Despite his relatively young age, Thorjn’s production and self-reflection already demonstrate remarkable maturity.

As he navigates the vast landscape of music, the UK-based artist’s work is both diverse and captivating. It’s no surprise he has found a home with UPSCALE, the experimental label and community founded by Hudson Lee and Frequent.

This mix, like his artistry as a whole, explores the rich sonic diversity that musicians bring to the world.

In an in-depth interview, Thorjn shares the origins and evolution of his project, his influences, and his creative approach to making music.

Tell us about your journey! How did you start making music, and what drew you to making experimental electronic music?

I wasn’t hugely interested in music growing up. I played guitar and listened to the radio in the car but I didn’t really have a huge connection to any of it, nothing clicked. When I was about 13 I discovered a site called Newgrounds which hosts user-made games, videos, and music. There I listened to fully electronically composed music for the first time and was just instantly amazed at what I was hearing. I just had to learn how to make this stuff, especially from a sound design angle. I picked up a wine-bottled version of FL at one point and a mobile app called Auxy before I finally started using Ableton in 2018. This fascination with ‘texture’ that could never exist in the physical world without a computer has kinda remained at the heart of everything, I think.

Was there a specific moment or person who inspired you to get into electronic music? Any artists, albums, or key events that left a mark on you?

On Newgrounds, there was this guy called Xtrullor who I can trace back to being the person who started this ongoing listening chain. I think they still make music? but essentially they are a Dubstep producer from Finland. I got sucked down this rabbit hole which eventually led me to UPSCALE. I got talking to Hudson and Nolan who run that label and since then I’ve met so many amazing people, they’ve all really influenced me a lot. 

Coming to university in 2021 to study Music technology (I’m doing my Masters year now) seemed to cause this secondary explosion of musical discovery through meeting new people IRL. I grew up in a pretty rural area in the UK so it was extremely rare that I could meet other musicians, let alone people with a similar music taste. Everyone I’ve met at Uni has had such different musical journeys and tastes that have rubbed off on my own listening and perspective of music as a whole. That experience certainly imbued itself in ‘Full Body Sprain’ a lot.

What is the meaning behind the name “THORJN ꧁୦ਲ୦꧂”?

A friend came up with “Thorjn” a good 4 years ago. I came up with his artist name and he came up with mine. It was in an effort to replace my old alias name due to it being pretty unpronounceable, which is ironic considering the problem of pronounceability remains for ‘Thorjn’! I remember him likening the music I was making at the time – which was probably some early demos of Tales of The Canary Cage – as bitter-sweet and like the darker side of a rose which is where he got the idea from. It was an endearing sentiment in retrospect. The alias name has grown on me a lot. 

“୦ਲ୦” is a symbolic representation of the ‘Thorjn’ project. “꧁꧂” is the Unicode I’m using to represent Full Body Sprain. Unicode/ Symbols is essentially coloring the project, to imply certain aesthetics/ themes, etc. that language alone struggles to do. There are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, especially on SoundCloud. I don’t know its origins but I think people are using it for similar reasons.

In your own words, how would you describe the artistic vision of the THORJN project? Is there a message or experience you hope to share through your music?

I think perhaps there is a common thread in which the music I’m writing exists but I haven’t quite found that yet; it has morphed and changed over the years and does so between projects. My best guess is that ‘Thorjn’ is a platform for me to explore what interests me in art, music, culture whatever and I want to find interesting ways of presenting that exploration process. This is why I like album formats a lot, it gives a lot of space to build up these concepts and nurture the idea through experimenting with tracks – sometimes it assumes this narrative form, other times it’s sign-posting these aesthetics that exist in the world somewhere. 

Glitch, epic collage, and folktronica are some of the very niche and experimental genres you’re into. What draws you to these musical styles, and how do you create these sounds?

Although I don’t fully agree with genre labels like these, I recognize the commonalities between the music I listen to and the stuff I output as an artist. I like the idea of listening to specific bands/ artists rather than genres. I think these tropes have arisen from my own listening history which has drawn from lots of different specific artists and records. For both Tales and Full Body Sprain, glitch and ‘epic collage’ are pretty prevalent features of the music. I was listening to music that has this destruction and subsequent reconstruction happening. A lot of the sound design approaches were mimetic in the sense I didn’t know how these sounds were made exactly, so it took a lot of experimenting with things in Ableton and recording the results.

Your project has a very narrative, almost cinematic aspect, giving the feeling of diving into a story. How do you build this narrative in your tracks? Do you imagine specific scenes or worlds when you’re composing?

I wanted to be a writer before I started making music, like writing some Tolkien esc fantasy novels or something like that. Tales of The Canary Cage was based on a short story I wrote in lockdown that was this prologue to this larger novel series I wanted to make. A lot of the ideas in that were very visual. Anything post that project, I think the ‘cinematic’ aspect comes from a lot of the music I listen to combined with my approach to composition. I don’t ‘plan’ narratives, they emerge from the process which usually entails leaning into a certain sound world or aesthetic and seeing where it takes me: I’ve adopted this through-composed methodology in that sense.

