Joe Miller, an English-born beatmaker raised in Australia, fuses the energy of pulsating clubs with the tranquil melancholy of natural landscapes to create whimsical, evocative sets.
Photo credit: Joe Miller – Official
His career boasts releases on esteemed labels like All Day I Dream, Bedrock, and Traum Schallplatten, earning support from artists such as Sasha, Guy J, and Nick Warren. Joe’s global presence includes headline performances in Miami, New York, London, and Tokyo, as well as memorable appearances at events like Burning Man and Berlin’s Sisyphos.
Celebrating the upcoming release of his debut EP, ‘Planet E Is Far Away,’ on 26th March 2025 via Anjunadeep Explorations, Joe dives into atmospheric electronica, weaving intricate sound design with emotional depth. The EP marks his artistic evolution, exploring themes of inner reflection and therapeutic connection through music.
Join us as we explore Joe Miller’s creative journey, the inspirations behind his latest work, and his perspectives on the music industry.
EG: Hi, Joe! Welcome to EG. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us. How have you been? Where are you right now?
Joe Miller: Thanks! Right now, I’m riding a tram past an old house with one of those cone-shaped roofs, like the ones every nineteenth-century aristocrat wanted.
EG: First of all, congratulations on the release of your new EP, ‘Planet E Is Far Away’! You must be psyched to have this one out. What are some of your initial thoughts? What has the reception been like so far?
Joe Miller: Thanks very much! I am properly psyched about this, both from the enjoyment of sharing something that’s been so long in the making and because the Anjuna label family has been high on my list for a while. None of the official feedback is in yet—just nice words from a few of my closest people.
EG: So…‘Planet E Is Far Away’ is quite the title. How did it come about? Is there a concept or thread driving these three cuts?
Joe Miller: There’s a heap of ideas behind the title, and I’m tempted to explain what I meant by it, but I’m hanging out for some eccentric YouTube commenter to write their own explanation—and they won’t do that if I give mine. Oh, OK, just three clues then: Closer Musik, Carl Craig, and the spirit of the electronic music scene in the years leading up to 2000.
EG: And what can your fans expect to find on ‘Planet E Is Far Away’ as a whole?
Joe Miller: The previous releases have tended to be about nature and playing with electronic music as a teleportation device—trying to put listeners in specific environments through music.
Part of the aim with this new one was more inner and therapeutic; despite its grifting tree wizards, rave culture at its best has the capacity to be redemptive and connecting. And while working on these tracks, I had the loose idea that they could work as distilled, pitched-down rave consolations—‘Nocturne’ inspired by fuzzy clockless memories of the sort where a friend takes your arm and says, ‘Let’s climb that tree!’ and you suddenly feel five years old again, and ‘A Third Remove’ recording moments of spiritual crisis in the hope that someone will hear it and feel less weird about having been to the same place.
To me, the ideal for this effect is Grouper, whose music (a) makes me suspect she’s visited some frightening, desolate parts of the psyche, and (b) is like a “cooo-eee” in the dark, conveying that sentiment, ‘humani nihil a me alienum puto’ (‘nothing human is alien to me’). Dancing is nice (and sort of essential for bookings), but what I’m really going for is cathartic tears.
“Rave culture at its best has the capacity to be redemptive and connecting”
EG: You’ve become associated with club/dancefloor-oriented labels, like Bedrock or All Day I Dream. How did the idea for an ambient EP come about? What was the recording process like? Had you tried your hand at something like this before?
Joe Miller: There are admirable, conscientious people who finish one project before starting the next, but I’m all over the place, and at least one of these tracks started as a draft before I’d had any connection to All Day I Dream or Bedrock. As the tracks developed, I felt like they could get along with each other, but they started out alone.
I hadn’t thought of them as ambient until you said that, but I guess they’re in the ‘ambient breaks’ or ‘ambient techno’ world. It’s funny how you go from thinking about genre tags when digging, and that vanishes when you’re making music. There’s a trope about musicians who hate being pigeonholed—I used to think this was an affectation, but it’s not; the genre boundaries just mean less when you switch your brain from input to output.
