through a reverb unit. But we've taken the trouble to record in a church... When you set up mics, you capture more than just what is being recorded. You capture an ambience or a feeling as well. It's all about creating something unique and of the moment rather than just another bland factory preset." In an interview with the Weedbus fanzine at the same time, Sutton commented: "If you were making a film or something you want to have special effects — for example, a train going over a cliff. Then you either get a little model of it and simulate, or you can get a real train because that's probably going to be more effective. We wanted to capture real acoustics rather than have everything computer simulated. A lot of keyboards can sound very bland so you have to look at recording them in a different way. We wanted to have a gritty edge to it. We got a PA and set it up in a church, a really huge church in Stratford, east London, just beside a huge traffic island, so we had to do it late at night when there was no traffic! We had the keyboards coming out of the PA and the microphones at the other end of the church. It created a very interesting atmosphere..." By this point, the band had developed a singularly unique and varied sound — embedded in lush electronic sampling and textures and accented with electric guitars, piano, and melodica. Regarding the sampling, Sutton commented "although the album doesn't sound like it, a good fifty per cent of it was just running from computer... A lot of things. Guitar things. Moving things around, you know, cutting things out, then moving them around. Bits of vocal moved around... There's also a lot of samples of instruments involved. But we do it in a way that is idiosyncratic to us... Although Hex is sample-orientated, it doesn't necessarily sound like that, and there is an acoustic drum-kit in there, recorded in such a way that it sounds quite idiosyncratic to me. The album doesn't fit in that well, which I'm happy about — I wouldn't like it to fit in with a homogeneous agenda like dance music, or ambient music, whatever. The area of ambient music interests me more than any other but it's still too stylised." Sutton himself was moving in the