Interview: Roan Clawson on Aural Texture
INTERVIEW 31/05/2026 PUBLISHED 13/06/2026
Roan Clawson’s ‘Aural Texture’ is an album brimming with electronic breath and harsh noise. It chokes on itself. It contourts into grainy textures. It pushes guitar music until it is muddy, exhausted, and churned through a broken, metallic sieve. It rusts, breaks down, then reinvents itself. It sounds like a memory trying to resurface. Through a combination of granular synthesis, iPhone recordings and an attuned instinct for sonic tension and relief, Clawson crafts a truely experimental debut album.
For fans of (but not limited to) ear, Caroline, Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon’s 2026 album ‘Seeing is Forgetting’, Aphex Twin, Vegyn (but not the remixes), lowkey Vangelis’ 1982 Blade Runner soundtrack, feeble little horse if they were instrumental, ‘Slow Jam’ by Four Tet.
It’s because it’s full of sonic textures, and aural describes the kind of vague ideas of sounds that permeate throughout.
What is a vague idea of sounds?
I think it’s sounds you can’t quite pinpoint, but they try to mean something to you.
They try to move you?
They try to move you. You don’t quite know what they are, but they definitely move you in some way.
Why a granular synthesiser of all the effects?
Well, I did a course in audio programming called Granular Synthesis. A lot of people do it because it’s quite interesting to code because you’re taking samples in, granulating them and making them into weird textures... and I just thought that could be an interesting way to develop sounds I already had.
How does coding come into this process?
Coding is the…uh… fulcrum. It is the initial, first part of the process. That’s what created the VST that I used
What’s a VST?
The VST is the granular synthesis that I created and coded.
Is it called the VST?
It’s like a plugin
Does it have a name? Your plugin?
That’s a good question. I feel like I did give it a name. Um… let’s call it the Granualiser
Amazing.
I feel like that’s probably been used. I don’t have a specific name for it.
Gran-you-ah-liser. That’s quite hard to say, isn’t it? Gran-you-lah-riser?
Gran-you-lah-riser. Gran-you-lah-riser.
What does sonic respite mean to you (as per your bandcamp description)?
Oh, yes. I like this idea of sounds being clusters and chaos then you kind-of dissipate into this – what I call – sonic respite. There's moments of such concentration of sound, then that’s then dissolved into a sort of emptiness which is respite from the previous concentration.
Well Kirsten (Wright) is an awesome photographer. In DC unfortunately, right now, but she’ll be back. She took loads of pictures. It does give me an emo-y vibe – all her pictures. If you go through all the reams and reams of photos she’s got. I think [the album cover] is awesome.
And then obviously Elliana Craig band. Shoutout. We’ve been in for two years. I thought it would be very fun to basically just dissolve our demos. And completely change the live recordings from iPhone recordings of the gigs. The quality actually came out really well.
Very nice.
I’m interested in the Max MSP side to your project. Tell me why you wanted to include a visual element, rather than just doing something more 2D. Or do you think that the visual element is important at all?
Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed by software company Cycling '74. It has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations.
The visual aspect of max MSP was used for my dissertation which was basically testing a multi-player instrument. It was already relatively abstract as an idea of interacting between two people. So without the visual aspects I don’t think there would have been very good results if it was just purely sonic exploration. I used the visual aspect to help people realise how they were navigating this sonic space.
I actually found there wasn’t that much difference, actually.
What was the most surprising thing that came out of the album?
The most surprising thing was that I designed quite a few of the songs with visuals. A lot of them were soundtracks for films and triptychs and stuff. I was surprised that it was able to translate relatively well, I thought, to being just a sonic output.
I’d say pretty damn well.
Thank you very much. Because it was designed solely as a soundtrack. But I thought this sounds kinda awesome just on its own.
And the reference to Caroline on the last track – how are you inspired, if at all, by them?
They’re whole vibe is the same vibe as like the clusters of sonic concentration, and then you’re released into a surprising moment of either respite, or sometimes it’s more like strangeness. It’s unpredictability. I think that my project was a different take on it. It was genuine randomness, rather than unpredictability.
As per the code, or…
Yeah. As per the code. Genuine randomness. But like you can harness that randomness to give a vibe for what you want, but it is at its heart, random.
Something that isn’t at its heart random are song titles. Tell me why it was important that you included underscores, or made a phrase into one word. Is that important to you? I’m kind of fishing for an answer here. But what is the point of doing that?
I actually didn’t deep it that much to be honest with you. I think song titles are important. The underscores were used purely to identify the songs which were just one long recording that was put through the granulator. So the ‘_gran’ was just one sample, put through the granulator, and there was nothing else to do to it. I wanted to define those.
Then mashing the phrase into one… One, I think it looks kind of cool. Two, I think that song lends itself to being clustered and I wouldn’t say there’s that much space. It’s quite tight and chaotic. I think that metaphor is more retrospective, but it still holds up.
My last question for you: is music teleological?
I mean... so many people ask at the end of interviews: What are you doing next? Where are you going? But, because we’ve known each other for so long I want to ask, do you think music is chronological? Is there a timeline?
Is it a journey?
Haha. Is it a journey? Are you just leaving the album on bandcamp to marinade? What do you have brewing? Whether that be past, present or future. Give me your general temporal reflections.
I don’t think my music is teleological. Well, maybe it’s not linearly teleological, but there could be different paths that converge into a direction you want to go in. But you probably should think non-teleologically.
It’s a big question. I guess everything is a journey, but it’s not a linear journey.
Well… life is linear.
Is it?
Yeah. You live and die. Start and end.
There’s a lot in between
Not that much.
Linear would be… straight line. There’s a start and end in any function.
That’s true.
Think about that one, Casemore.
And with that, any further comments you want people to know about the album?
Let me know what you think about it. Drop me a message. I think it's relatively abstract, but not that abstract. You can get into it. And yeah, enjoy! I hope you do enjoy.
Aural Texture
was released on Bandcamp on the 12th of May 2026 with contributions from Alexander Bland, Ronan Lenane, Oisin Rice, James Smith, Kirsten Wright