Etch – Scream of the Butterfly album track-by-track

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Etch’s latest release is a seismic double album, diving deep into sonic world-building that spans dubstep, jungle, garage and hip-hop influences. Scream of the Butterfly sees the Brighton-based producer assembling an eclectic cast to explore darker shades of club music, veering from intense bass to atmospheric experimentation, making this “a masterclass in evolving bass music” according to our eminent reviewer.

Albums like this don’t come along very often – so we asked the man himself to talk us through the contents, one track at a time…

01 – Paternal Curse

I think this is probably the most ‘on the nose’ track title i’ve ever used; when it comes to writing personal tracks i’ve always left things a bit shrouded in uncertainty or i’ve just guided the narrative via use of vague samples. But I felt with this track it was time to show a bit of vulnerability, I don’t actually think I even need to detail what this track could mean, you can see it in the title nor do I want to go into any grim details – but it was the conception of this track which actually guided the rest of the record in terms of it being based of real and personal situations rather than a lot of my back catalogue being about escapism and fantasy. It’s also one of those tracks that seemed to just pull itself together and I was following it’s lead; a situation happened, I felt like I needed to write some music as sort of self-therapy and then I heard that sample, the demon voice from the (criminally underrated) 2000 film ‘The Cell’, after finding that sample and also some of the background atmos the track came together really quickly and dictated alot of the mood the rest of the record would take – also ultimately gave me an early visual identity for the world that the tracks exist in. I highly recommend people check the film if they want to get a bit of an idea of the colours and visual elements I had in my head for making tracks on this album.

02 – Star Fallen Ft. J-Shadow

J-Shadow is one of my favourite producers of the past… almost a decade now. He has an unmistakable sound and is extremely precise and technical; I was almost setting myself up with an unbeatable challenge by even trying to collaborate with him but it actually turned out to be an incredibly fun back and forth. He initially sent me all of the drums and percussion which I made into a bunch of different loops which I built up over the intro and first drop then added the bass I made to it – then I sent it back to J and he went even crazier on the drums and the arrangement and started adding his iconic little synth flares. To round things off to bring it into the context of the project and also to add my identity to it I sampled a lot of the atmospheres and background sounds from the video game Elden Ring which gave the dark mood that the rest of the track sat in – then I sent it back to J once more and he put together the insane 2nd part of the track, it came together really fast. I love sampling video games, perhaps more so than films because there tends to be a lot more space in the sound which gives me the ability to manipulate it more, video game music and sound effects are often also less recognisable, so while they mean something to me as an avid videogamer and conjure up experiences, to a lot of people they are left to the imagination.

03 – Three Of Me One Of You

This is potentially one of my favourite tracks I made on the record, it’s one of the few tracks (potentially i’ve ever made) where I managed to properly bring together an element of everything I love into one track and do it without it being too messy, in fact quite the opposite its very minimal and stripped back, it contains elements of hip hop, jungle, the more stripped back side of neurofunk/techstep, 70’s film soundtracks and the weightyness of dubstep without becoming too in-debt to any of those things. Conceptually it continues the theme I set off with on the first track as an exploration (or exorcism even) of personal experiences told through a darker more stripped back visual style than I’m usually known for – with most of my records outside of the more abstract visual worlds in my head they tend to be lead by colours, I wouldn’t say I have synaesthesia but I certainly correlate things with colours and shapes; as weird as it may sound alot of the tracks on this album present themselves in dark blues and purples, lots of noir-ish long shadows and sharp shapes, this track probably being the prime example of that.

04 – No Fuckry

I’m always a bit apprehensive about using samples that may be too obvious, but sometimes I have to give into temptation and try and flip them into my own narrative. As someone who’s first love was purely sample based music I also have to respect these samples and retain some of what they mean if I use them – this of course most famously known from Origin Unknown – Valley Of The Shadows (but as most sample nerds will know is just a loop from the Future Music Vol.1 CD) an extremely iconic jungle track on RAM Records and probably one of the finest and most well known examples of when jungle started to dark, but unlike a lot of other 1993 darkside/hardcore tunes, this track to me always had a lot more elegance to it and a lot of this had to do with that sample and the way it’s executed. To me this sample helped continue this visual narrative of the record, also slowing it down to around 110bpm and using a more dancehall style beat which I had never tried to do before but was always interested in and landed me on an exciting new format to flex ideas across.

05 – Hadanar Melody

Oddly enough this is one of the oldest tracks on the record, it was made a while before I had even started to put this record together but listening back to it I realised it really fit the whole narrative, that’s often how my LP projects come together, i’ll make a lot of tunes with the general concept in mind and often without realising because I just fully succumb to the story and drown myself in things that influence the ideas externally such as films, art, photography, games so that i’m constantly in the same state of mind (which can be gruelling) and then often i’ll find tracks i’ve made that just instantly make a lightbulb go in my head and i’m like “ahhh so I did make that for a reason”. This track in a weird way was a bit of a homage to the more synth-y/sci-fi/atmospheric side of some of Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor’s stuff on the Ghosts I-IV project and the album The Fragile. Trent Reznor as a whole was a huge influence on the record particularly The Downward Spiral, which is a concept record with an idea similar to mine but in reverse, also on the artwork of the album.

