Image Credits: Will Bruce
After years of circulating London’s underground scene as solo artists, UK producers Joe Arthur & Liam Keydell (Kincaid & Keydell) have joined forces with new project, Opsin.
Releasing on London-based Hypnic Jerks, Through the Wall’ was born from the difficulties that came with isolation during lockdown. The naming of the record is quite literal in the sense that, despite living in the same house, bad cases of Covid kept the pair apart. To cope with the frustration and fear of the times, Joe & Liam sent sketches and sonic notes to each other to work on.
Across its ten tracks, the album combines found sounds, drone-like ambience, and modular sketches, resulting in an amalgamation of their real-world experiences. It’s dark, atmospheric, and visceral in its composition and has a distinct atmosphere, prioritising narrative and storytelling over functionality.
Music like this, which challenges modern conceptions of what music can and should be, is (at least for us) captivating and worth listening to. This record is about friendship, collaboration, shared experience, and art in the face of adversity. A beautiful reminder that with a little bit of light, true creativity can grow in even the darkest of spaces.
In our interview, Opsin shared their origins, the making of the album, and what inspired it.
You two have been friends for a long time. How did you meet?
We met years ago in our early twenties. Joe was touring under a different alias back then and, in between shows, found himself needing somewhere to crash. Liam, had more or less just moved to the UK from Singapore and having only just met him, offered to let him crash in his room in Guildford where he was studying at the time.
Joe then slept on what was basically a fold-out armchair for the best part of a week, left a pile of clothes and luggage in the room, and we’ve stayed best mates ever since. We’ve both gone through a lot of shifts and transitions in life at similar times – career, living situations, relationship challenges, personal issues, friendship circles, lifestyle changes. We always end up in a similar place. Very family.
What made you decide to commit to the new alias?
Well, it took time for that to take shape. When we started, we didn’t really have a plan to create anything specific, it was just firing things back and forth. It was only when the ideas and sounds started taking shape and kept spawning new work from the previous sessions that we realised this could be an album or project in itself.
It just seemed to have such a specific sonic world and narrative without us really having any intention for it. Over the next four years, our ideas and relationship to the album, and what to do with it – were in constant flux. Our lives were often taking us in different directions, so coming together to release the work was difficult.
Creating the alias Opsin was essential to identify and categorise this sort of anomaly we’d created. After so long, it felt removed from what we’d done as individuals, but it also felt like there was more to explore together. Creating this separate and specific channel for that just felt right.
Why did you choose the name Opsin? What meaning does it hold for you?
Around the time we came across the word Opsin, we were really starting to hone in and conceptualise exactly what had driven the project – what the album was saying and what it meant to us as producers and as friends who had shared a particular experience together.
There’s a lot of focus on perception – or an imagined or recalled perception of reality – and a re-envisioning of what sounds can be and mean to us and to others. The album itself was created in a kind of darkness and isolation, hidden away on drives and links, and was brought to life through exposure to others. Their perception and witnessing of it really shaped its identity and also our own understanding of what we’d made.
An opsin is a protein in the eye that’s essential for perceiving and processing light waves in the visible spectrum. It’s dormant until exposed to light, where a cascade of intense reactions and processes create the signals, we interpret as the world around us. For us, that terminology reflected the development we’d undergone as a duo – and the album itself, its reactive exposure, and the chain of events that led to its release.
How did the idea and concept for the album develop?
Initially, it was just a coping mechanism for a particularly difficult period. Joe (Kincaid) was isolating after coming down with Covid in a severe way which, although we didn’t know it at the time, led to a four-year road of illness and eventual recovery. He’d also lost his job and relationship and being stuck in a tiny attic room in Bruce Grove, North London, in the February winter was taking its toll on all of us.
Liam put the idea out there to just mess around with some bits of audio and see what happened. We were both experimenting heavily with sound design at the time, and he knew it would be a good distraction. We’d never made music together in the seven years we’d known each other at that point – we both worked in such different ways: Liam focusing on audio processing and odd re-sampling techniques in Ableton, as well as getting into modular synthesis – and Joe on Reaktor-based sound design in Logic.
The first concept was simply to see what would happen if we exchanged a sound, worked on it, sent it back via AirDrop through our bedroom walls, and continued that process until we had something we wanted to run with. Eventually, we started holding onto these audio clips in our respective DAWs longer and longer. Even though we were working on them in isolation, each time we passed the project over, the themes remained so tightly related it was like we were writing to a shared narrative.
