Heavier Sideways is the new EP from electronic musician and instrument designer Tom Richards, consisting of live improvised sessions recorded under lockdown in Richards’ home studio. The twitchy electronics are partly informed by his background as a PhD student at Goldsmiths, where he re-imagined and built the Mini Oramics machine – a 'drawn sound' instrument first conceived by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram, and finally realised by Tom in 2016. But he's also just as influenced by handbag house classics, Junior Vasquez, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk, and others adjacent to the legendary Paradise Garage in New York.

The creation of the EP was spurred on by vintage technology – a 1990s analogue vocoder and a 1980s Soviet drum machine, both of which were integrated into Richards’ hand-built setup. They’ve left their mark on the recordings, with the drum machine’s insistent blips punctuating strangely non-verbal vocoder-mangled synths. The EP opens with 'Big House Tune', a slightly tongue-in-cheek title and the closest thing Tom has ever made to straight up four-to-the-floor house. Elsewhere, 'Minor Breach' revolves around a sparse groove, with interjections of classical radio ‘breaching’ the electronic sound world and influencing filtered electronic feedback.