Ed: “The song ‘Brasil’ is the record in a nutshell. It’s got this melancholy and intimacy at the start of it, but then goes into this joyful, beautiful, colourful place. There are moments of loneliness, sadness and withdrawal on there, but there are times of celebrating being a human being. I didn’t want to make a record that was just melancholic. Melancholy is somewhere that you can slip into quite easily, whereas joy is the hardest thing to do on record. It’s hard to have fun. It isn’t something you can fake.”

Ed: Yeah. That’s a song of two parts. The first part, the acoustic part, is very much written in Wales. For me, it’s a very creative place to come to and to be. You feel folk music really resonates here — the acoustic guitars, that comes out of being in Wales. But the second part is really about transporting you from the bucolic, natural world of Wales to the samba-esque, magical realism, trance-like music of Brazil. When you go to Carnival, it runs for two nights and it has six samba schools each night. They run throughout the night. You go to sleep each morning and 8:00 am and you’ve still got those rhythms in your head. You can feel the pulse of samba, these polyrhythms.
There’s great similarities between electronic trance music and samba. They both get you into a kind of trance, and what’s what I wanted to do on that track. I wanted to find that moment where it’s like stepping into another world.

Ed: That’s kind of my favorite song on the record too, along with “Brasil’ and “Cloak of the Night.”