Finally, yes, I’ve tried my hand at ambient music in the past—there’s ‘Pluto,’ my collaboration with Jamie Stevens, ‘North’ and ‘Instress.’
EG: For most electronic artists, creating ambient music is not as easy as it would seem. Any tips or advice for your fellow creators regarding this genre?
Joe Miller: It feels like the most playful style of electronic music to make—just faffing with sound design, signal flow, and chords until something internal goes, “Yeah, that way!” I grew up in an almost percussionless house, so programming drums has always felt mysterious to me, off in alchemist territory with its weird friends, Mid/Side Compression and Modular Synthesis. So I don’t have any advice to give, except the usual thing about cultivating trust in your own taste rather than worrying about some imagined demographic.
EG: By the way, you’ll be hosting a launch party for ‘Planet E Is Far Away’ at QQQ. St Park in Melbourne on the 21st of March with Jamie Stevens, Nasti Goreng, and Pjenné. What can we expect from this very special date?
Joe Miller: I’ve asked a few of my favourite local DJs to play at this one: Nasti Goreng (a relatively new DJ with incredible taste and a technique that’s far stronger than it has any right to be so early on—like that schoolmate who learns to 360 flip in their first month of skating), Pjenné (radio host, label co-manager, and DJ of great range and pathos), and Jamie Stevens (friend, mentor, collaborator, and rider of a seemingly never-ending inspiration wave). Visual artist and VJ Imogen Henry will be presiding over the visuals, and I’m preparing a one-hour hybrid set involving a JP-8000 and a couple of guitar pedals.
EG: Now, on to the state of the scene…What do you see as the biggest challenge for the music industry in the next few years, and how do you think artists can adapt?
Joe Miller: (1) Machine learning and (2) streaming services. I’m not a computer scientist or economist, but here are my ‘reckons.’
(1) Short term, I think there’ll be a premium on things that are obviously human and idiosyncratic, as these will be the outliers in the datasets getting mined by deep learning networks—”all things counter, original, spare, strange,” as Hopkins called them. My optimistic side hopes this will mean more work for session musicians, more public interest in watching live bands or four-deck DJ sets, and a flowering of music that’s new and weird.
On the second point, you ran a good feature the other day on Liz Pelly’s work. I’m hanging out for the development of a fairer streaming model, but in the meantime, my ideal is to pay for musicians’ work as directly as possible and to go to their shows. It feels like music-lovers are coming around to the idea that musicians need time and money to make stuff that’s interesting, and that music shopping habits have some influence over that.
Music-makers need more collective self-esteem too, working from the starting point that music is intrinsically valuable rather than trying to prove its worth. This isn’t unique to musicians; poets, graphic designers, journalists, photographers, cartoonists, stand-up comedians, and installation artists share the exhausting experience of trying to justify their value, so there’s a lot of potential for mutual support.
“It’s funny how you go from thinking about genre tags when digging, and that vanishes when you’re making music”
EG: Looking forward, what can we expect from Joe Miller in the coming months? Are there any incoming releases we should be looking out for? Where can your fans catch you next?
Joe Miller: I’ve just finished a 25th anniversary mix for Balance, digging through each of their compilations to make a one-hour love letter/mixtape addressed to the series—that should be going up next week.
I’ve also been working with a multi-instrumentalist called James Gilligan, as well as finishing up some low-slung techno tracks, so all of that will turn into a couple of EPs down the track.
In terms of gigs, I’ll be over in Europe and the UK in June, so will be announcing some dates soon.
EG: Thank you so much for your time, Joe! We wish you all the best for the future. Take care!
Joe Miller: Thanks so much for having me, René! Best of luck with Electronic Groove this year.
Joe Miller’s ‘Planet E Is Far Away’ EP is set for release on Anjunadeep Explorations. Pre-Order here.
Follow Joe Miller: Spotify | Soundcloud | Instagram |
