Out of all of us, electronic musicians should cope best over the next months. “I can go a few days without human contact,” admits 25-year-old Willaris K, who recently gave up a lonely job as a lineman in Australia, keeping power flowing across the border between New South Wales and Queensland, for a career as a DJ-producer. Often compared to Jon Hopkins, Willaris K (taken from a scanner that misprinted his real name, Jack William McAllister) is much less austere. His sound is more reminiscent of the early days of dance, when producers operated by fewer rules and the primitive tech meant there wasn’t a great distance between techno, ambient and progressive house.
Willaris’s most accomplished pieces, such as Alchemy or the cavernous Natural Selection (think Jaar via M83), keep one eye on the dancefloor and another longingly on the sofa. You can hear his solid grounding as a DJ, but the dynamics of rock and ambient play an equal part on his epic sound stages, and he’s trying to collaborate more, working with singers on Underwater and Indifferent. He has a couple of EPs prepped, too, and plans a headline tour, having played his first UK gig supporting Rüfüs du Sol at London’s Alexandra Palace. “This music was always meant for you guys,” he promises.
Willaris K EP is out 3 April