Daniel Avery

Truth London’s 24-hour licensed nightclub, FOLD, is tucked away on an industrial estate in Canning Town, overlooking a graveyard of empty skips. Since its opening in 2018, it’s become one of the capital’s most thriving electronic music destinations, thanks to a water-tight booking policy, an impressive sound system and the fact you have to stick a little gold star, like the ones you got at primary school, over your phone’s camera. Daniel Avery has goose bumps thinking about DJing there back in March, stroking his arm to feel the hairs standing on end. “I came off and the room felt like it was raining sweat,” he recalls. “I looked at my watch and it was 5pm, you know, you should be having a roast dinner at that time!” Unfold is a Queer-leaning party held fortnightly on Daniel Avery was lost, Sunday daytime with completely unannounced line-ups, and no set times. He played there alongside I. JORDAN, and but now he’s found. Marcel Dettman, and Richie Hawtin DJed there recently. “Everyone wants to play it,” he says. “Everyone gets paid the Following a reset thanks same, as well – a sort of token gesture amount, but it’s not about that. It removes the idea of superstardom: everyone to the enforced hiatus in that room is equally important. For me that’s the absolute nucleus of what clubs should be – the DJ’s in the of lockdown, the middle of the room, so every single person surrounding the DJ plays an equal part in the energy of that room. It’s not electronic producer has about a stage.” Avery is sitting at a wooden table in The Gun in Hackney, a returned with the best pub which has a personal significance to Avery, 36, as one of the places that welcomed him when he first moved to – and most expansive – London from his native Bournemouth. Camden’s Lock Tavern, where he used to DJ, alongside the now defunct The album of his career. End and fabric, was owned by the same people. A few minutes earlier he was happily chatting away to the bar Felicity Martin speaks staff. The East London boozer has its own affiliations with music, and Avery contributed to the ‘Gun Aid’ LP it released to the man who claims on its own label along with the other card-carrying life members who are producers. “It’s the kind of place that he’s not a natural makes London what it is,” he says fondly. performer, yet whose Cupping a glass of red and a packet of peanuts (“probably the worst thing to order when you’re recording this impassioned sets move conversation!”), there’s a calmness to Avery that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from someone who, a few his fans to tears… weeks earlier, was firing breakbeats and strobe lights around a big top tent as part of a live set at Field Day in nearby Victoria Park. His quietly comfortable demeanour resists any suggestion of someone who craves the spotlight. “I’ve never considered myself to be any kind of natural performer. I still don’t,” he says. “But I do like the energy that gets fed back between the performer and the crowd. At the end of the day, I still feel like a music nerd, a complete music fanatic, and someone who is so fortunate to be able to share what he does.”

After his Field Day appearance, one Twitter user posted: “I’ve seen Daniel Avery many many times before but, dunno what happened this time, I burst into tears when ‘Lone Swordsman’ transitioned to ‘Knowing We’ll Be Here’.”

It’s coming up to the end of a festival season that’s seen him appear at Lost Village, Glitch in Malta, ION in Albania, and more. But Avery has drastically scaled back on the amount of touring he’s been doing. It was that relentlessness that attributed to the nearly five-year gap between his last album proper, 2018’s ‘Song For Alpha’, and his new one, the magnificent ‘Ultra Truth’.

“I think I held on to the idea of dance music being an escape too firmly at times,” he says, talking about promoting ‘Song For Alpha’, his second album following his 2013 debut, ‘Drone Logic’. “It led me to ignore quite a few serious things in my own life and to do with myself. It’s an easy escape, and it led me to start defining myself through that life as a touring DJ. I’m sure your learned readers can use their imaginations to work out the pitfalls someone like me could have fallen into on the road over the years. That’s only a small part of it, though.”

At this point, Avery stops, saying he can sense himself holding back. He pauses, then starts again: “That whole lifestyle really overtook me and definitely blinkered me in lots of ways. I’ve come to realise that it was all born out of fear, fear that this incredible life I’ve been gifted could all end tomorrow.”

Then, in March 2020, lockdown happened, and it did all end. “At first, it felt like it had been wrestled from us,” he says. “It was scary, but I’ve come to realise that the time to stop was a blessing for me.” Taking stock of things, he did the sums and realised that he’d been DJing for literally half his life. “Once everything had settled, I realised that I was still standing, I was still intact, and I realised it wasn’t that lifestyle that was making me happy. And, in fact, at times it was making me desperately unhappy.”

The conclusion he came to – “very vividly” – was that making records was what brought him the most joy. The result was the synth-laden ambient ‘Together in Static’ and the pounding, yet wistful, double album ‘Love + Light’, “which were very much ways of getting me through that time,” he says. “It really was lockdown that taught me that, I’m not sure I would have come to that conclusion fully had it not been for all of that.”

