Following the release of their third album last year, Adam Winchester and Laurie Osborne return as Wrecked Lightship on Peak Oil with their latest album ‘Drained Strands‘, opening the hallowed doors of their submarine to all types of distorted fantasies.
As the name suggests, Wrecked Lightship carries fractured memories of vessels forgotten in vast expanses, from the sea and beyond. The weight of their work conjures images of desolate landscapes beyond human reach, yet their invitation into this sonic vision becomes a ticket to inhabit the very space of extraterrestrials.
‘Drained Strands‘ withholds a kind of extraordinary beauty that is more often felt than heard. This combined performance unit of solo acts Appleblim & Wedge exists in an untethered vortex – one built from scattered electronics and bruised hearts. All of this culminates in IA MIX 392, a studio mix where heavy scores of bass and a plethora of textures, some borrowed and some unheard, bubble together in a melting pot of comfort and disorder.
Interview by Asmi Shetty
"Like a Ballard story, we had the idea to create a mix narrative that unfolds over time, builds tension and release, and creates contrast, carrying the listener through an arc."
This IA MIX is anything but ordinary. We’re thrilled to chat with you about your new album ‘Drained Strands‘ on Peak Oil. To begin, when, where, and how did you put this mix together? What kind of environment were you in when recording it?
Adam: Thanks, glad to know It stood out. It came together quite organically. It’s more of a studio mix than a live DJ set, as we wanted to take time crafting something that would be interesting to listen to and experience, assuming most listeners would be tuning in from their sofa’s or headphones rather than in the dance. So we spent some time in the studio considering the composition and then building it. Our studio is located in the far east of Berlin on a road aptly named Kosmonauten Allee (Avenue of the Cosmonauts). There’s really nothing much around, it’s very industrial with factories and drab apartment blocks. No cafes or bars, so there aren’t any distractions. We are on the 7th floor and the view out of our window of a large factory and giant chimney and a maze of steel pipes, which can take on a moody character depending on the light and weather.
The excerpt heard right at the start is particularly intriguing – can you tell us where it’s from and why you chose to open with it?
Adam: It’s a recording of an audio book of J.G. Ballard’s Prisoner of the Coral Deep. We both find Ballard’s storytelling incredibly poignant and inspiring, conjuring near future realities and themes of urban isolation. These are facets that we reflect in our sound – dreamlike non linear narratives, brutalist architecture in ruin, submerged cities, desolate coastlines. The book is sort of a ghost story with spirits representing a past life that is not human, the primeval sea, reptilian creatures, and apparitions of a “mariner from the future” who is marooned in the past, all evoked by the discovery of a shell on a beach.
How did you go about curating the tracks for this mix? Were you exploring a particular narrative, mood, or concept throughout?
Laurie: We wanted to create a mix that would take people deep into our music and a few of our influences…it’s cool to include a few curveballs, for example Adam selected the Photek track which is one I had totally forgotten about, as I’m usually drawn to other favourites on that album. Ultramarine are a band I’ve been into since they started, and I still follow their new stuff, this track is old but I think still sounds so fresh. A kind of pastoral English electronica or something. Adam and I met when dubstep & grime were just forming so it’s natural to include our heroes Horsepower Productions, who to me are the absolute dons. Benny has become a pal and I am fascinated by the combination of vibes in his music..something we are consistently inspired by.
Adam: Like a Ballard story, we had the idea to create a mix narrative that unfolds over time, builds tension and release, and creates contrast, carrying the listener through an arc. The audio book excerpts are arranged throughout the mix and form a narrative framework that we built on, similar to classical music, the mix goes through several movements as it develops, peaks, decays, and finally resolves.
You’re both accomplished solo producers. What inspired you to come together as Wrecked Lightship, and how has this collaboration influenced your individual work?
Adam: We have a long history as friends since meeting on the same Creative Music Technology degree in 2003, and then living in shared houses for years in Bristol as we rose up as DJs and producers catching the Dubstep wave. Despite living together for years, DJing the same shows and even releasing on each others labels (Applepips & If Symptoms Persist) we never collaborated on music. Just before Covid hit, around 2019 I think is when we first got in the studio together and began writing.
Both living in Berlin since 2016/17, it felt like the right time to start something together. We have very similar tastes in music, literature, and films, and inspire each other a lot. I think the collaboration has influenced me and my solo work by giving me more confidence and belief in myself as a musician and creator. Just having the regularity of meeting up weekly and writing music has become a dedicated practice, and I feel my production has improved and developed massively as a result.
Laurie: I definitely try to include as much jamming and improvising as possible now in my solo work which I think has been inspired by this project. Having a combination of loose and less predictable flows, combined with some tightly edited moments is my goal now.
