DIAL

Bristol (raised in Brighton) · FARA Records

DIAL (Mari Ashcombe, b. 23 March 2004) grew up in Brighton, the technical, solitary child of parents who ran a small electrical repair business — she spent a lot of her childhood around things being opened up, diagnosed and either fixed or accepted as unfixable, which is a fairly direct origin story for a record built around dead equipment and what it retains. She's lived in Bristol since nineteen, drawn by the city's IDM and experimental-electronic scene rather than by anything social. She found her way in through headphones alone at fourteen — a genuinely solitary discovery rather than a shared one — and learned production backwards from most people: programming before arrangement, arrangement before melody. That order shows in everything she makes.

She doesn't consider what she does singing. She records fragments — spoken, half-sung, barely-there — and processes them until they sit somewhere between a voice and a texture, closer to found data than to a vocal take. Her instrument is really the arrangement: sliced, micro-edited drums with real ghost detail, sub felt rather than heard, motifs that corrupt on a schedule rather than randomly, and silence treated as a rhythmic element rather than an absence — she programmes the silence in a track before anything that's going to fill it. Her influences run the IDM and braindance tradition of composed, deliberate corruption; glitch as a compositional tool rather than an aesthetic; and, from her upbringing, a plain technical fascination with what data and old machines hold onto after everything else about them has stopped working.

Solitary and precise, and not unfriendly so much as genuinely most comfortable alone with a system she's building. She found her way into music entirely through headphones, alone, at fourteen, with no scene and no one else's opinion involved, and the records still sound like that discovery. She learned production backwards from most people — code first, then arrangement, then melody last, if at all — and it's audible in how structural her records are. She grew up around a small electrical repair business, watching things get opened up and diagnosed, which she says is the most honest explanation she has for why her records are so interested in what persists after something stops working. Precise, solitary, exacting.