BLAWAN

Thurnscoe, Leeds and a cup of coffee

Jamie Roberts grew up in Thurnscoe, a village in South Yorkshire, and moved to Leeds to study. The working name came from the same period: Java Blawan, the coffee he drank his way through at university. It is an unglamorous origin for a producer whose records have since been filed under industrial techno, and the unglamour is the point — very little about the way Roberts talks about his own work suggests mystique.

The sound has a documented source too. At fourteen he worked on a maggot farm, where an industrial mincer clattered away in the background. He has traced the metallic, uneven percussion that runs through his catalogue back to that machine. Listen to almost any Blawan record and there is something in it that sounds less like a drum kit than like a piece of equipment failing in a shed.

The track that got away from him

His first release, Fram, came out on Hessle Audio in 2010, with early records also landing on Hinge Finger. He signed to R&S in 2011 and remixed Radiohead's Bloom for the TKOL RMX 1234567 set that same year. Then, in 2012, came Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage, a sample-built track that turned into an unexpected hit and has shadowed him ever since.

What he did next was characteristic: he stopped. Three years passed before the Warm Tonal Touch EP arrived in 2015, built on analogue synthesisers rather than samples, and audibly uninterested in repeating the trick that had made his name. The pivot to hardware set the terms for the following decade.

Ternesc, Karenn and Persher

Roberts runs his own label, Ternesc, and co-runs the irregular Voam with Pariah. The partnership with Pariah also produced Karenn, a hardware-only project built on live improvisation, and Persher, which pushes into industrial hardcore and metal rather than techno. Further aliases — Trade, Parassela — fill in the gaps. Few producers of his generation have spread themselves across so many names while keeping each one legible.

The first Blawan album, Wet Will Always Dry, appeared on Ternesc in 2018. By then his reputation was settled: a producer credited with pulling industrial textures back into techno, and one of the few British artists of the post-dubstep years to end up somewhere genuinely unlike where he started.

SickElixir, made on headphones

The second album took seven years and arrived in very different circumstances. Roberts has been open about addiction across his adult life. He spent years in Berlin, then relocated to Lisbon to get clean. While the record was being written, several childhood friends from home died of overdoses, and the survivor's guilt of being sober and elsewhere runs through the finished thing.

The practical conditions were just as compromised. Living in a cramped Leeds flat without his studio, he worked on a laptop and headphones, drawing on sound libraries he had already built rather than making new sounds. He has described it as a really, really tough endeavour and said it felt like learning how to write music again. His own voice, processed into something closer to a growl than a hook, became the lead instrument.

SickElixir was released on 10 October 2025 through XL Recordings: fourteen tracks of gurgling machinery, mid-tempo broken rhythms and vocals that sit somewhere between a chant and a complaint. The closing title track is for the childhood friend who first handed him happy hardcore tapes.

The Fader, reviewing it on the day of release, called the results grotesque and gorgeous at once, noting that these are functional dancefloor records in which the expected vocal lift has been replaced by unintelligible, addled grunts, and praised NOS and Style Teef in particular. Rather than reading as dystopian, the review argued, the album lands as something closer to sensual.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

SickElixir was nominated for Best Independent Album at the 2026 AIM Independent Music Awards, decided at the Roundhouse in London on 22 September. Between albums he also turned up on Thistle, a collaboration with Skrillex, Randomer and the Brazilian MC Dricka.

The bigger shift is a move back towards the floor. After relocating his home studio to a new city, Roberts returned to straightforwardly club-oriented production: the two-tracker Gi Mi Keys Back / Auto Fake went up digitally on XL on 25 September 2026, with a limited 12-inch following on 13 November. It is modular, wrong-footing techno rather than the headphone-built sludge of the album, and it tallies with what he told Crack around the record's release — that he had started writing a lot of techno again.

On stage

Roberts both DJs and performs live, and the live set has become the more interesting of the two. He spent months workshopping SickElixir material on stage, something he had previously avoided doing, which means the album tracks have been reshaped by rooms rather than simply reproduced from the files.

The current run has been scaled accordingly. On 25 September 2026 he presented an entirely new live set with custom visuals at HERE at Outernet in London, part of Resident Advisor's RA25 celebration and timed to the single. Earlier in the year he played a one-hour live slot at Rewire in The Hague, 01:15 to 02:15 on Sunday 12 April at PAARD I — a late, short, dense format that suits the material. On 30 October 2026 he appears at Depot Mayfield in Manchester as part of Overmono's Pure Devotion world tour.