Name: Steve Miller aka Afterlife
Nationality: British
Occupation: Producer, DJ, label founder at Subatomic UK
Current release: Afterlife's new album Standing At The Foot Of The Mountain is out November 14th 2025.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: Daphne Oram – An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics; https://sengpielaudio.com/calculator-wavelength.htm
 
If you enjoyed this Afterlife interview and would like to stay up to date with his music and current live dates, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, mixcloud, and bandcamp. 



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

When I seriously listen to music I close my eyes, I always have.

Then I am transported either to the place the music was made – if it is a live recording then I am on the soundstage, surrounded by the players and their energy. If it is a studio production, then I am transported to a unique place created by each production. Sometimes it can be a landscape, sometimes a very abstract space of colours and shapes.

I like music that has an uplifting quality that causes a positive effect in me, rather like people, paintings, sculptures, food, places, it’s all just energy on different frequencies. For me art is therapy, my art reflects how I feel at the time of creation. I believe this is why everybody has different tastes in art that can change over time as they evolve.

Daphne Oram posited a concept called intermodulation: in short, as we listen to frequencies because we are resonating at frequencies generated by our emotions, the frequencies we hear are modulated by our own frequencies e.g. if a person has a generally angry demeanour then they will like angry aqgressive sounds.

I guess this ties in with the saying your reality is what you make it ...

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

I grew up listening to music on a good stereo system. When I moved home, the first decision was where to put the speakers for the most beneficial listening experience, everything else was secondary.

I find headphones to be claustrophobic. Sound is simply vibrating air so it needs some distance to work properly. You can't feel bass physically through headphones and it also isolates the listener from the environment, which can be dangerous. It also disconnects the listener from the surrounding people diminishing communication skills. I can understand why that may be desirable at times but I never listen to music for pleasure on headphones.

I either go to a good concert with good acoustics or listen at home on studio monitors. I use headphones to check a production mix and when I am writing outdoors with my portable rig but am always relieved to take them off. I have tried all sorts, including the incredibly expensive planar phones. But none of them make any difference so I stick to my lightweight trusty Sony MDR 7506 phones. I just don’t think the human ear was designed to have a speaker strapped to it or worse still an ear bud inserted in the ear canal.

20 years ago a PRS survey was conducted and showed that listening to music had moved from being a primary experience to a secondary experience. In other words, people listened to music whilst engaged in a primary activity as “background”. This was due to headphone use and for me degraded the experience for the listener. I guess this encouraged the creation of more product rather than music.

It is good therefore to see the emergence of listening bars where great importance is placed upon a really good stereo system with DJ curators playing music for people to enjoy out of good speakers and listening more, talking less.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

Ada Kaleh’s single “Palatul de Clestar” is pure genius. I love the way he weaves the beats into a mystical fabric like no other can.

Great bass production, and when the bass clarinet comes in, I’m in heaven. It is also very well mastered with no loss of dynamic range.



Ulla - Foam. I love the fragmented nature of the music, each fragment is in its own reverb space which may be different from the fragment you heard 2 seconds ago, Ulla having understood mixing rules throws the rule book out of the window.

I love this attitude.



Grace Jones – Slave to the Rhythm album. Steve Lipson created incredible sound spaces with the new digital reverbs at the time as well as playing guitar and bass, a very imaginative engineer/producer. It is always a special audio treat to put this on the turntable for friends.

Dark Fidelity Hifi – His new album Fractured Pursuits encompasses all of the above. Every album is imaginative, forward looking, no cliches.



Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

I love deep bass that is warm and soft, plucked and bowed strings that sing, drums that talk, birdsong, modulated synth voices, muted bells created by frequency modulation.

I think I captured some of this feeling when I wrote “Mono No Aware.”



I prefer analogue synthesis to digital as I find some digital feqs to be rather harsh in comparison.

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Baby screaming in supermarket is a classic irritating sound. Diesel engines on tickover, truck reversing beeping alarm, most continuous mechanical sounds are pretty awful becasue they are mindless drones with little if any variation. But by far the most irritating noise is when a politician opens their mouth and starts making bogus noises.

The fundamental note of all of the above sounds is not the issue. It is the overtones that are not in harmony that I find unpleasant. For me they clash. I’m quite sure that everyone has different tastes regarding this question.

Ocean waves - we evolved to the spectrum of sound that is white noise which is why I think we all feel good when we hear the sea.

Sitting in the wild just listening to what city folk would call silence reveals a symphony of delicate sounds that continually change over time and this keeps it interesting.



