This coming month, Ikonika‘s debut album Contact, Love, Want, Have will be released on Hyperdub.

A brave, deeply individual record, it’s completely instrumental, and finds Ikonika applying her trademark sound palette of sub-bass and deep red bleeps to electro (‘They Are All Losing the War’), swelling synthesizer epics (‘Fish’) and serpentine dubstep (‘Psoriasis’; ‘Idiot’). Closing on the fragile ‘Red Marker Pens’, it’s an album that thrives on its tense balance between vulnerability and toughness, and travels through moments of despair, anguish, bliss and exaltation. It’s one of the best albums of this young year, by an artist who’s come a long way since ‘Please’, her breakthrough debut single in early 2008.

FACT and Ikonika met for sushi (complete with the world’s strongest wasabi), and talked about fat kids, identity crises and the colour red.

“I think the confusion with my identity is probably my identity now…”

I was reading some old interviews, where you described Ikonika as being like a teenager trying to discover her identity, but secretly hoping she’ll never find it. I was wondering, now you’ve been through the process of making an album, how that has changed?

“I think the confusion with my identity is probably my identity now. With the album, it’s kind of like a hello, an introduction to this confused identity. I’d say I feel a lot more grounded now – I have my own sound, my own formula. I’m just more comfortable with my sound, and Ikonika’s more comfortable with herself. I guess with [early singles] ‘Please’ and ‘Millie’, I was figuring out a lot of things, still experimenting with certain things, and seeing how far I could push those things. I definitely think the album’s a continuation of that development.”

With the past singles, was there a reason ‘Fish’, ‘Sahara Michael’ and ‘Millie’ made the album but ‘Please’ didn’t?

“Just because it’s probably already been rinsed too much – it was on that Soul Jazz compilation [Steppas’ Delight] and also the Hyperdub one [5], I don’t want to scar anyone with that song again. That’s the only reason – I was gonna do to a beatless version, which was kind of a ‘Sine of the Dub’ tribute to Kode9, and leave it really open, so people can edit it and do what they want to do with it. And that was going to be the bonus stage, on the album.

Kind of like a Devil Mix [Wiley’s name for his beatless mixes] thing?

“Yeah, exactly. But I just didn’t want to annoy people too much with that song I guess.” [laughs]

When you say there’s an Ikonika sound, I was wondering, is that to do with colour? This isn’t in a genuine synthesia way, but I do always associate different music with different colours, and even when you’re recording in different styles, there’s always a red tone that binds your music…

“Well red is my favourite colour. I love the colour red – contrast is really important to me, and the colour red, at its simplest form, it can be love, it can be blood… It’s something I’m really drawn to, and I’m glad you picked up on that.”

I’m guessing when ‘Please’ and ‘Millie’ came out you were still focused on making singles. When did your focus change to the album; like when did the process of making a full-length start?

“I think when Kode9 heard ‘Millie’ for the first time. I sent it to him first, and he was like “this is a banger, but it’s like a different kind of banger, it’s a banger for me. I love it, I want to release it, but I’m also kind of curious as to what an Ikonika album would sound like.” So from there, that’s when we started talking about it. I was in my last year of uni, and when I graduated, he was like “have you got a job yet?”

Thanks dad.

[laughs] And then he was like “do you want a job?”. I was just after a quiet job; I thought I’d take some crappy temping work and continue to make some singles, and Kode was like “well you can’t have a quiet job, but you can have a really loud job – do you want to do an album?”

So I guess you started approaching music in a different way from that point.

“Well I was scared. Just because I felt – well, I still feel – that I’m not technical enough; I didn’t feel like a proper artist. Recently I do, like it’s my full time job and stuff. But it was daunting as well, like I’m a big fan of Kode9 and Burial, and I didn’t want to disappoint Hyperdub; you’ve really got to do something amazing, or at least work your heart out, and that’s what I tried to do, I really wanted to imprint my personality on the album.

“I completely changed my setup as well, I had to learn Logic proper quick [after changing to an Apple Mac; Ikonika had previously been using Fruity Loops on PC]. Malcolm [fellow producer Optimum] helped a lot in me translating my Fruity Loop skills to Logic. That helped a lot. There was also a bit of a race between me and Darkstar as to who would finish the album first. Or as Steve [Kode9] put it, there was a prize for whoever finished the album last.

“I was working at HMV at the time, like doing stupid shifts, six days a week, and then I’d get home and try to work on the album and I was really getting nowhere with it. And then I quit. But as soon as I quit, I went on holiday for two weeks, and then started writing ‘Yoshimitsu’, ‘They Are All Losing the War’, ‘Video Delays’, those tunes – I was feeling really refreshed, and had a better idea of what my vision was, basically. I wasn’t scared anymore. I think that was the problem; I was really scared at the beginning. But then I figured you’ve got to just suck it up. You don’t know if you’re ready until you just do it.”