Your visual world is filled with dreamlike digital elements, mixing nature and technology with mysterious symbols. What role do these visuals play in your music, and how does collaborating with visual artists like Uniow enrich your creative process? Is this collaboration consistent for each visual, as you have a comprehensive vision of your music where visuals play an important role?

As I mentioned with the Unicode / symbolism, for me, visual works do what the music cannot in the sense they fill in the gaps as to what the music is trying to convey. I think about music that I enjoy the most and how if it didn’t have its cover art my experience of it would be wildly different. Working with Uniow on Full Body Sprain was fantastic. They’re super talented, and like with the writing process of that album, we did a lot of exploration of what the visual world could be. 

I feel like I have a clearer vision of how to visually represent the music I’m creating these days. I’ve been putting together collages using images that capture the mood or themes of each track, and I upload them alongside the private SoundCloud links. Collaborating with Uniow has really expanded these ideas, not only through his technical approach but also through his unique perspective on how to bring them to life.

We noticed you use platforms like Twitch to stream live sessions, organizing a “mini-festival” with Upscale for your album release. Do you think this closeness with your audience influences your music or creative process? Is this something you often do, and how do these real-time interactions impact your evolution as an artist?

I don’t like to think about audience reception a lot. In the writing process, it can lead to all kinds of unnecessary problems. Obviously, there’s a certain standard I want my music and art to uphold but this comes from a personal desire rather than being based on how it’s going to be received. This is not to say that I don’t value what people think about my music, of course I do. But that fact comes after I’ve shared something, never during the process of making it. 

I would like to get more involved in these real-time events, URL and IRL. I’ve started performing in front of live audiences this year which has been really fun and I hope to actually start doing that as ‘Thorjn’ very soon! I think it does make a lot of this stuff I’m doing feel more ‘real’ and not just constrained to statistics on a laptop screen.

Speaking of the album, what can you share with us about ‘Full Body Sprain’? What themes, emotions, or ideas did you aim to capture with this project?

I met a lot of amazing friends and musicians when I started University in 2021. I was introduced to so much music that I would have never listened to had I not met these people. That’s the essence of Full Body Sprain, an exploration of writing an album being influenced by this crazy amount of novel experience and music discovery. 

More specifically, a big focal point of the writing process was those off-grid rhythms. Collision Notes and Solar Plexus were the first tracks I wrote before I knew that they’d exist in an album. I was getting frustrated by my (lack of) drum skills when it came to writing bass music so in defiance I started chopping stuff up and putting it off-grid.

Latterly written tracks like Vapour and Drag ꧁our꧂ Wings were more influenced by things like dreams; or how sound manifests in altered states of consciousness and dreams. 

You are part of a band, Ion Tarkus, in addition to your solo alias. Can you tell us about the dynamic between these two entities? How does collaborating with other artists influence your personal approach to music?

Ion Tarkus is an electronics improv trio with two of my housemates. I’ve been doing a lot of improv jamming with different people this year. It’s different to ‘Thorjn’, there are parallels in certain sounds that I will bring to the table in an improv session but the practice is an entirely different dynamic. It’s probably my favorite thing to do at the moment. It’s so powerful working with musicians in this way, it shows you how they think and feel about music and performance, and of course a lot about yourself too. It’s nice to be a smaller part; you can really focus on that one thing you’re doing within the context of the rest of the ensemble and forget about any preconceptions you might have.

You did an awesome remix of a Hudson Lee track. What inspired you with this work, and how did you approach the project? Are there other artists you’d like to remix and/or collaborate with?

Thank you! This feels like a long time ago but I remember Hudson sharing an early demo of Reflex Angle with me in lockdown. I instantly fell in love with the project and have really fond memories of hearing it for the first time while I was getting to know a lot of folks in UPSCALE. I was honored when he gave me the opportunity to remix one of the tracks and also absolutely terrified, I’d never done a remix before. There’s a really powerful moment that happens at about a minute into Embrace which I springboarded off of – I wanted to make this big climactic ending out of it considering that track bookends that record. This was also around the time I was deep into writing stuff for Tales of The Canary Cage so I think a lot of that natural, field recording element bled into the remix a lot. 

I like the idea of working with friends mostly because you get to see how they think about music on a deeper level, as well as getting this back-and-forth insight into each other’s workflows. It’s fun but also really really hard to do, from experience it’s better to just not take it that seriously and see what comes out of it.

What can we expect from Thorjn in the future? Any releases, projects, or shows planned?

I finished writing two albums this year. I’ll release one in 2025 and the other the year after probably. I’m pretty excited about them, they’re both very different from one another in terms of content but are both kind of the culmination of things I’ve been engaging with over the course of my studies. 

I’m hoping to start performing as Thorjn next year. I’m working hard to figure out how to perform this music live rather than playing out a wav. file or DJ-ing, plus I want to be doing more improv gigs too! When more show opportunities arise I’ll be grabbing them. Seeing as I have all this new music that I want to share, it’ll be a chance to hear it before it’s released 😉

What’s your favorite song in the mix, and why?

Saving the hardest question for last! If I had to pick one it would be the last track in the mix, Everytime by 7038634357. Neo Seven, the album it’s a part of, is very special to me. It communicates something very magical about this unconscious churning of memory. Strongly recommend that album, no one does it quite like them.