“Tranquility Suite” is an example where I tried to record the abstract nature of natural sounds that never repeat exactly.

I find this deeply relaxing, rather like a Plein Air painting where the artist quickly paints what they see rather than manipulating the vision in a studio.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Cicadas singing at dusk.

Every place I have heard them it is a very different performance, sometimes comforting, sometimes slightly sinister, but always different and intriguing.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

As I walked into an anechoic chamber with my friend who was talking to me but not actually facing me, his voice disappeared and I could only hear it when he faced me. That gave me a whole new outlook on sonic reflections and their importance.

I have been in lots of caves, never really liked the reverb, it seemed cold and uncaring.

I once listened to choir practice in the Cathedral in Seville just for the sound of the reverb which I would describe as mystically beautiful and full of love.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?

Since I bought an OPXY and created a large sample library for it, I love writing outdoors in the wilds, by the sea on empty beaches, anywhere that has no human distractions so I can just tune into the vibe of the place and create an audio impression.

It’s a brilliant sketchpad with a very high quality audio output so is very well behaved when I take it back to the studio for production.

When I was DJing I always preferred playing outdoors on high quality high power rigs so this all makes sense to me.

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

Yes absolutely!

In my piece “The Future Is Not Cancelled,” I viewed the recurring piano motif as a piece of carrara marble becoming weathered by the various other sounds representing different ages that quietly altered the shape of the marble over time.



How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

I think it is tremendously important and sadly ignored especially in Western “civilisation.“ Brian Eno made the point with his Music For Airports album.

I felt it made total sense and only wish it was played in all airports today as well as other calming ambient fare.



A badly EQ’d sound system is quite capable of starting a riot, I have seen this happen once in the past in a normally peaceful country town venue that had been refitted with a new sound system and a really bad EQ setting that had been locked.

2Khz had been boosted a lot as well as an overall high end lift and even at low volume it was impossible to hold a conversation and we had to leave. That same evening 2 riot vans attended and 30 people were arrested. Having sawn off the locking bar the owner asked us to re-EQ the rig and there was no further trouble, ever.

Distortion plays a big part in this. As the inner ear attempts to vibrate in both directions at the same time, normally ordinary peaceful people start shouting at each other because the distortion prevents them from hearing quieter sounds. This can escalate very quickly.

When the ear hears something but cannot quite make out what it is, this becomes annoying and causes a sense of unease. I seriously think every public venue should be monitored for healthy acoustics in the same way as any public kitchen is checked for hygiene.

Mental Health is the big issue of the day and this surely is partly due to the continual racket most humans are subjected to these days.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

My cat purring next to my head is wonderful, irreplaceable.

This time of year at night in my garden owls looking for a partner serenade each other, delicious.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

Yes, it’s my experience that this happens all the time before we even consider humans training animals by voice commands.

I don’t think there’s a creative element as such. With animals it seems to be generally warning noises to alert the community of predators, or a warning to another animal to back off.

However I can always tell when I hear a robin singing as they seem to improvise continually and sometimes get quite jazzy. So maybe robins are artists.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

When I go to a concert I take a pair of sound engineer earplugs in case the mixing guy is doing a bad job. They scoop out freqs around 2khz. If the front of house rig is distorting I just leave.

Tinnitus is far more prevalent these days because of EMF from phones and wifi routers as well as bluetooth earbuds. So I avoid that stuff as much as possible.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I think that silence is the real treasure. Hardly anyone has experienced real silence. If you do, you can hear the blood in your veins, your heartbeat, your thoughts. An anechoic chamber with no one else there but you is good for that.

Other than that, we are already surrounded by sound every second of the day if we but stop and listen. It’s just one of our senses, we are surrounded by smells every second of the day too, good and not so good.

In natural environments light is constantly changing. I find it really magical to sit and watch and listen.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I don’t see how hearing can be called The Universal Sense.

We have different methods of perception: Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, gut feelings. Light travels faster than sound, it is more precise to locate an object by sight than by hearing. Most of the universe has no atmosphere which is required for sound to be heard.

As humans we only perceive something like 0.5% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, rather like Plato’s allegory of the cave. So I think we have a long way to evolve to develop a Universal Sense.

A blind person is the only person who has the experience to accurately answer the second part of your question, but here goes … perhaps we would be more influenced by tone of voice than by how a person looks, this may

encourage more authentic relationships and a greater distrust of politicians. Perhaps we would be more influenced by the way a band sounds than how it looks too …