“Owls” started out as a story that I wrote while my partner Darius and I were roadtripping through America - from New Orleans to Memphis and ultimately to Nashville. We had the radio on the whole time and it was mesmerising to hear the music slowly morph between genres as we drove. At the same time, we were deep into David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" which made our experiences of the small-town America we explored on the way even more bewitching. All these new impressions, local stories and overwhelming scenery culminated in a story taking shape in my head. It was about love and loss, intimacy and secrets, and the shadowland between dreams and reality. In fact, when we arrived home I sat down and wrote a full screenplay for "Owls", aiming for it to become a surrealistic, indie musical film.

But I quickly realised I couldn't wait the average 7 years it takes for a film project to be made to share the music with the world. And so, I decided to focus on the songs and the sounds, allowing the narrative that inspired it to be more of an undertone, a conceptual backbone for the songs to rest upon.

More than ever, Darius and I dove into creating as rich a production style as possible on this album and many of our close friends lend their musicianship to these songs. We have Floris van der Vlugt on (bass) clarinet and saxophone, Kevin van Moorsel on ethereal electric guitar, my dear friends Aysha de Groot, Simone van Vugt and Fleur Stam belting out the chorus of "I Guess I'm Changing" along with me... and that's only naming a few.

A lot of our production choices were aimed to infuse each track with a sense of location and context. "Only Brokenhearted" is played in a semi-deserted local bar, on a tinsel-lined stage with a musty smell of tobacco and heartache in the air. "All Time Low" takes place in a solitary bedroom, with moonlight pouring in through a dusty window.

On our road trip we made a lot of field recordings and used these to weave the album together into one long journey. I hope the album feels like an adventure to you as much as it does to us and that it inspires your own version of the story.

SPECIAL ART FEATURE - PHENAKISTOSCOPES

For the "Owls" vinyl, I wanted to create an extra art feature. Something that would give a little hint as to the strange, surrealistic scenes that I still see in my head when I hear the album. And so, I created 11 phenakistoscopes that are included in the "Owls" LP packaging. These are animation disks, that will start to move in front of your eyes when spun on a turntable at 45 rpm. All you need to make this work is my free custom stroboscope app installed on your phone and a darkened room. Click the link below to learn more about how this works and watch a quick video I made demonstrating this absolutely mad technique. It is basically... magic. And some maths. But mostly magic.