I started out as a kid obsessed with beats and scratching in the 90s. I honed my turntablist skills and, inspired by my love of Spiderman, adopted the name Parker. I set about learning my craft in the underground clubs of Bristol, playing at various spots around the city. I was fortunate enough to support a long list of my personal heroes including Roots Manuva, Black Twang, Mark B and Blade, as well as hip hop royalty; The Beatnuts, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.

I soon turned my hand to production, inspired by the music of DJ Shadow, RJD2 and local legends Massive Attack and Portishead. Those were years of learning and experimentation, and the results were mixed to say the least. I jumped from instrumental beats and breaks to dubstep and drum and bass, and everything in between. At the core of what I was doing was the art of sampling, I was flipping parts of other people’s records and trying to do something interesting with them. My debut album To Eternity was described by DJ Magazine as having thrown “stylistic doors wide open with deliciously pleasing results.” 

Ever restless, and with a roving eye when it came to music, I moved on and experimented with bass music and remixing. This meant that I was still sampling, but now I was adding more of my own flavour, it was the foundation of learning how to write original music. Many of my dubstep remixes went viral in the mid 2000s and in particular my remix of Bjork’s classic Venus as a Boy ended up being chosen by Massive Attack for their Blue Lines anniversary Radio 1 Mix.

As a DJ I began to get a reputation as a versatile cross-genre selector, thanks in part to my mixtapes gaining heavy rotation on Ninja Tunes’ Solid Steel radio. I was voted Bristol’s best DJ in 2010, and ended up performing on stages at Glastonbury, Shambhala (Canada), Big Chill and Bestival, as well as various clubs around the world.

I look back on this time as fun and exciting, with a lot of learning thrown in, but creatively I was feeling increasingly unfulfilled. I knew I needed to push myself in a different direction, I needed to ditch the samples, and learn how to write my own music. Enter Neuropol, this was me throwing off the past, and all the creative restrictions I felt. I went back to the underground for inspiration and found the early stages of an exciting beats movement, with Om Unit at its forefront. The result was a coming together of orchestral sounds and richly textured atmospherics with rhythms that fused elements of hip hop, drum and bass, and footwork. I signed music to Drum & Bass label Shogun Audio, and was really proud to release an ep on Om Unit’s Cosmic Bridge. I was labelled as “standing firm as a bastion of future-thinking UK music” by Radio 1’s Friction. 

It was a freeing time in some ways, but that restlessness reared its head once more, and I soon realised it all felt a bit shallow. I wasn’t actually interested in clubs, beats and bass etc, it was the emotive sounds that fell between the beats that I was passionate about. And so, once again, I left it all behind and turned my focus towards creating compositions that were inspired by my own emotions, life experience, and the natural world. 

The thread that seems to have tied this all together is the word ‘Widescreen’. It has been used to describe much of my work regardless of the genre, or the alias it was written under. To me it means emotive, filmic, visual music, and that feels like a perfect fit for me. So much so that I’ve adopted Widescreen as a way to describe my sound, and as the name of my radio show.

With hindsight I can see that I am now where I always wanted to be; creating music that means something.