.5 – 9.7.19
06. 1.6 – 7.5.19
07. 1.7 – 30.5.19
08. 1.8 – 2.3.19

Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1 will be out on May 21 and can be pre-ordered here, with an edit of “1.1- 7.5.19” streaming in full via the player below.