Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1

Sunroof is the revived collaboration between Mute founder Daniel Miller and Depeche Mode producer Gareth Jones—two figures who, between them, shaped a good deal of the sound of British electronic music. Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1, their first release under the name, collects eight live, unedited improvisations for analogue synthesisers, recorded in Miller’s studio across spring and summer 2019 and released on Mute with the archival session dates stamped into each title.

Sunroof began decades ago as a release valve—the pair first found themselves alone in a studio together during the early days of their working relationship, and the improvisations that followed were shelved, the project becoming a private ritual revisited between production duties. This volume brings that ritual out into the open. Both men have set aside the discipline of the producer’s chair: no fixes, no edits, no arrangement after the fact. Instead, a bank of vintage synthesisers, sequencers and tape echoes was patched together and left to run, with Miller and Jones chasing whatever the machines threw back at them.

The result is process made audible. Sequencers lock into uneasy sync, oscillators drift slowly out of tune against one another, and reverb blooms across everything, each track carrying the atmosphere of the room in which it was caught. Nothing has been tidied up for release, and the session-date titles—1.1 - 7.5.19, 1.4 - 18.6.19—read like labels on museum specimens, framing the record as documentation rather than composition.

That documentary quality is the record’s quiet strength. Opening track 1.1 - 7.5.19 eases in with a slow-blooming drone that swells patiently across its six and a half minutes, whilst the longer 1.4 - 18.6.19 finds a deeper, more percussive pulse. The brief sketches 1.3 - 30.5.19 and 1.7 - 30.5.19 are the most fleeting, barely two minutes each—glimpses of a conversation cut short. Closing track 1.8 - 2.3.19 lingers in sustained, melancholy tones, a fittingly unhurried end to a record that never once rushes.

Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1 is not a greatest-hits tour of either man’s career; it is a document of two of electronic music’s most influential figures letting the machines lead. For fans of Miller and Jones it is a fascinating window into their process, and on its own terms it is quietly hypnotic—patient, unshowy and generous, a fitting addition to the Mute catalogue from the label’s own founder.