“Everything Gets Lost”: A Conversation with Junior XL
- Bryson Edward Howe
- Jul 6
- 8 min read
I can’t remember exactly how I found Junior XL. Somewhere in my Spotify algorithm, late one night buried in a haze of ambient oddities and broken club loops, his music surfaced. Rainy, tortile, slightly ghostly around the edges, once I'd heard it, his music sunk in, embedding itself into my weeks until he had quietly become one of my most-listened artists of last year. So it feels special to bring him to Venue MOT on July 10th, headlining our MOT Live night alongside Mark Leckey, Agata Genissell, and DJs Frames and di/di.
For the uninitiated, Venue MOT has been, for a lot of us, more than just a venue, but a place that made things possible. In our early days, putting on nights there while still at university, it offered a rare kind of trust and freedom. Jan’s support and the space itself made me feel part of something. I’m grateful to be returning with this lineup and for all that MOT continues to make room for.
Ahead of the night, I caught up with Junior XL to talk about process and pace, creative friendship, small venues, the impossibility of silence, and what happens when a song finishes itself before you can ruin it.
The Big Ship: Let's start at the beginning. How did you first get into making music?
Junior XL: I started making music when I was a teenager. I just got a cracked copy of Reason, which my friend had. It's actually still what I mostly use now, which I find kind of funny. I picked it at the beginning without thinking about it, and no one I know really uses Reason. Whenever I tell people I use it, they’re always shocked. But it was just making music in my bedroom on my laptop. I fell out of it for a few years and then came back to it in my early twenties. I was listening to a lot of early genre-less club music and just started trying to make my own version of that.
The Big Ship: Was there a moment or an artist that really kicked it off? Was it raves or clubs?
Junior XL: Yeah, I think I was really into guitar music until I was about 18, and then I started going to clubs. That became a new kind of obsession for me. The early Joy Orbison stuff and the Boxed grime instrumental scene were really big inspirations. But I think having that guitar music background ended up influencing what I do now, too.
The Big Ship: When you're making music, what's your current process? Are you someone who sits down with an idea, or do you just mess around?
Junior XL: I try to make music every day, something new if possible. When I’m deep in mixing or finishing something, maybe I won’t, but otherwise I like coming up with new ideas regularly. A lot of them just stay as ideas, but when it’s going well, they get fleshed out into full songs. In the last couple of years, I’ve found that if I don’t flesh out the idea into a song in the first couple of days, it usually never gets finished. Occasionally I’ll go back to an older idea, but often they just get stuck in this weird room where I can’t really touch them. I’m kind of at peace with that now. I see it as practising or rehearsing, working towards something that does get finished. I’m not too bothered about things getting lost because the songs I feel best about are usually the ones I made quickly.
The Big Ship: Do you think there’s a little bit of recency bias with that? I definitely do that. If I get a new idea, that’s what I want to work on now, and I forget about the older ones.
Junior XL: Yeah, it’s that, and also my favourite music I’ve ever made is usually the thing I’m working on now. But I think there’s also something about the immediacy of the idea. If you can basically finish a track in a short period of time, there’s a real focus to it. You might tweak it for a while after, but when I’ve tried to work on something over a long period, it ends up feeling like a mess, either emotionally unfocused or bits feel tacked on. I’m interested in stuff being quite simple and immediate. The ones I spend too long on just don’t feel satisfying.
The Big Ship: Has that affected how your sound has changed over time? Especially for your early stuff, before releasing anything.
Junior XL: I think for a long time I didn’t really know what my sound was. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted it to be. Being part of the duo lol K has helped clarify what the solo sound is, because while there’s a big overlap, I now have a better sense of whether something should be a Lol K song or a solo thing.
The Big Ship: Can you tell me a bit about lol K, how that project came about, and what it gives you that Junior XL doesn’t?
Junior XL: We went to art school together — me and CJ Calderwood — and we also lived together. I love working with CJ because when I send them something, what they do with it is never what I would have expected. That keeps it exciting. We sometimes talk about the idea of trying to break each other’s ideas apart. When you’re making music on your own, it’s kind of impossible to do that. You might try to break your own idea, but you’re still the one who made it. It’s never as much of a curveball. When I know exactly where I want something to go, that’s when I realise it’s probably a solo song.
The Big Ship: Do the two projects feed into each other? You mentioned lol K helps you know what isn’t a Lol K song, but are they separate worlds or more like two sides of the same coin?
Junior XL: They’re separate worlds, but there’s definitely overlap. They allow me to do different things. With lol K, we’ve tried to move away from using samples and focus on making everything from the ground up. But when we were mixing and finishing our last album, I really craved making something sample-heavy. That became the next Junior XL project. It gave me a good jumping-off point, like, what if I made stuff that was the opposite of the last thing I did?