"Wrecked Lightship makes me think of submerged sunken deep sea vessels, but also deep space orbiting machines of light crash landing on desolate planets in some other nebular."
The name ‘Wrecked Lightship’ has a beautifully weathered quality to it. What’s the story or symbolism behind the name?
Laurie: The concept of a wrecked lightship is instantly evocative I think. A lightship is a lighthouse on a ship that can be moved to dangerous areas rather than fixed on the shore. You can find pictures of wrecked ones. I guess the thought of something trying to help ships avoid becoming wrecks, falling victim to rocks, swells and waves itself is very poignant. The fact that ‘lightship’ also made us think of a spaceship traveling at the speed of light instantly makes me feel torn between the sea and space, the Earth-bound and the galactic – and this is a very interesting place to be.
Adam: I think there’s a mention of a ‘wrecked lightship’ in one of the Ballard books, Drowned World I think I was reading at the time, and we may have used it originally as a track name… then we thought it really stood out and summed up the sound we had created and so it became our name. Wrecked Lightship makes me think of submerged sunken deep sea vessels, but also deep space orbiting machines of light crash landing on desolate planets in some other nebular.
In line with your latest release, Drained Strands, your music tends to oscillate between high-pressure club momentum and abstract distortion. How do you navigate your production processes?
Adam: Each track is different, but we tend to adopt a similar process that usually starts with jamming on hardware. Whether with the modular, or fx pedal reverbs and tape delays dubbing out analogue radios, no input feedback mixing, manipulating field recordings, or playing prepared instruments through broken amps, we start by generating the terrain of the world we are creating, then expand and evolve it with software. Textures, rhythms, strange collisions of harmonics – it’s kind of like an excavation process. In the collage of noise and sound, something usually resonates – that’s when the process of carving it out, refining the sound, and giving things space to breath begins. Like, there’s a glimmer of gold in the rubble somewhere, we just need to dig around and find it.
Laurie: We just push off and see where it goes! There may be loose ideas about tempo / vibe / beginning instrumentation, but this quickly develops and often drifts off course, which is often where the good stuff happens…you want contrast in music, whether thats within a track, or an album, or even a small musical part, so definitely the relationship between drones / noise and rhythm / melody is a fascinating one…sound is such an utterly magical phenomenon, even after studying it I still feel it makes no sense and I almost don’t believe it – an aeroplane many thousands of feet above me displaces air molecules with enough force to reach my eardrum and vibrate it in a way that my brain understands. What?! The fact that how the brain does this is still mysterious to us, the confusion of how sense data creates our world, is beautiful and terrifying in a way. And when we play with sound I think we are helping to understand it, or at least interact with the unknowable.
With Drained Strands being your second album release on Peak Oil, how did your relationship with the label begin? In your view, what distinguishes Peak Oil from other experimental imprints?
Laurie: I was first made aware of the label when my friend Low End Activist (with whom I make music as Trinity Carbon) played me the Topdown Dialectic stuff, which I love, and I dug into everything else in their back catalogue and connected with it….They seem like kindred spirits in a sense, underground, DIY, independent and guided by the music and nothing else. Having lived through several different stages of hype and fashion during my musical life this is refreshing.
Adam: It’s been a great experience working with Peak Oil. We’ve become fast friends and the guys are very professional and straight up. We feel like there is a good partnership growing between us, and we are happy and grateful that they had the faith to invest in us and the music.
"Getting hands on and physical, and finding the space between control and chaos - that’s where we get lost in the sound and things get most interesting."
When you’re in the studio together, do you have clearly defined roles, or is it more of a fluid, improvisational process? How do you typically begin building a track?
Adam: I wouldn’t say we really have clearly defined roles as we both do most things in the studio, swapping in and out of the producer chair and bouncing off each other, but because of our musical backgrounds, I think people often assume that Laurie creates the woozy melodic patterns and harmonic progressions, and I tackle the sound design, scapes, and textures, but the lines are much more blurred. We both have backstories in bass-driven sound-system music, which I think comes through no matter what. It all feels very natural and fluid.
Your sound is texturally rich and structurally complex. What shapes the sonic architecture of your tracks? Are there specific techniques, equipment, or ideas that consistently feed into your process?
Adam: Thanks a lot, I’m glad that comes across, I’d say the sonic architecture usually begins with improvisation and hardware-based exploration. It’s instinctive at first, more about mood and feeling – reacting and responding to the machines and the sounds we get from them. We are drawn to contrast and counterpoint, and are always considering how to exploit this within the music – light and dark, harsh and fragile, close and distant, density and space, and how these elements co-exist. We tend to rotate the tools we use a lot to keep things interesting too, often drawing from machines with unpredictability, randomly patching the modular or the instability of no input mixing for instance…which if not controlled can actually blow up your speakers! Getting hands on and physical, and finding the space between control and chaos – that’s where we get lost in the sound and things get most interesting.
