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Debut in Motion: Sir Hiss’ ‘Time Dilation’

W: Theo Thompson

The story of Sir Hiss begins, as so many Bristol tales do, with a pair of battered speakers and an attic-sourced amplifier rattling through house parties. For Jeff, those improvised nights were less about spectacle than revelation. “Those house parties… that was my introduction to realising it was something I could do, in terms of DJing and both production.” The Bristol soundscape seeped into him early, its weight and rhythm inescapable. What began as casual experimentation quickly became the axis around which his world would turn.

Unlike many contemporaries who gravitated first to the decks before venturing into production, Jeff pursued both paths in parallel. “They’ve always been a very side-by-side thing… an equilibrium of trying to balance.” In time, production pulled ahead; his distinctive approach to drum programming and melody carving out its own recognition yet DJing remained the counterweight, grounding him in the immediacy of the dancefloor. His philosophy as a selector has never been about specific technicalities but about energy, feeling and cohesion: “It’s much more just about… can I get them to blend together?”

This philosophy, sharpened across years of grime, dubstep and increasingly electro and percussive techno, finds its most complete expression in his debut album ‘Time Dilation’; a project two years in the making and one that Jeff himself describes as “the baseline” of his sound. Set for release on Pineapple Records, the record pulls together the threads of his journey into something both concise and expansive, a distillation of lessons learnt from Bristol’s pirate radio to international tours. “Every track has been distilled to its sharpest form, inspired by both my past and aimed at the future,” he reflects.

Grime may be his core, but the album pushes into territories Jeff once only admired from afar: electro’s precision, techno’s restraint and the exuberance of Brazilian funk. The collaborations at the heart of the project demonstrate his open ended approach. Working with Logan yielded ‘Don Gorgon,’ a track that channels Kraftwerk’s futuristic pulse while letting Logan’s vocal burn through the mix. With ‘Wild Strikes’ alongside K-65, the focus shifted to an electro-breaks’ clipped discipline, while AÆE brought in Brazilian funk elements that widened the sonic palette with the fitting ‘R6’. Jeff acknowledges these contributions with characteristic humility: “They levelled these tracks up to a point where they sounded like nothing I could have done on my own.”

The fluidity of ‘Time Dilation’ reflects a shift in his creative process. Where earlier work carried the architecture of grime’s stripped-back ethos, the album often grew in unpredictable ways. From vocals rewritten to instrumentals being reshaped with tracks pared back to their barest bones. “The whole production process for the album was quite fluid… breaking everything down to its necessities.” That ethos crystallises on a personal favourite of mine from the album in ‘Memory Leak’, a hardware-led track built almost entirely on one drum machine. “It’s super minimal… just drums from one drum machine. And I was like, this is all it needs.” Such restraint marks a maturation in his outlook: knowing when to stop, when to let the music breathe.

Minimalism is not an affectation here but a principle that binds Jeff’s influences together. From grime producers like Sir Spyro, whose work “maybe has four, five elements and that’s all it needs”, to techno’s stripped spatiality in Robert Hood, Jeff finds common ground in the belief that less can indeed be more. Bristol peers like Kahn & Neek embody this, too: “Although their tunes are wildly complex, it’s more so that that base of space is what’s so important.” Even his early idol in Joker, whom he calls “a production god, basically, mad genius” informs his sense that clarity, not excess, carries the greatest weight.

Threaded through Jeff’s productions is his reverence for global sounds. Middle Eastern samples, Turkish Arabesque textures, and the haunting vibrato of Bollywood vocals have long fascinated him. Yet his philosophy around sampling has evolved. “It’s very important that you understand as much as you can and respect the source material instead of co-opting it into your music with no care in the world.” What began as a youthful thrill in making something “sound cool in grime” has matured into a deeper engagement, a desire for understanding rather than extraction. “We shouldn’t be taking from these scenes and sounds… we should be working with the artists from wherever across the world. The ultimate thing is collaboration.”

That ethos of collaboration, of learning from others, permeates his recollections of late night studio sessions with producers like the legendary Lemzly Dale: “There’s always gonna be something someone knows that you don’t know… every studio session I’ve had I’ve always come away knowing more.” This remains his compass, whether working with peers in Bristol or absorbing lessons from the global dancefloor. The act of doing, he insists, is the point: “The ultimate goal isn’t always to make it sound as technically good as possible… the act of doing is the important part.”

Yet the making of ‘Time Dilation’ was not without its trials. At one stage, Jeff believed the album was complete, only to have the label head Sam Binga push him further. That push, he admits, transformed the project: “If Sam hadn’t have said that, and we put it out as was, it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful.” Such moments reflect the humility and persistence underpinning his practice: music not as a fixed product but as something continually shaped, refined and challenged.

In placing the album with Pineapple Records, Jeff found not only the right aesthetic home but the right spirit. He describes the label’s identity as “cheeky, but very ready for the club,” noting that any Pineapple release is guaranteed to deliver “fun club slammers” a spirit that mirrors his own grime electro convergence and the album’s playful yet functional approach to rhythm. 

Looking back, the distance from attic speakers to ‘Time Dilation’ is vast, yet Jeff speaks of it with the same unpretentious humour he began with. Asked what his younger self would think, he shrugs: “It’d probably be something stupid, like, ‘Oh yeah, nice one mate, sick.’” In its modesty lies his truth. This debut is not an endpoint, but as he puts it “the baseline. As much as it’s cementing my sound, it’s also the start of something. This is the new sound.”

For Sir Hiss, music remains a cycle of input and release, discovery and refinement. “It’s always going to be a journey… it’s always evolving.” From the echoes of Bristol basements to the wide eyed exploration of techno archives, from grime’s clipped urgency to the spatial freedom of electro, ‘Time Dilation’ embodies both reflection and propulsion. It is a record shaped by humility, collaboration and restraint; an album that, like its maker, looks backwards only to find new ground ahead.