Liverpool based producers JC Leisure and Jon Davies aka Kepla have teamed for a new project called Local Habits, recorded in their home over the last few weeks. The resulting EP sees Pale Master label founder and rave cassette enthusiast JC Leisure combining tape manipulation, field recordings and vocals to serve as a minimal canvas for Kepla's cello playing.

“For me, this work is an exercise in reduction,” explains JC Leisure via email. “The textures in these five parts were created by slowing down the cassette tapes that I sampled in the album Mutations For to their absolute limit and extracting their micro sounds. I also took recordings of the room whilst it was empty and folded this back in on itself. Both of these processes are a way of creating a split in these temporalities; of the cassette tapes and of the space where the work was performed. There’s a playful aspect of giving Jon the bare minimum of material with which to respond to and seeing what he does with that space.”

“I'd say that my main interests in this were improvising with small sounds,” adds collaborator Kepla, “and creating a local logic between us two (learning a musical relationship and anticipating gestures). Then, on a personal level, I'm both relearning and unlearning an instrument, attempting to iron out habits.”

JC Leisure is interviewed in The Wire 435. Subscribers can read the article in full via the online archive. Mutations For is released by Warm Winters Ltd.