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May 21, 2026
Nathan Fake: Live, Reshape, Repeat
Emerging from rural Norfolk, Nathan Fake stands as one of the key figures in the evolving landscape of UK electronica, IDM and techno. From his 2004 breakthrough single The Sky Was Pink through to his seventh album Evaporator, Fake has remained committed to a distinctly low-tech, hands-on approach to production while refining his signature palette of atmospheric textures.
In the studio, he continues to favour a mix of vintage tools from Roland drum machines to the second-hand Korg Prophecy that helped him overcome a career-threatening creative plateaux. More recently, Ableton Live has become central to Fake’s shifting workflow, enabling more spontaneous, performance-driven recordings.
The iterative process of recording live takes, reshaping them in the studio and returning to performance again, has become a defining method in his work. On Evaporator, it results in radiant, daylight-infused tones that soften Fake’s typically nocturnal techno sensibilities. The album feels less like a departure than an evolution: evidence that when instinct and technology are allowed to interact freely, the outcome can feel both organic and enduring.
I was intrigued to read that a Casio keyboard shaped your first interest in music?
That's definitely where it all started. The Casio was a little present I received when I was really young, but I got obsessed with playing it and I’ve still got the keyboard in the spare room with all my junk. I've always been a fan of little toy keyboards because you can get some sort of unexpected sound, put it in a track and people don't quite know what it is. The Casio began a linear process of going from one keyboard to another, and a few years later I got a full-size keyboard for Christmas before saving up for a Roland Groovebox because I wanted to make beats and full loops.
Nathan Fake – “Slow Yamaha”
Did your musical education come from emulating the artists you admired?
I was really into The Prodigy when I was young, and then I got into Orbital and Aphex Twin, but it was the Orbital stuff that made me want to write music. I had albums like Snivilisation and In Sides, and bought the Brown album in the mid-‘90s, which is one of my favourites. I'd be listening to those and start having ideas for my own tracks or imagine doing a remix. That was before I had any gear and I didn't even know what they were using – it was all in my head!
I loved all the programming on Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James album too, but it felt out of range and I quickly accepted that I’d never know how to do it. You could tell it was probably made on fairly cheap drum machines and the programming was obviously done on a computer, but I still can't understand how it’s made, whereas Orbital seemed more attainable.
What gear were you using on your first LP, Drowning in a Sea of Love?
I was using a PC with Cubase and the aforementioned Casio keyboard. I'd had a couple of singles out by then, but wanted to do something that was a little more easy-listening, so I ended up toying with the keyboard and got my friend Vincent to play guitar on a couple of tracks. It’s actually the only stuff of mine that's got a real guitar on it – he used an EBow, which is like a magnetic device that produces a lot of reverb.
After your third album, you mentioned being badly affected by writer’s block. How did you navigate that period?
The longest gap between albums was Steam Days and Providence and I basically just had to ride that period out. Thankfully, I was still doing quite a lot of gigs at the time so I could still survive financially, but I went through a couple of years of not even wanting to make music. The writing part just wasn't happening so I gravitated towards playing my live set and doing remixes, but I feel very fortunate that I got through that period with my career intact.
“People often raise an eyebrow when I tell them what gear I use because they either never thought about it or forgot it existed.”
You broke the impasse after purchasing a Korg Prophecy. It seems counterintuitive that such a limited synth might help you achieve that?
Another act that I was really into was The Orb. I loved how they used texture and remember reading in a synth music catalogue that they’d used the Korg Prophecy around the time they made the Oblivion album, which is another favourite of mine. When it first came out in 1996, the Prophecy literally cost a grand, but fast forward 20 years and I was able to buy one for a couple of hundred quid on eBay.
I don’t know why they’re not more sought after, and I didn't buy it thinking I was going to use it to make an album, but it ended up being key to coming up with new ideas. The Providence album ended up being all the stuff that I’d randomly hammered out on the Prophecy, so it was a really serendipitous thing that happened to get me through my writer’s block.
“Providence” - The title track of Nathan Fake’s 2017 album
You still use it today, which may surprise people because your music sounds very sophisticated. What features make the Prophecy relevant in 2026?
I’m looking at it now and it’s just a grey synth that’s only got a few buttons and a tiny LCD screen. It looks more like a MIDI controller keyboard, but at the time it was touted as this really state-of-the-art synth. Its design seems so strangely put together and you have to go through loads of menus so it’s really hard to programme.
