Whether it's Bjork honing her vocal chops on the cliffs of Iceland or the Belleville Three birthing techno in the mean streets of 1980s Detroit, there's a certain romance to seeing music in terms of the environment in which it was created. So when Nathan Fake released his debut album "Drowning in a Sea of Love" in 2006, many linked its blissed-out brand of electronica to the young producer's origins in the rural depths of Norfolk, England.
Now living in London, Fake (his real name) doesn't buy the argument. "I guess it's quite nice to think that someone who lives in the countryside will make pretty, organic-sounding music and then someone who lives in the city will make drum & bass," he says over the phone from his home. "But I don't think it really works like that. A lot of people who I went to school with back in Norfolk were listening to hard house."
Fake won't deny, however, that being far from the center of the action affected his musical development. When his teenage ears picked up on 1990s electronica acts like Orbital and Aphex Twin, he struggled to find people with the same enthusiasm.