Laurie: It’s really a case of letting the music and sound guide you, and hopefully opening up to inspiration. I believe that that something more powerful than your ego opens up when you are lost in sound, when listening or creating, or both. If this is inspiration, the divine, spirits, time portals, who knows? The result is something that you don’t really remember how you made it, or it is for me, and that is the magic I think.
We just got copies of Drained Strands in at Inverted Audio Record Store, and the lenticular cover by Brian Close is a total standout. That 3D, illusion-of-movement style recalls ‘90s ephemera like Transformers cards and old magazines — also used for Antiposition. Did you have creative input on the artwork and packaging?
Adam: It looks great doesn’t it, I’m glad you like it. We can’t take any credit as it’s all the excellent work of Brian Close. We had input on the colour pallet, but that’s about it. The first record is purple and blues which we felt reflected the deep sea theme, and this record is the exact contrast – oranges and reds which I guess leans into the exploding space craft concept.
Where do you see Wrecked Lightship sitting within—or intentionally outside of— today’s electronic music landscape? How do you view your place in the broader conversation?
Laurie: I really have no idea. Of course we are all the result of our inspirations, so psychedelia, bass, drone, breakbeat culture, dub etc are all are reference points, how could they not be. But I am quite happy not being part of a ‘scene’ as these can sometimes end up being quite restrictive.
Adam: I think Wrecked Lightship exists somewhere on the periphery of electronic music – intentionally so. Not really trying to slot into a specific scene or genre, but explores different musical traditions. I think of Wrecked Lightship less as a project within electronic music and more like a sonic drift – a way of mapping internal and imagined spaces. Like a Ballard story, it’s a kind of fiction, suggesting worlds rather than trying to explain them.
Having been involved in music production, labels, and nightlife long before the social media era, how has the shift affected the way you promote, tour, or connect with audiences and other artists?
Adam: It’s changed everything of course, I’m not sure for the better or worse, maybe somewhere in between. Coming from a time of pirate radio, record shops, flyers, online forums, and going to raves and meeting other like minded people was how you connected with a scene. The shift to social media has felt wider reaching and more expansive, but it’s also super disorientating and potentially quite damaging to human connection and mental health. I don’t think I engage with it very effectively myself, and mostly it does my head in, but I see other artists using it in creative ways to engage and include people, not just for promotion, which is inspiring. I think playing shows and meeting in person within your community is still the most effective way to build connection.
"We aren’t trying to reinvent the vessel with each new record, but we are always striving to venture deeper, and explore new terrain, without veering too far off course."
What albums, artists, or even non-musical references have been in heavy rotation for you lately? Anything that’s been feeding into your creative headspace?
Adam: It’s hard not to find inspiration in everything really, whether intentionally or not, I think we all get subconsciously influenced by our surroundings, the people we interact with, movies, books, concerts, conversations, arguments, news feeds, the online universe, the real world… It’s not always positive influence, sometimes intrusive and unwelcome, but this can be just as provocative.. inspiring reaction and response. We are impacted by so much noise, chaos, love, hate, dark, light and everything in between.. there’s so much contrast, and so much to get affected by. I feel blessed sometimes that I have a positive outlet for it all.. I find making music and getting lost in the jams so cathartic and good for my mental health, it really is the therapy to all of it. I think you can definitely hear it in Wrecked Lightship, where the grit, distortion, and grunge, is contrasted by the light of the harmonics and euphoric synths that pull you out of the darkness.
Laurie: I am permanently finding musical inspiration in the rich history of dance music, from NY club culture, from disco to now, I pick up stuff from every era, anything I can find cheap, recent inspirations include early Dutch Techno on Eevo-Lute to 80s Britfunk / disco from Light Of The World, I was lucky to have been given the new Calibre box set by the man himself which is incredible, all 120-140bpm stuff, I saw him play some of it on the incredible Open Ground soundsystem in Wuppertal…mind blowing….all the Peverelist Pulse EPs have been doing it for me too, never puts a foot wrong that guy, permanent inspiration…the Purelink stuff is killer….Second Storey has some absolutely mindmelting and bodyjacking stuff to unleash soon…Shackleton’s constant explorations and experiments in new forms…his work with Indian musicians is incredible.