It’s based on physical modelling, but they didn't seem to market it as that and I usually only end up playing around with the presets. It's a mono synth, so you can't play chords, but it's got all these really dense pad sounds and the aftertouch adds a nice sort of breath control. It's also got a lot of woodwind and brass sounds, which I don't really use, although I did use a saxophone preset on the last album and sped it up to sound more like a violin.
Nathan Fake – “Aiwa”
You’ve mentioned that your latest LP, Evaporator, has a less nocturnal sound. Was that simply a result of changing your working hours?
For Evaporator, I basically started out wanting to make a full-on Brian Eno-style ambient album, but wasn't sure how that would pan out. It ended up not being that at all, but I'd never written an album that set out to be gentle and I wanted to make music that I could listen to at lunchtime [laughs]. It’s not like you can’t listen to Breakcore at lunchtime, and Evaporator does have its dark moments, but tracks like Aiwa and Yucon are quite breezy, which is what I‘d set out to make.
The production landscape is dominated by modern plugins. Does it feel like producers are coming full circle and using old synths again to create a more distinctive sound?
People often raise an eyebrow when I tell them what gear I use because they either never thought about it or forgot it existed. I’ve always tried to gravitate away from what everybody else is using, but over the past 15 years there does seem to have been a bit of a revival in people using ‘90s digital synths as opposed to analogue Jupiter or Juno sounds.
Now it's a sort of hybrid of the two, plus people using a lot of newer analogue stuff, but I've never been seduced by expensive high-end plugins. I’d much rather use a 20-year-old laptop with crap software and go back to the days when free plugins would actually be quite good. In the early 2000s, James Holden would make mad stuff out of a free plugin he’d found on some forum, but 64-bit processing made it all very high-end and killed the free plugin thing.
Do you have a method for starting a track, just to get the ball rolling?
When I work on the computer, I tend to go to drums first, so I'll just make beats to kill time and end up using them as the framework for a track and then play along to them on a keyboard. What I like about the Yamaha Reface CS is that it has built-in speakers, so it’s easy to just randomly turn on and mess about with it. Since I’ve had that, I’ve been writing stuff so much quicker.
Obviously, I have to wire it up properly to record, but it's good to have a little toy that you can quickly switch on, jam with and then program on the DAW. When it comes to live recordings, I'll either do one long take and make edits from it or edit bits together from shorter takes until I end up with a hybrid of live recordings and programmed sections.
Nathan Fake (with Chris Clark) – “Orbiting Meadows”
It’s rare for you to collaborate with others, but you invited Chris Clark to work on the track Orbiting Meadows. What were you looking to get from that collaboration?
I’ve been a huge fan of Chris’s music and we became friends after doing some gigs together. While I was making the track Orbiting Meadows, Chris was also in the middle of making his album Steep Stims. We’re always sending each other bits and bobs, so he sent me a couple of early demos and I’d purposefully written a very basic ambient track using two major chords and wanted something to float along to them. I basically sent the track to Chris asking if he could add some microtuning to give it a bit of an edge and what he sent back was amazing, so that's the track.
How did your move towards using Ableton for live performance unfold?
I’ve been using Ableton Live since 2004, basically because I knew a duo called the MFA who were using it prior to version four, which I believe was the first version to have MIDI. I wanted to use lots of synth plugins live and after they advised me to use Live I thought it was absolutely ideal and made myself learn it. I basically got offered a live show and ended up using Live to build a set in the space of a week, which is pretty miraculous for me because I'm usually a pretty slow learner.
From that point, Ableton's been perfect. I don't know if I use it in the same way that everybody else does because I like to have all the percussion parts separated and don't really use stems - I prefer to use little loops. I’ll have a hi-hat on one track, shakers on another, the kick and the snare and I’ll use MIDI parts for all of the melodic elements.
Live’s become a huge part of what I do now because its ability to react quickly is really good for staying in the zone. It’s actually one of the reasons why I wanted to incorporate live takes into my recorded tracks, because I felt that was something people weren't getting unless they came to watch me onstage.
Nathan Fake – Daytime Club Set / RA Greenhouse Sessions
It sounds like a circular process of using live takes to build studio tracks and then evolving those tracks once you’re back on stage…
The live set’s totally improvised, so although a lot of it’s prearranged, I've got lots of clips that I can literally drag into anything. It’s all just loops, basically, but the set is different every time I play it. That alone keeps things interesting because I can go in any direction depending on the energy I’m getting from the crowd. Time will tell how the new tracks will evolve. In this early phase, I'm not quite sure what to do with them, but I expect they’ll come into their own after a couple of months and because of Live they’ll be completely different from the album version.