How William Carkeet recorded an organ in a derelict Primark store, then turned it into a plugin“I wanted to get out of my studio,” says William Carkeet of the idea that led to his new EP, prmrk. Having long been drawn to space in music and production, the sound artist, composer and film music editor took a decidedly unique approach: recording a bellow organ in a Primark store that’s been derelict since 2012.

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While he mostly performs as one half of art-pop duo Robbie & Mona, and is known for his work with composer Jerskin Fendrix on Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies Kinds of Kindness and Bugonia, Carkeet likes to strip things back when it comes to his own music. “I always want the listener to feel like they’re inside the actual space the music was recorded in,” he adds.
This was certainly true of the decisions that led to him composing prmrk. “I wanted to stick to one simple concept and force myself to find different ways of making that idea interesting,” he says. The new approach felt rewarding to Carkeet because “normally you rely on layers, melodies, bass, beats and plug-ins to make a track engaging, but when you strip all that away, whatever you’re doing has to hold its own”.
Image: Press
With this in mind, he says that creating the five-track EP was an exploration of what he could do with the instrument and the space. “I’m not much of a keys player,” he admits, “so whenever I mess around with instruments or gear, there’s always a big element of experimentation and an approach to make whatever it is not sound like what it is.”
As for the building, Carkeet says that it “chose him”. Not only does he work part-time at the nearby Margate School of Art as their art technician, but his students had been using the second floor of the Primark building as storage during the school’s restoration works. During this time, he also needed to relocate his organ. “I originally moved it out of the school and into the Primark to protect it from the dust, so it was surrounded by a load of building supplies for a while,” he recalls.
Although Carkeet would pop in every now and then to have a play on it, he later decided to put the organ downstairs in the empty ground floor “because it had a huge reverb”. After convincing one of the builders to help him carry it downstairs, he began recording. However, the location presented a number of problems – chief among them “noise that sounded like ghosts running around upstairs”.
Image: Press
This, Carkeet says, made it “a struggle to record when it got dark”, though there were also some challenges during the day. “The space has huge windows and doors opening onto the seafront, so while I was recording, people walking by would peek in, maybe wondering if I was a ghost,” he laughs. With this in mind, he says the recording of the EP “almost turned into a performance piece in itself”.
While there weren’t many technical issues, one “hassle” that Carkeet faced along the way was the cabling. “I didn’t have XLR leads long enough for room mics, so I ended up daisy-chaining loads together to make these super-long cables.” He also found it hard to resist the temptation of adding other elements to the compositions. “I had to stop myself from reopening sessions and tinkering,” he says, adding that he even made a rule where he could only work on the tracks while in the Primark building. Following this restriction meant that he couldn’t sneak in extra layers later on in his studio.
The project also saw Carkeet experiment with low-quality recording and sample rates. “When audio is slowed down and stretched digitally, it starts to introduce artefacts into the audio to replace the missing code,” he explains. Usually, Carkeet considers, these are two things that engineers and producers usually stray away from because they can be “an audible sign of poor quality or imperfections”. However, for this project, it seemed to be the right fit: “this was what I was searching for as it felt like it represented the neglected, degrading structure of the Primark building”.
While it could be inferred that Carkeet is keen to convey a deeper meaning with his prmrk project, he says that’s not the case. “I guess there’s a comment on the state of the UK economy with the decline of the high streets and underfunded councils, but I’m actually trying to stay clear of the obvious political stance it brings up.”
Image: Press
Instead, friends he’s spoken to who grew up in the area have shared with him their “romantic nostalgia” for the building. “Apparently, when it was open, all the teenagers in the area would go on dates to the Primark building.”
Viewing the structure as rare and unique yet “rough round the edges” thanks to graffiti, smashed glass, dead pigeons and mouldy 70s-style carpets, Carkeet also decided to create a DIY reverb plug-in using a frequency sweep of the building.
“It’s basically a digital archive of the space,” he says of prmrk_impulse response — AKA track six of the CD version of the EP (whose front cover includes instructions on how to add the WAV file into a compatible plugin). “So when the building is eventually turned into a bar/restaurant or luxury flats, we’ll still be able to access its sonic environment”.
Intentionally creating sonic imperfections to mirror the building’s dilapidated feel may have been Carkeet’s plan, but the outcome of this technique was never certain.
“There’s no real way of controlling it,” he admits. “You have to give the music over to the ghosts in the code basically,” he adds, referencing the influence that a research project called ‘The Ghost in the MP3’ has had on him over the past few years. “It could sound bad or amazing, but I’m always searching for those unpredictable things in production.”
‘prmrk’ is out now on Spinny Nights
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