“In our mission to create a truly futuristic space rock album,” explains Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones via email, “we worked on Rock Sutra together as a band, and it became clear that unlike previous Sun Araw records, we would need to record it live as a band. This presented some challenges, as my home studio accommodates just myself usually, and one at a time style noodling.

"But since Jon Leland, our drummer, has been mostly playing a digital drumset in the band, and Marc is on keyboards, we realised we could record the whole album just in MIDI. MIDI is of course basically just a digital 'score' that documents the note you played, how loud or softly you played it, and the timing with which you played it.

"So instead of recording sounds, we just recorded all of our performance data. This left me with a very long and fun and frustrating and difficult to conclude process of arranging and orchestrating that data in the basically infinite space of my computer, where the drum tracks don't necessarily have to stay drums, or the keyboard patches can change between every single note if you want them to. In the end, very few of the sounds we used as listening references during the recording process remained on the finished album!”

Sun Araw is featured on the cover of The Wire 338. Wire subscribers can read the full interview via the digital archive. Rock Sutra is available via Sun Ark from 3 April.