‘Ultra Truth’, then, is his “most genuine statement” to date – the name came from an old 90’s rave flyer he found, but also hints at this Covid-induced epiphany. “[The album] finds me far happier, far healthier, but also someone who’s not afraid to look into himself on a much deeper level. It’s not always pleasant to do that but that’s where I’m at right now, and it’s certainly why the record is so noisy and abrasive at times, but also has moments of quiet beauty on it. I really felt like I had to go through the fog to get to where I am now.”

That noise comes in thick. It was forged from Avery pushing himself harder with his sounds than ever before. He wanted to create an album that “sounded like it was on fire”. “Oversaturation, noise, hiss, field recordings, the sound of air distorted, and forming a kind of fog over everything,” he details, of how the album differs from past productions. “Drums being pushed to breaking point… That all stems from my love of guitar-led music and music that’s pushed to a point that’s just about to snap. That’s my favourite sonic place. It’s not the easiest listen. I love how it sounds, I think it sounds warm and full, but I think – I hope – it’s not easy to ignore.”

Avery has always classed his music as apolitical – although he doesn’t exactly shy away from the topic on social media: “fucking Tories” (or variations on that theme) are common sentiments on his Twitter account. “Maybe we don’t all need to be reminded 24/7 how shit the world is at the moment,” he says about detaching his music from politics. “I still believe in this idea of music ultimately being about love and togetherness and sharing.”

Still, it would be hard to hear the searing, ablazesounding and catastrophic edge to the album and not draw some conclusions of your own at a time of intense greed and looming poverty, climate collapse and insecure geopolitics.

“It’s an intentionally distorted, shadowy record,” he says, brushing his mop of blonde hair carefully from his eyes. “But one that’s also warm and inviting – because that’s what got me obsessed with music as a kid.”

For the artwork, Avery worked with a Berlin-based designer called Claudia Rafael to make something that felt futuristic but referenced his love of rock music from his childhood. “She said: ‘This is great, but there’s no point in us trying to make artwork that looks like a rock band from 1998, let’s try and make an album that was made by a rock band from 25 years from now.’” The cover art and videos were conceived mainly using AI to create “an interpretation of every record I’ve ever loved,” he says. They threw in keywords, like the idea of a femme fatale that kept appearing in other artworks they were looking at and referenced directors David Lynch and David Fincher who depict female characters with a dark side. “But I’m keen to stress it’s not meant to be a woman,” Avery interjects.86_DISCO_POGO

“It’s not meant to be anything – it’s just this face emerged, but it did feel like it had a personality. I think that person, that being, that energy, is called Ultra.”

That touch of darkness is present in many of Avery’s points of influence, from Chris Cunningham’s abstract and creepy aesthetic to nightmare-inducing video games like Silent Hill. Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang Clan and Hype Williams videos are all examples of art that have “starry-eyed futurism” to them, he says, but “tinged with this real dark edge, an extreme vision of what the future can look like.” Look at any of Avery’s compositions, artwork, even his high contrast black and white Instagram posts, and it would be impossible not to sense that dark edge gripping all of his art. Which perhaps extends to how some people view him as an artist. He recalls a moment in Brixton’s Phonox where he was watching his friend HAAi DJ.

“A guy came up to me at the bar and we had a chat. And as he left, he took his drink. He said: ‘Oh, nice to meet you, mate, I thought you were gonna be a cunt.’ It really made me laugh.”

Across his decade-plus of being active in music, Avery has built up a community of like-minded people – from HAAi to HTRK, to Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, with whom he made the 2020 record ‘Illusion of Time’. “My favourite part of touring and travelling is the people I’ve met along the way – I’ve made friends for life.” He wanted to get some of that collaborative spirit across on ‘Ultra Truth’.

The voice of SHERELLE, a new collaborator and friend, introduces ‘Higher’, talking about club culture: “It was just this beautifully intense feeling of joy and excitement, but I couldn’t show that outside,” she says. Elsewhere, Marie Davidson reads a poem that Avery wrote himself. Kelly Lee Owens, who sang on ‘Drone Logic’ nearly ten years ago (“I loved that idea of that full circle”) is on ‘Chaos Energy’. South London’s James Massiah, who closes the album, wrote a poem after listening to the LP in full in the corner of Avery’s Thames-side studio – “out of nowhere he delivered this entire piece, which is inspired and informed by the music, did it in one take, boom, done. He left me shell shocked.” Meanwhile, HAAi, “one of my absolute best friends”, sings on two of the tracks.

A more surprising collaborator on the record, perhaps, would be Matty Healy. “I love The 1975, they’re one of my favourite pop bands,” he says. He was working on a remix for them which never quite got finished. Avery took the frontman’s voice and transplanted it onto an album track – “there’s human voices throughout, even if they don’t seem like they’re voices at first.” Then there is A.K. Paul, who Avery found himself writing some pop songs in the studio with (“Hopefully they’ll come out”).

“He was singing through some kind of wooden wind instrument, and it was just too beautiful not to include.”

