Karl Hyde

Karl Hyde

Karl Hyde is the vocalist/guitarist for English electronic group Underworld, and has also released his own music as well as working with Brian Eno.

His solo album Edgeland is a series of aural snapshots taken on the periphery points between London and Essex. Some might have been captured from the low-slung windows of illegal minicabs; others from train seats while watching the sun burn out behind a horizon of skyscrapers. Edgeland comprises nine songs pieced together from notes made by Hyde on the daily journeys from his Essex home to the Homerton based studio of guitarist/producer Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno/Pulp/David Holmes).

Where the thick amber glow of London’s streetlights fade out - that’s where the edgeland starts. It’s somewhere near the end of the Roman road where the all-night offies and the kebab shops work overtime; just down the overgrown pathway to the disused shoe factory that looks like an Eastern Bloc Relic, Essex style. It’s there outside the greasy spoon where the radio crackles with traffic reports from the periphery and it’s on the bankside of the river that meanders slowly towards the Thames and out to the sea. As much the darkness at the edge of town as the rabbit holes that let you escape the rat race, the edgelands are the inspiration for Karl Hyde’s first solo record.

He will appear at Sound of the Thames Delta event The Wilderness is Much Closer Than You Think.

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