Contact, Love, Want, Have

‘When I make my tunes, I don’t actually remember making any of those melodies, it just comes out.”

Speaking of ‘Yoshimitsu’ [named after a Tekken character], obviously there are several videogame references on the album – ‘Insert Coin’, ‘Final Boss Stage’, etc. That influence is there under the surface of a lot of dance music, why did you decide to make it so explicit?

“I guess – and I’ve only started to figure this out recently – that it goes back to when I first started listening to music, I was playing Megadrive. The 90s was a really cool time for music for me, whether it’s R’n’B, hip-hop, some pop, UK garage…that was all really cool to me. So I had 16-bit sounds in one year, and the music my sisters were listening to – they were like seven years older – in the other. They were out raving to garage, their bedroom walls were covered with flyers and stuff. They would buy records – we never had decks, just one really nice turntable – and I’d hang out with them listening to those and playing Megadrive. And I guess there, you’re pushing buttons and making sounds.”

On a really simple, literal level, that translates to music production.

“Well yeah, when you’re playing computer games you’re making a beat in the rhythm of the game. It’s really similar.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Like there’s a time where you consciously get into music, where you start buying singles or whatever, and so you have a very conscious nostalgia for that. But most people of our generation played video games before we made the effort to get into music, so we have a subconscious nostalgia for those sounds. And I think that comes out later in life.

“It’s definitely true. With the whole film thing as well [Ikonika’s degree was in film, at Kingston University], I was really into Luis Bunuel, who was all about the subconscious. It’s weird, when I make my tunes, I don’t actually remember making any of those melodies, it just comes out. I use my Mac keyboard for all of it too, I like the feel of it, I like typing, and I think that could go back to computer games.”

You’ve said before that you go into a second state, like kind of a trance when you’re making tunes.

“With ‘Yoshimitsu’, I recorded all the audio for it, and just left it there for two months. It wasn’t until Steve was like “are you going to finish the album”, and I was like “yeah, I just need a couple more tracks.” I was fishing back for some parts, and Malcolm was with me, and he heard the parts and was like “are you going to finish this?”. So I went up and did the entire thing that night. [laughs] It was totally beatless at the time, I don’t remember making the chords or anything. ‘Simulacrum’ I definitely don’t remember making.”

“My musical hero standing right in front of me, telling me how amazing I am. Like shut up.”

I don’t produce but I can get into that state watching DJs. Kode more than anyone actually. I was at FWD>> last Thursday, pretty sober, and I forgot just how disorientating it can be to zone out to a set like that played really loud. I don’t remember much of it.

“I think it was when Kode started playing Funky. There was one set last year [a two hour set at Plastic People] where I was totally in a trance, I was actually hallucinating.”

That’s my favourite ever Kode set.

“Yeah, I was in another world. I think it was when he played that DJ Gregory tune [‘Don’t Panic’], that tune was so old, but it fitted so well with that ‘Black Sun’ sound he had going on at the time.”

Linking tenuously from the videogame thing, I remember talking to Gemmy ages ago, and he said something that really resonated with me, about listening to Megadrive music and how it’s an attempt to make pop music without vocalists; they didn’t have singers so they would have to make the synths sing. You’ve said similar things about your own music, but you’ve also said you’d like to be a behind the boards producer, working with vocalists. Did you ever think about getting a vocalist on the album?

“Yeah, there was one. [laughs] I was supposed to get Daryl Palumbo from Glassjaw on it. I sort of met Daryl on the internet – I hate saying that. You know how I gave ‘Phonelines V.I.P.’ to XLR8R to give away? They were asking the story behind it, and I told them that it was a tribute to [Glassjaw’s] ‘Siberian Kiss’.

So this guy from XLR8R, he knew all those New York hardcore guys, and he introduced me to Daryl, and I sent him a couple of tunes. We were meant to do something, but he was just really busy with Glassjaw, and Head Automatica. But he did put me in touch with Nick Hook, from Cubic Zirconia, who I think plays keys with Drop the Lime sometimes, and I did a remix for them.

“But possibly in the future…I met Daryl when he was over here playing Wembley, which was crazy, like my musical hero standing right in front of me, telling me how amazing I am. Like shut up. He’s producing on Logic as well…[laughs]

“I’m gonna start building a vocal booth in my bedroom though, so I’m gonna start inviting as many people as I can. I think if you’re going to vocal one of my tunes, you need to deal with the bleeps; deal with those leads. I don’t want it to be a competition. I’d need to find a really good balance between them; that’s my only concern really. On a tune like ‘Idiot’, there might be too much going on, so I’d have to strip it down. Saying that, I’ve started making juke, and I chopped up The-Dream’s ‘Shawty is a 10’ over the top of one of those tracks recently and it seems to work.”