The decision to include these vocal snippets came from a period in lockdown, when he started looking back at albums he loved from the mid-90s to the turn of the millennium, from the first Wu-Tang Clan album, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ to ‘The Holy Bible’ by the Manic Street Preachers, and ‘Rated R’ by Queens of the Stone Age. “They have these interludes and spoken word elements that have such a human touch to them. Those records feel like a wider, bigger world than just some songs in order.”

For someone so deeply implanted within the UK techno scene, electronic music didn’t figure in Daniel Avery’s consciousness for much of his teens (despite his dad taking him to see The Prodigy aged 11). Instead, his heroes were Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Deftones, The Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails – who he’d later come to tour the US with. Although, as a teen, he was keen on acts like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld, he didn’t really consider himself a dance music head. He only started taking note of club music – something he’d previously associated with stag and hen dos – after watching Erol Alkan play Bugged Out!, and then getting into DJs like Andrew Weatherall and Optimo, before trying his hand at mixing records aged 18 at Bournemouth’s alternative club night, Mayhem.

And, strangely, over the years Avery has found that people have described his music as a gateway into electronic music – “people who said that when they were at uni, they thought they didn’t like clubbing. But then someone gave them ‘Drone Logic’, and now they go all the time. To have that impact on people – that’s my absolute favourite thing that could have happened. It makes it all worthwhile.”

One of the people who did that for him was the late Andrew Weatherall, who championed Avery’s work and “showed me a different path into electronic music,” he says. Weatherall inspired him to blend dance records with other genres for something, mind-blowingly to him, even more expansive. Beyond someone who was at first a hero and an inspiration, “he became something of a friend,” and “was a very, very early supporter of what I was doing”. Weatherall was the first person to have a copy of ‘Drone Logic’, and “without his support, I mean, I probably wouldn’t be here,” he offers.

‘Lone Swordsman’, the track Avery produced on the day of learning of Weatherall’s passing, has a spot on the album, in keeping with its deeply personal, honest message. “I don’t know how much I believe in the cosmic order of the universe,

but something seemed to happen that day in the studio,” he says of the skippy builder that sees synth lines darting about hopefully.

“He was someone who did things entirely on his own terms, constantly created and pushed himself but never once believed his own hype, really. In the best possible way,” Avery says of the artist who once described him as a “purveyor of machine funk of the highest order”. “[Weatherall] knew he had something to offer but he didn’t really care about the fanfare around him, as long as he could keep creating, that was all that mattered to him.”

There’s a long history of Avery coming to work with his heroes, whether it was releasing music on Erol Alkan’s Phantasy Sound label or having a member of Nine Inch Nails reach out to him as a fan. But Weatherall was, to him, arguably the most important. “I’m sure many people reading this will have some connection to Weatherall in some form, or some memory,” he continues. “And I think Andrew would probably baulk at the idea of him being a mentor or anything. He wasn’t. He would never talk like that, or think like that, he would never say: ‘This is what you need to do here.’ He just led by example. And he wouldn’t even think that he was leading. He just was. That was the coolest thing about him. He just was who he was at all times. And I mean, that’s a lesson in itself.”

The aforementioned, sweat-soaked FOLD party was the genesis of ‘Unfolder’, a searing techno track with a wailing vocal sample that Avery produced especially for his set there, and that’s since become a crowd favourite and his “summer secret weapon”. Although it doesn’t feature on the album, it does make up part of the record’s universe, a decision that came from the beating heart of “indie boy me,” Avery says. “I love B-sides, off-cuts, additional tracks, rarities. Each version of the album, cassette, CD and vinyl has its own unique bonus track. You have your main body of work, but if you want to dive deeper then you can. I’ve always loved that.”

‘Together in Static’, one of the lockdown records, was created after Avery secured a couple of intimate gigs at St. John at Hackney Church. He started to produce music specifically for those shows, keeping the vast, vaulted Georgian space in mind, before falling into the project headfirst and suddenly, he had an entire album’s worth of material. While making ‘Ultra Truth’, though, Avery wasn’t even thinking about the club. “I wanted it more to exist in people’s heads and particularly through people’s headphones, actually,” he says when it’s pointed out how cavernous sounding the record is. “It’s informed by the club in so many ways, but I believe it’s equally informed by stuff outside of that world.”

But in the year 2022, club music is bigger than ever – with drum‘n’bass earning younger legions of followers alongside 90s trance, rave and house filling the charts. The TikTok era, you could say, is conducive to making one-hit wonders, or a crop of overnight celebrities, who don’t have the years of dedication someone like Avery has put in.

The idea of the DJ being “in some way elevated” or lavished with praise is “something I think you have to shut down pretty damn quickly,” he says. “Otherwise, you’re – I mean, I find it difficult to think of myself like this, anyway – but you’re distracted from the real goal, which is to continue making music and to continue just creating and offering myself in that way. Those paths don’t lead to anything particularly fruitful and actually can be pretty fucking harmful. So, you know, I really feel like my vision is pretty clear. As long as I can keep coming back every year, every two years, with something new, whatever that may be, then I’m happy. I’m genuinely happy.”92_DISCO_POGO