Wiretap began on an extended visit to Detroit back in 2016. The project is about transformation, and finding hidden potential in the built environment. In practice, it combines mechanical music with aspects of field recording, and urban artforms like graffiti.

The video here was made in Detroit’s legendary Packard Plant, which was demolished last year.

I worked on this with Raphael Merriweathers, aka Ray7, who is a percussionist, producer, and DJ for Underground Resistance. With the help of Justin Moncrieff and Tom Linder, we snuck into abandoned factories around the city and made music from whatever we found, using the solenoid percussion setup I’d been developing to build makeshift instruments and write music for them, bringing the factories back to life with a different purpose.