The Big Ship: Why did you make the decision not to sample? Was it just a creative challenge?
Junior XL: It just gets long when you use samples, people come after your tracks, or you’re trying to make something in key, and the sample throws everything off. With the two of us, more sounds are generated rather than having to generate everything yourself. But then I saw a lot of artists using really obvious samples and not getting them taken down. That felt freeing. I like the intertextual thing of sampling, especially micro-sampling, like one tiny percussion sound from an old grime track. It’s not the basis of the track, but it’s a little thing your ear picks up on that roots you in time and space. That’s what I’m interested in right now, tiny stabs.
The Big Ship: What makes a good night for you as a performer? Sound, atmosphere?
Junior XL: Good sound is important, but also an audience that’s willing to not be too cool to dance, and open to going places. In London, we’re lucky that there are quite a few spaces where people show up ready to give things a chance. They might trust the venue or the promoter. But yeah, it’s mostly about the people. I’ve been to parties with bad sound that still had an amazing vibe because of the crowd.
The Big Ship: I think of you as someone associated with a lot of South London spots: Ormside, Spanners, MOT. How important are those venues to you, not just as places to play but as part of a creative community?
Junior XL: They’ve been really important in figuring out what I want to make. When I was younger, I went to Corsica Studios a lot. The Hyperdub nights were amazing. The lineups Shannen SP put together were incredible, this mix of art and whatever was happening in London at the time. Before that, there was a night at Rye Wax run by the Curl label, not many people went, but lots of musicians did. You’d see early sets from people like Klein. People would try out their weirder ideas and then just hang around and chat. That was hugely influential in making me want to do music. In recent years, places like Ormside, Spanners, Avalon, MOT, they’re a big part of where I see myself now.
The Big Ship: Have you seen the scene around those spaces change over the years?
Junior XL: Yeah, Corsica changed a lot. Mostly with club pricing. Now, I feel like I have to really want to go. But London is still great for independent spaces. I wouldn’t want to be the one running the nights, though. It’s really hard, even in London. I’m grateful those venues are still doing their thing.
The Big Ship: The night we’re doing wouldn’t exist without Jen just wanting to see some music on a Thursday and having the space say, "Take the cut from the door and give it to the artists." That’s so rare for a space as popular as MOT.
Junior XL: For sure. I think the Thursday night thing has opened the door. Even on a Wednesday at Ormside, you can get a slightly weirder bill, a mix of smaller artists, without worrying about making the same money as a Friday or Saturday. That feels like a big change from when I was younger. I don’t remember those nights existing in the same way.
The Big Ship: What is something non-musical that’s been feeding your work recently?
Junior XL: I watched Days of Heaven by Terrence Malick recently. That was really inspiring. The shots feel unscripted, just watching things happen. Beautiful cinematography. I’ve also been thinking about therapy and therapeutic practices. That’s been on my mind while making music. Some of the Junior XL stuff feels meditative to make. I listen to a lot of rain sounds. I can’t really listen to music after a day of mixing. I listen to ten-hour tracks of rain and extraction fan sounds. I’m not that into ASMR, but I like continuous tones. They bring a kind of peace. I’ve been thinking about how to bring that into the music in a way that feels right for me, something peaceful, but not cringey in the way that some relaxing music can sound.
The Big Ship: I use a website called sounddrown, which has these channels of birdsong, rainfall, white noise. There’s even a coffee shop loop with no conversation, just an ambient murmur. I listen to that while writing.
Junior XL: It’s interesting how common it is now that people can’t sit in silence. Most people I know have their version of that, something they put on to sleep, to work. It probably says something about where we’re at with technology, but it’s the reality now, and I find that interesting. When I experience real silence, like at a show when the music cuts out, it’s intense and powerful. We spend so much time with sound now, waking and sleeping.
The Big Ship: How are you trying to feed that back into your music?
Junior XL: I guess I haven’t fully decided. I don’t want to make background music. That feels like the AI path, just endless passive sound. I want to make music that’s weird and doesn’t fit neatly into genres. Not something to fall asleep to, but maybe something calming for me. A lot of ambient or chill-out music has no bass, and that makes me feel unsettled, like I’m waiting for something. Even live sets that don’t use bass feel disjointed to me. I like the idea of bass-heavy chill music.
The Big Ship: That’s really interesting. What can people expect from your live set at our show at MOT on July 10th?
Junior XL: I did this hour-long set recently of all my own music, completely new, and it was really fun to play stuff no one had heard before. I want to adapt that, throw in some music by other people. Definitely some curveballs. A lot of 180 BPM music. And some sadboy vibes. Or, melancholic but a bit uplifting. That’s probably more accurate.
