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As Romare, Archie Fairhurst’s working practice is rooted in building vivid new forms out of existing material. Playful but also deeply researched, his albums and performances are patchworks of inspirations and obsessive lines of enquiry made from a global panoply of source material.
The clue is in the name – Fairhurst called himself Romare in tribute to Romare Bearden, the lauded American multi-disciplinary artist renowned for his incisive collages. In Bearden’s process Fairhurst saw a way to approach the infinite pool of electronic music production with a more considered approach to sampling, creating music from existing sonic material and bedding themes into his juxtapositions.
No music lover sticks on one sound their whole lives — Fairhurst’s areas of focus have evolved over time from the breakout impact of his 2012 debut on Black Acre, Meditations On Afrocentrism, through a run of albums on Ninja Tune reaching up to 2020’s reflection on place and belonging, Home. Projections is a direct homage to Bearden’s work, and the Love Songs releases draw on the rich seam of romantic music. Having lived a nomadic life growing up, Fairhurst's source material has moved around over time, but increasingly the sampling becomes more subtly enmeshed with other instrumentation.
2022’s Fantasy expands on that idea with a more abstract approach, folding elements from 1970s fantasy cinema into his distinctive strain of rhythmic, off-centre electronica and heralding the start of his own label, You See. Fairhurst's personal platform has also been home to the 2024 nocturnally-focused EP Here Comes The Night, while 2026 LP Oblivion will mark the first release on new label All You See, in which the Romare process is steered towards reflecting on contemporary issues for the first time.
For all the considered concepts and unusual arrangements, Romare is dance music at heart, and it naturally translates into the live and club environment. At times Fairhurst has pulled together a full line-up to render his music on stage – a call back to his roots playing guitar and drums in bands – but elsewhere he’s at home sequencing and arranging his music solo, re-moulding album material in the moment with the flexibility which dance music so often requires. Equally, he has DJ’d prolifically around the world with an omnivorous approach which serves as a logical extension of his studio craft, balancing hidden corners of historical investigation with the kinetic impulse of the dancefloor.