Adam: I listen to a lot of dub, whatever mood I’m in it always lifts me up and makes me feel good. It’s such positive music, but sometimes with an underlying darkness and depth that makes it incredibly thought provoking. Beyond that I also love listening to folk and psychedelic music, I’m big into German experimental rock like Tangerine Dream, Can, and of course Kraftwork. I love that those bands were looking into the future to find a fresh sound and set them apart from other rock music at the time, there’s a rawness and freedom which definitely feed into my creative headspace. Amon Duul II, and Popol Vuh are close to my heart as I was lucky enough to collaborate with the legendary lead singer Renate Knaup when I performed as part of Dot Product, which was a dream come true! I also teach Electroacoustic Composition at the University I work at in Berlin, and I love having the opertunity to dig in to such a fascinating subject, examining such incredible music and the abuse of technology over the past century by such interesting pioneers of music, most of whom complete outsiders of society. So interesting!
Laurie: Away from music I am fascinated by Ronald Hutton’s talks on Paganism, in fact all of his lectures (indeed all content) on the amazing free Gresham College lecture YouTube channel. Douglas Harding’s Headless Way is always inspiring (anyone interested in a self- built cosmic look at the Self and the Universe should seek out his Hierarchy of Heaven & Earth – utterly fascinating). I love people who interact with divine forces through their work, Austin Osman Spare’s poetry and drawings are completely compelling, he used automatic drawing (where you just let the pen go where it wishes) to allow spirits to talk through him, and created his own religion in a way, his own gods and goddesses with his own personal relationship to them.
Adam: I’m also very influenced by films. B-movies of all descriptions, I love them, especially the bad ones! There’s nothing better than setting up a triple feature on the projector and settling in for a movie night of weirdo Si-Fi. Complete classics like The Eliminators, Trancers, Creepozoids are favourites, such awesome film titles too.. Robot Holocaust, From Beyond, Terrorvision etc anything by Cannon Films, Rodger Corman, or Empire Pictures basically, good sample fodder too.. do some digging and you’ll see what I mean.
Laurie: I’ve been rediscovering the work of Jorge Luis Borge, which my Dad introduced me to when I was quite young, his essay ‘A New Refutation Of Time’ is an amazing read for anyone who finds the interplay between the past (memories), the future (projected hopes & fears), and the nonexistent but eternal present moment fascinating & extremely weird should read it! I finally read the Principia Discordia after finding hints of it in Bill Drummond / KLF and The Black Dog’s work (two constant inspirations) – another self-made religious tract based on chaos, creating your own Goddesses and rejecting the ‘sense’ of the so- called rational world. It’s deep and also very funny, and a big influence on the Church Of The Subgenius which entered my mind via various rave and anarchist fanzines in the 90s – all worth a look if you need help understanding (or laughing at) the absurdities of life!
And finally, what’s next for Wrecked Lightship? Are you steering into new sonic territory — or something even more uncharted?
Laurie: There’s lots more to come in many styles, some Kosmische and German 70s music inspired stuff, also some darkside grime dubstep & junglist sounding bits but usually we work out what it is after the fact! I’d love to make a purely beatless album…lets see!
Adam: We are constantly working on new music, it’s an ongoing process that we are still finding inspiring and exciting with lots of possibilities. We aren’t trying to reinvent the vessel with each new record, but we are always striving to venture deeper, and explore new terrain, without veering too far off course. There’s definitely a lot more to come from the Wrecked Lightship, so keep an ear out for our future transmissions.
‘Drained Strands’ is out now via Peak Oil. Buy a vinyl copy from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. Wrecked Lightship – Intro [Unreleased]
2. Wrecked Lightship – Ultra Red [Peak Oil]
3. Gorodisch – Setting Sail [Leaf]
4. Wrecked Lightship – Drowned Aquarium [Dead Bison]
5. Wrecked Lightship – Reeling Mist [Peak Oil]
6. Peverelist – Puse XII [Punch Drunk]
7. Unknown – Unknown
8. Horsepower Productions – Voodoo Spell [Tempa]
9. Wrecked Lightship – Take it Back [Midnight Shift]
10. Fadi Mohem – Solute [Mohem]
11. Wrecked Lightship – Lagoon [Peak Oil]
12. Photek – Halogen [Virgin]
13. Dubwar – DW20 [Unreleased]
14. Denis Smalley [GRM] / Tiger In The Woods Dub – Wind Chimes Wrecked Lightship
15. Unreleased
16. Wrecked Lightship – Oceans and Seas [Midnight Shift]
17. Pan Sonic – Laptevinmeri = Laptev Sea [Blast First Petite]
18. Wrecked Lightship – Somnium Sands [Peak Oil]
19. Ultramarine – All of a Sudden [WRWTFWW]