06 – Not Surprised Ft. Lee Scott

As usual I had to cover all sides of music I love while giving them my own twist and sound palette – hip hop does not get away. When I actually made this beat I was low-key trying to make something similar sounding to a beat off the Children Of The Damned – Tourette’s Camp album (those who don’t know that was an iconic uk hip hop group now known as Cult Of The Damned which Lee Scott helmed) but again looping in my interest in film soundtracks and also references to survival horror games. So when Lee Scott got on board after picking this beat out of a few I sent him it was a dream come true, he is easily my current favourite uk hip hop artist as a lyricist, writer, producer and label owner – he has been iconic for years and it just so happened without even giving him context the lyrics synced up quite a lot to some personal situations I had been in – so basically Lee Scott is also psychic.

07 – Stepford Lives Ft. E.M.M.A

Out of everyone I’ve ever collaborated with E.M.M.A has always been the person I’ve been most comfortable with, we made a bunch of tracks back in 2014 and have been saying ever since we’d do more then out of nowhere when I was working on this album i said on whatsapp “lets do it” and in the space of about an hour or two the track had almost come together, emma came through with her instantly iconic synths and waltz-y drums and I sequenced them all out then left them for a while on loop while me and Emma started talking about 1970’s film (and novel) Stepford Wives and how it’s weird how we are almost living in a world where becoming an emotionless robot is required to hold down mundane day jobs and be ‘socially acceptable’ and that just became the spark for the concept of the track so I went through the film and sampled pieces of dialogue from it and sprinkled them over the track; it was a super satisfying collaborative experience as someone who is generally not that good at collaborating. It also massively lent itself to the narrative of the record being a lot about personal experience in the world.

08 – Blue Note

This track came together at a time where I was getting a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about UK Garage, I will always love Garage, it’s always been one of my favourite club genres next to Jungle/DnB and I always felt like it had been experiencing a really great resurgence with people creating new shapes and ideas with its format, but slowly and surely it’s started to fall into what initially made me dislike garage when I was younger (before doing proper research), proper corny champagne, jeans & shoes, bad cocaine VH1 discount pop music – there is a time and place for that, but it happened, so I almost decided to use a garage style backdrop for this track to remind myself there is still space to work deeper ideas into it.

09 – Halloween Blue

When it comes to weaving together stories and concepts on an album project I am a sucker for creating little interlude-y type tracks that really gel together parts of the record, almost as transitions of little breathers before things start to switch up (or down) – I probably made about 20 of them for this album then went through them all and picked my favourite. I really wanted to do an actress-hazyville-era little 4×4 tease but give it a bit of an off-beat melodic pattern which also alluded to the colour and form of the rest of the record. it’s funny when I was younger and starting to get deeper and deeper into production and chasing after complexity (which I think is always a big risk for any creative because it’s always a losing game really) I often looked down on a lot of 4×4 music, I was always like “yeah it’s easy, i’ll get bored making it”, it wasn’t until I got a bit older and also really started listening to that music more closely & started loving it that I realised how hypnotic it is and also how deceptively hard it is to pull off really well.

10 – Crusht Wings

Similarly to the previous track and Hadanar Melody earlier on the record this is another one of the interlude tracks that signifies a change of pace is about to occur – this track relies entirely on atmosphere. I love writing ambient tracks, I hope to one day release a whole record of them, they’re such an emotional release – a lot like Hadanar Melody, this was a track where I played the melody completely live then just left it looping while applying effects and layering up bits of atmospherics and relooping delays over the top of eachother which is always a massively gratifying creative experience. Along with the beat I made on the Lee Scott collaboration this was sequenced live through my SP404 which again adds its own character and unique effects to the mix.

11 – Prayer Wheel Ft. Killa P

The irony is not lost on me that this track, which is sampling a 1960’s Thai psychedelic record which carries an anti-war message, has Killa P spitting bars about shooting people in the head on it. BUT. Everything is about contrast. Also this is one of the few tracks on the record which is HYYYPE, Killa P is easily one of my fave grime MC’s and he really went in on this one in a way I haven’t heard in a while which was hugely exciting to hear back, it was also really fun to add the psychedelic spin to grime, which is something i’ve always had in my head but never really been able to execute properly until I was making this track. Apocalypse Now.

12 – Heatmap Ft. Emz

Rounding off the MC lead tracks is this with the legendary Emz, easily my favourite of the newer wave of grime MC’s, he was one of the first names that came to my head when it was suggested to have MC’s on the record – funnily enough I was originally thinking for him to go over the track that Killa P ended up going on but now looking at the flow of the record and how Emz approaches the beat I couldn’t imagine it being any other way, he has incredibly dexterity and flows around sharper/sparser beats better than anyone else. I kind of think of this as a continuation from the record I did with Nico Lindsay on Sneaker Social Club back in 2019, trying to apply the negative space but sharp transients of Photek’s Form & Function era to Grime instrumentals.

13 – Inside The Box

It wouldn’t be an Etch record without a solid drum break work out – this album kind of ventured away from that for the most part but chopping up breaks over film samples (this time Terminator 2 and Dune) with some aggy deep basslines – it contains elements narratively of everything covered in the first half of the record, I always enjoy it with albums when things start, then go left and loop round back to where they were originally in terms of context and I try to achieve this on all my long length projects. I gotta give love to the EMU6400 and haggard little Mackie mixer which Toasty gave me at the time which (and I hate to say being a pro-software user) gave this track the grit it needed.

14 – Amnixiel
Last but not least a track that rounds out the LP in a final shout of rage, recorded mostly live on my Maschine Mk3 then run through FX on the SP404, it’s a fairly simple track just essentially comprised of a few atmospheric samples taken from Sin City and an old Moving Shadow record but with me hammering over compressed and distorted drums on top, I always like to include one track on an LP that is performed almost completely live and I like to make sure you can feel that too.

To buy your double vinyl copy of Etch’s Scream of the Butterfly album, click here