These longer ideas developed into fleshed-out sections, and from those sections we’d extract another sound that would spiral into a new track, and so on. Sometimes what we sent to the other came back totally transformed – but it always felt coherent and flowing. There was never any discussion about direction or when to stop.
We had housemates listening from the bottom of the stairs, hovering in the door frames, encouraging us to keep going. When we finished the last track and listened through the whole thing together in the living room, we all felt it – this was a real body of work. It told a story about what we’d all lost, a kind of solastalgia for the intensity of club spaces, but also for our memories of those spaces. We were really just trying to make sense of things through what we were creating.
Producing music can be a very personal and intimate experience and doing it in a duo often means opening up and sacrificing control. How did you both navigate the production process whilst keeping true to yourselves?
Because we weren’t overthinking what we were doing at the start – and because we’ve always been so close as mates, it never felt like we had to consciously “let go” of control. The process itself drove us, and we just reacted to it.
It was a huge release for both of us; we poured ourselves into it without even realising. That’s probably why the first version was finished in about a week. It was an authentic expression from both of us.
When we came back to mix and finalise it a year later with our friend Tom Smith (Son of Philip), having someone close to us involved made that process just as effortless.
What did you use as inspiration when making the album?
Both of us were in a phase of developing our own sounds in new ways. In our own productions but also digging into new labels, artists and mixes on a daily basis. When we moved into our house in Tottenham, Bruce Grove together, we also had a group of mates move in with us, and Craig especially played a huge role in shaping both of our musical worlds.
He was working at Hidden Sounds at the time when it first started up in Pelican house, and we’d always been mind blown by his skills as a DJ and knowledge of music across the board. During the lock down, every day he’d be digging. And we’d just hear this flow of really raw music, blasting out a single KRK, that sat on the borders of so many styles, just pouring out his room. Stuff that focussed on layers of texture, strange found sound & electro-acoustic music, with really raw techy & dark forms of regurgitated Dnb and Jungle, that was touching on forms of skewed rave that communicated with so much depth. From his digging on far flung corners of the web, to the record collection he’d run through daily and nightly, we just soaked it up.
It drove us to push harder and experiment more. Hearing what was possible really stripped away our inhibitions as producers. Having Craig there as a blunt critic, setting the bar for feedback, was invaluable. You think you’ve heard everything — and then someone walks into your life and opens another dimension. That’s the beauty of music: how endlessly it expands.
Liam always found joy in mangling random sounds that shouldn’t work at all — foley recordings, internet digs, whatever — and pushing them until they landed somewhere useful. Joe, at the time, had started teaching production and was refining his synthesis skills even further in Reaktor and similar tools. Craig’s influence accelerated our experimentation as individuals — without that, we probably wouldn’t have made the album.
Labels and artists like XPQ?, Concrete Cabin, West Minerals, Acting Press, early T++, Topdown Dialectic (Peak Oil), Pessimist, Circula, Source Direct, and Ulla were all in heavy rotation while we made the record — so those influences definitely seeped in.
What can fans expect to see from this project that differs from your work as solo artists?
For us, it sits in this sort of liminal world that neither of us had touched in our solo work. There’s plenty of our club and drum-focused energy in there, but it’s always felt like a listening album — a long-form conversation that happened between us as we made each track.
There are intricacies and details we explored that we’d never have done on our own. It’s got a palette and tone that feel totally different from what we usually do — but it’s also just this 50/50 meeting point of our sounds that makes it such a unique project.
What’s next for Opsin?
After four (nearly five) years since making the record, we’ve just started writing new material again and getting a sense of what could be next sonically.
After moving out of that shared house, we both had a lot to crack on with individually — other music, work, life commitments — which made it hard to align and fully focus on the project in the same way as before.
When we made the record, it was unexpected and very ephemeral — a way of processing the pressure we were under at the time. Neither of us were sure we’d ever do something like it again.
In the years between creating it and releasing it, we’ve both developed our individual practices and probably become more grounded in our approach to music. That’s made us feel more focused on Opsin. We want to explore the formula we used for the album, but with more intention — really refine the practice of pushing a palette to its limit and seeing what those restrictions bring.
We’ve started on new material and hope to build up another body of work to share soon.
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