New album from the Norfolk, UK-based electronic pioneer. Since 2019's A Small Box Over a Global Goal LP and Ollust (a collaboration with Milly Hirst) in 2020, Broads has slimmed down from a two-piece to its original form: the solo project of James Ferguson. On his forthcoming releases, Ferguson maps out his journey through the post-lockdown landscape through fuzzed-out drones, lush electronics and occasional dancefloor-oriented bangers. "It's the most intimate and personal set of tracks I've ever written", Ferguson says. "Not in a Lou-Barlow-weeping-into-a-four-track sort of way, but the songs really reflect that feeling of coming out of lockdown and trying to work out who I was all over again. Remembering (and forgetting) how to function in 'normal' human relationships coming out of a time when solitude kind of became the default." The new material is lyricless, but the use of samples across Touch Machine echoes this sentiment, particularly on lead single 'On Par With Swings'. "The samples on that track are originally from a TED talk about rejection and social anxiety that I ripped off YouTube. I cut sections of it up into little single syllable bursts and created a sort of rhythmical collage - I suppose trying to go somewhere with the idea that when you're distanced from the human element of words they tend to lose meaning and just become part of the general noise around you." Touch Machine follows the Broads tradition of balancing emotional rawness and memorable melody and texture, and is Ferguson's most fully realised album yet, from the loping, tightly-wound opener 'Supply', through the hazy club atmospherics of 'A River Going In' and 'Smart Heretics' to the epic Seefeel-meets-Fuck Buttons roar of 'Deep Death Pyramid' and its uplifting sister piece 'Boketto' there's a beautiful, evolving and perfectly-weighted journey here. For Admirers of: Seefeel; Clark; Grouper; Caribou; Max Cooper; Craven Faults; Stereolab; Boards of Canada