Richmond, Virginia based Keaton Transue aka Agnarkea is the producer behind an extensive Bandcamp back catalogue, which forms one section of the Waistdeep Clique digital network connecting a small collective of musicians from various states across North America. Transue's first full length album Black Helicopters is released by Manchester label Natural Sciences on 28 October. We asked Agnarkea some questions by email – read his replies below.

What were your starting points for this album?
I don’t know exactly. Ever since I learned the term black helicopters I had thought, ya know that would be a great name for a project, and this was back around 2015. The actual concept for the tape hadn’t fully formed in my mind until I had seen the movie Buster’s Mal Heart, and the themes in that movie surrounding hermeticism and conspiracies really fascinated me. Watching that movie was kind of an ‘a-ha’ moment for me and I knew where to draw inspiration for a lot of the sampling. I knew that I wanted a sort of militaristic, heavy industrial sound from jump.

When did you join Waistdeep Clique?
I joined Waistdeep in 2016. Back then it was just Dragg and Calsutmoran. I was a big fan and early supporter of Cal’s, and he and I became good friends and collaborated a few times, so he asked me to be the third member. ’Bout a week or two later we added FVDXVD to the group. GONE and Jak3 came later. S/o Trevor Colvin/ Helianthus, he handles a lot of important stuff for us regarding merch and art.

How have the workings of the collective influenced this album Black Helicopters, if at all?
Yes I'd say the whole Memphis influence to a lot of the beats comes directly from knowing the Waistdeep guys and learning about the underground scene.

What do you enjoy about producing shortform tracks?
I like to see just how deep I can go within a small stretch of time. I like to switch things up a lot in my music, it comes from loving all genres of music and wanting to express every possible musical idea, I don’t want to make anything too boring and repetitive. Don’t get me wrong, I love longform tracks and jam sessions but the attention span of some people just don’t hold to it, and I have so many ideas I wanna just get it out and move to the next one.

When you play live do you stick to one long mix?
Haven’t got a chance to play live yet, but bet when Waistdeep does a show it’s gonna be stupid dummy hard and crazy. Next level shit.

Your artist name is pronounced Anarchy – is this play on language important to your artistic practice? If so, why?
Yeah I feel like my music can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the person. So many people get my name wrong I think it’s hilarious and I applaud the people who really get it first try. Kind of feel the same way about my music. It’s about building a strong cult fanbase with esoteric inside jokes and yadda yadda – I think I may be looking too deep into this.

How would you describe your sound? What’s the atmosphere you’re trying to create?
I don’t know how I’d classify it exactly, I draw influence from so many places and each song kind of turns into it’s own thing. It could be any mix of punk, jungle, plug, boom bap, R&B, neo soul. Lately me and my Waistdeep counterparts have been experimenting with coming up with something wholly different from the norm. A new genre, something never before heard. I hope to keep a strong PMA message and vibe but also build off of the brutality and beauty of previous genres. We will see how it goes LOL. This is all conceptual, it’s really hard to do, but still something cool to strive for.

Black Helicopters is reviewed by Ken Hollings in The Wire 417. Subscribers can read it in full via the online archive.