Clippings

Whilst the previous three albums I’d released I was immensely proud of, there was one major issue with them; using uncleared samples essentially blacklisted you from releasing them officially on streaming services, and even though they could be released ‘unofficially’ through SoundCloud and YouTube etc., the risk was always ran of takedowns or, even worse, legal action.

After the release of The Shakeup in 2020, I worked on an entire album featuring no samples, and went in a singer-songwriter / electronic direction. That album, despite being worked on tirelessly for multiple years, was eventually completely scrapped when I realised I didn’t have the right tools to finish it (other musicians to bounce ideas off of, for one - it became a bit of an echo chamber). At this time I had also moved back home before getting a place of my own, I’d graduated from University, and gotten a job doing Web Development. Whilst I uploaded the occasional remix of tracks I was listening to at the time, I didn’t return to producing ‘official’ ookiiani music for multiple years.

That changed when, inspired by electronic artists such as hxly xo, I created a track called ‘Ice Level’, an airy drum and bass track with the only samples being vocal samples taken from Splice, which meant I could release it officially under my name. In January 2025, I released Ice Level officially both on SoundCloud but also on streaming services such as Spotify and TIDAL.

One of the parts about album creation I love the most is the artwork and general theme of the album. Creating an artwork piece and the associated materials for it is always great fun, and for this track I struggled for a while to think of a suitable theme - until I realised this track and any future album would come together like any other album I’d done thus far - small independent tracks I’d made over months - or years in this case - that would eventually be grouped together, worked on, and released as an album, the same way newspaper clippings are gathered and preserved to tell a story about a particular event or person. It also had a double meaning as a bit of a happy accident, relating to having taken ‘clippings’ of other songs for my released up until that point.

With this idea, I crawled the Google Newspaper archives for any interesting things I could find. I loved finding archaic adverts, print styles, portraits of people and things that were printed for one newspaper issue only, and then forgotten straight afterwards. I could’ve trawled those archives for months, but I quickly built up a large graphic to use in the background of the artworks, as seen below:

With this, I released Ice Level and began creating other tracks over the course of the next couple years - such as Gavin’s Theme, a nod to 90s house music, So Easy 2 Luv, an upbeat drum and bass tune, Never Leaving, a UK Garage track, and Redline, a heavier and more grungier drum and bass tune - amongst some others.

Finally, in July 2026, on mine and my partner’s anniversary, I proudly released Clippings, my first album in 6 years, to all major streaming services and - for the first time - vinyl!