Having not released new music since 2016’s White Finger EP, I am back with a fresh song and accompanying video to boot. “Approach Me Like A Lion” was not even the seed of an idea two months ago so how come it came out so fast? Well, I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone this year and enter a competition, set up by the company Dubreq to celebrate 50 years of the Stylophone. What’s a stylophone? Simply, it’s a tiny organ played with an electric pencil… If you want more detail than that, google it. Suffice to say the Stylophone has long been relegated to the wings as a mere toy of an instrument, occasionally wielded on mainstream recordings by the likes of David Bowie et al., but generally ignored. The recent release of the Stylophone Gen X-1 (a more complex version of the instrument) has slightly tilted this perception, and since receiving one of my own this Christmas, I have been slowly unwrapping the mysteries of this little synthesiser.

The main rules of the competition are: write a piece of music or song lasting 2 minutes or less, where the stylophone is the chief instrument. I thought these strict parameters would most likely mother invention, and I was right. Using a basic drum machine loop, I built up dozens of layers of stylophone to create full chords and melodies, with no other instruments to hand. I sang over the top of it and “Approach Me Like A Lion” was born.

As it has no direct siblings, and therefore no album or 7″ record to keep it safe, I decided to shoot a video for this song rather than see it fade into obscurity after the competition is completed.

This is most definitely an Oliver Richard curiosity, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.