Blanco White has already crafted a sound of his own with his off-world explorations of Latin American and Andalusian folk music. On Tarifa, Josh Edwards’ second solo album, he mines new depth within his colourful fusions of folk with indie and electronics, while embracing the thrill of collaboration, discovery and cultural exchange. In the winter of 2022, Edwards packed his car full of instruments and gear and embarked on a writing trip to Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain. He’s long been drawn to Cádiz because of its flamenco guitar traditions, stunning architecture and stark scenery. The grass remains green even in the coolest months, and the wind-beaten shores alone would make for good writing inspiration. But this specific trip was even more significant due to a chronic pain condition that had left him unable to play or write. “I did have a real health wobble between the start of 2020 up until spring last year,” he says. “For a lot of that period, especially 2020 and 2021, I was almost completely out of action. It was a really scary time. Since then I’ve recovered really well and feel much healthier and stronger for having gone through it, but at the time I didn’t know if my career was over or if I’d ever be able to tour again. That was the headspace of it. I still live with the condition, but thankfully my pain levels are so much lower and I’ve got my life back.” “I’d just finished my first record, On the Other Side. The nerve condition started in 2019, and I’d played through the injury touring and recording for about a year, which in hindsight was incredibly stupid. I got COVID and my condition really deteriorated. There was a point where I realised I had to stop trying to write and record. It felt like I needed to set aside all my time to heal, giving that my whole focus. It was a full reset.” During that healing period, Edwards kept connected with music by consuming as many audio podcasts, stories, and books as he could. Unable to play or write, he tried to educate himself instead, diving more deeply into production and engineering. “I got obsessed with trying to learn as much as I could, to try to feel as though I was still growing and developing musically even if I couldn’t play my instruments. The knowledge I gained ended up being hugely important in helping me evolve my sound when I did feel able to record and play again.” After recovering, playing with Brazilian percussionist Pilo Adami (Nubiyan Twist) became an essential part of the early writing process, and eventually led to a partnership across most of the record. That process began with a tentative collection of jam sessions in Adami’s studio in south London. “It was the first time we’d worked together. We started on something that would become ‘Silver Beaches’, and at the end of the session, it felt like we’d found a kind of gateway track with a vibe I could start pairing other ideas around. Before writing that song, I wanted people to move more at the shows. I’d done the Time Can Prove You Wrong EP which was very minimalist, folky and gentle, and I wanted to do something that was a bit more ambitious and focused on rhythm and groove. The first session with Pilo led to something different to anything I’d done before and I quickly recognised that I could never have made it on my own. We recorded live drums and a whole instrumental on the first day of writing.” “It’s incredibly exciting when you find a collaborator you gel with. In this case, it was about finding someone with different skills that complemented mine, and different tastes too. But at the same time, it felt like our tastes overlapped in really interesting places. That was what was really exciting about it.” In contrast to this open collaboration was his inward-looking writing trip to Tarifa, which allowed Edwards to hone in on his own ideas. Travel had always been a huge part of the process behind Blanco White, but after COVID and Edwards’ health situation made that impossible, this was the first writing trip in a long time. “It was the first time I’d been able to really put my foot on the throttle again. I worked really intensely every day. That was super exciting. You can get lost in it if you do that. Writing in the time up to then had felt really tentative. I didn’t want to push things too much in case my condition worsened again. It all felt very stop-start-y, whereas this was a massive cathartic offloading of ideas.’ “From the first record, I recorded a load of demos on really cheap gear and then ended up re-recording the whole album and lost so much of the magic you capture when you’re writing. That moment of discovery is so important, and it’s sometimes impossible to re-capture it. The whole philosophy of the new record was the record button is always on, every idea is always being captured.” That “always on” recording philosophy can be heard in the album’s first moments, a two-part ambient folk odyssey called ‘Giordano’s Dream’. Part II of the track was formed from two happy accidents – the first with his flatmate Cam Potts (Superego), Blanco White’s session guitarist. The pair were playing about with a synth patch Edwards had created for Part I, capturing a glide-based performance that would have been impossible to re-record twice in the same way. That became the basis for Part II. Then, in another session, renowned drummer Seb Rochford (Polar Bear, Sons of Kemet) added a drum solo in a moment of spontaneity. Within both moments, Edwards has been glad to follow his instincts as well as the instincts of others. The song itself also acts as a lyrical mood-setter for the whole record, with its focus on cosmic wonder, influenced by ideas like the ‘rare earth’ theory, which outlines our potential isolation in the universe. “Music has always been my vehicle for getting in touch with the transcendent, the mystical and the spiritual” Edwards says. “Especially when you’re pairing it with big reverbs or temple-like spaces designed to help us get in touch with those feelings. That’s kind of how the music is often guiding what I’m writing about. With synthesisers, those spaces can take on a cosmic feel too, something I always felt that song ‘Giordano’s Dream’ had. I’m fascinated by sci-fi and space, and think about that stuff a lot.” The music’s otherworldly character is explored in the album visuals by artist Luke Insect, a long term collaborator on Blanco White. Drawing on a shared interest in surrealism and an admiration for artists like M. C. Escher, the artwork crosses over into the world building of the music. “For me most of the songs have a clear time of day that characterises each one,” Edwards explains. “It’s normally something that appears early on in the writing process. Some feel very nocturnal, but others are brighter and feel more associated with morning or daylight. It normally impacts the lyrics and the imagery of the world imagined in each song.” Luke Insect’s artwork draws on these references to light, creating fantastical distortions of different times of day. The terrain around Tarifa itself is evoked in the main album cover, with a nocturnal piece for single, ‘Giordano’s Dream’. The otherworldly feel of the music is especially clear in songs like ‘We Had a Place In That Garden’, and ‘Una Noche Más’, which combine bare and emotional lyrics with a tone that hints at the abstract and metaphysical. Edwards has been inspired by other world-building songwriters like Sufjan Stevens, Feist and ambient composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, who use expansive presentation to express something more intimate and personal. Atmosphere is a huge part of getting across the cosmic bent of the record, which was carefully worked on by Edwards with collaborations with Nathan Jenkins (Bullion), as well as Pilo Adami. Bullion brought his pedal collection and FX rack to certain songs nearer the point of completion, adding flourishes and delays to expand the space of the music. In the end, however, everything was mixed in the box, something that gave Edwards total control to add and subtract at any moment. “It meant the process started to feel a lot like painting, where a day’s work could resemble adding a few dashes of paint to the canvas. That work was tonal just as much as performance-based, trying to mix and shape things as we went along. Each Pro Tools project became more detailed, and I continually switched between tracks to try and maintain some kind of perspective.” This approach, as well as close working with his friends meant that Edwards was able to retain full control of his vision from beginning to end. “I’d worked with amazing mixers up to this point, but it had always been a difficult part of the process because it involves final decisions and letting go, and sometimes a song can disappear in an unexpected direction. I tried on this record instead to work more accumulatively, getting help from collaborators, but also having the confidence to do more of it myself and be the one to hit the final print button.” “It’s that thing of learning as much as you can from people who know more than you. But, I had the confidence for the first time to trust in my own taste, and to be confident that if I have a conviction about something, and something feels right, to not run away, but to trust it.”