After many years of recording demo tapes and CDrs, Purlieu was my debut album. Written and recorded over the winter of 2002 and 2003, the album was a logical conclusion of the experimentation and fragmentation of sound I'd been working on for three years, and a final realisation of a musical idea I'd had for much longer. Second Thought's dance music roots were all but gone, only remaining in the slightly tongue in cheek beats of 'Tsohg', replaced by light percussion, jarring piano melodies, strange grinding noises and a heavy dose of field recordings. It was the latter that made the album such a success for me, as it was my first album that occupied an individual world, with each track blending into the next to form a sonic landscape. The album was written to paint a picture of a sinister rural landscape with overcast skies, trees, fields and a vague figure on the horizon. I wrote a first person narrative and took hundreds of photos, the best of which turned up in the photo booklet accompanying the disc. The location was one that had been in my head for many, many years. The music itself was mostly ambient in form, although dark and sinister in execution, and a few pieces - 'Parin Onia', and the entirely acoustic 'Nsepan' - hinted at classical music in their composition and performance.

Delayed due to its initial label, the US imprint Project Aristotle Records, folding just as the album was due to be released, Purlieu eventually came out in spring 2004 on the label I ran at the time, the imaginatively named Second Thought Records. To this day it's still my favourite of all the records I've made, perhaps due to how effective the album worked as a soundtrack to a place in my mind.