Music has been saving Matt Karmil’s life since he was a child. Spending much of his early adolescence debilitated by illness – which would later be diagnosed as Epstein-Barr virus – many of his formative years were spent in near isolation. Distanced from peers, from school and from most of the things that make a childhood “normal”, the Wiltshire-born kid turned to music and learning guitar for companionship in the face of physical and mental unwellness. He hasn’t looked back since.

Fast forward three decades and Karmil has released three LPs and many more singles and EPs besides on revered labels like Wolfgang Voigt’s inimitable Kompakt, Beats in Space, Idle Hands and Axel Boman’s Studio Barnhus. Now, the artist is set to drop his fourth LP, once again via excellent Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound. Having released three albums already in the past four years, as well as working as a mixing and mastering engineer for other artists like Matias Aguayo and Kornél Kovács, it’s safe to assume that Karmil has a busy schedule, but to mark the release of the beautifully textured, half-ambient, half-house ‘Will’ this today (27th April), we wanted to catch up with the now Berlin-based producer to learn about his longstanding inspirations, processes and plans.

“I got ill when I was nine,” he tells DJ Mag. “As well as physical problems, I was suffering from severe mental health issues by the time I was 11 - When I discovered the guitar a couple of years later it literally saved my life.  Guitar playing and music became my total focus, playing all day every day for several years. This was basically instead of going to school. I started private music lessons around 15, 16 years old - It was quite obvious that music was going to be my life.”

“It was an antidote to the isolation, boredom and pain of the illness,” he adds. “Music unlocked the world for me - I absolutely carry that feeling with me and, because of that initial experience, music will always be core to my happiness and wellbeing.”

DJ Mag Podcast 90: Matt Karmil

Developing an expansive taste from an early age, Karmil fell in love with everything form Nirvana and blues to classic rave tapes and Musique Concrète. His longstanding love of ambient music in particular can be found everywhere in his granular, dusty, atmospheric back catalog, and even more so now on ‘Will’. ‘Sharehold’ hovers on a dense, smoky cloud of enveloping sound, its melody breaking through like sunbeams through smog at distanced interludes. ‘Sloshy’ meanwhile lurches slowly forward from a cavernous depth in a similar vein to that of Floating Points or DJ Koze’s more reserved moments. ‘Maffé’, the albums 17-minute closer is a quietly cinematic, deeply hypnotic trip characterized by its distorted hum and cityscape field recordings.

“I guess the first real ambient artist I started paying attention to was Phillip Jeck,” he remembers. “The vinyl, the crackle, the sadness…Amazing vibes. I think with Phillip Jeck you really get this unique feeling of it being ambient and very experimental, but also familiar… I think it has retained some more aspects of personal expression than some pure drone or ambient music.”

It’s that familiarity and comfort that has been so vital to Karmil’s relationship with ambient music, both as a listener and a producer. Even in his more energized, club-ready house cuts and DJ sets, one finds that sense of warmth and raw emotion that one so often can only find in well executed ambient, experimental music.