Sunroof share ‘Ensnare (Q Mix)’ from quadrophonic remix of ‘Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3’
Sunroof (Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones) share “Ensnare (Q Mix)” from Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3 (Q Mix), out 27 November on Mute.
Sunroof (Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones). Photo: Paul Heartfield
Sunroof, the modular-synthesis duo of Mute founder Daniel Miller and producer Gareth Jones, have shared “Ensnare (Q Mix)”, a track from their quadrophonic remix of Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3. The full release, Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3 (Q Mix), comes out digitally on 27 November 2026 via the Parallel series of Mute.
Every track on the original 2024 album is remixed for four-channel playback. Gareth Jones describes the format’s effect: “Every speaker is equally important, there is no front or back. The music is democratically distributed across the four corners of the room. This creates a sound field that feels compelling and deeply immersive, no matter where we stand or sit inside the square.”
Polygon Portal will host a 360-degree spatial audio playback of the Q Mix, with a Q&A featuring Miller and Jones, at All Is Joy in Soho, London, on 22 November at 2pm. Tickets are available through Polygon Portal.
Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3 collects nine tracks improvised on the duo’s Eurorack modular systems, continuing the method set out on their 2021 debut: each piece is recorded across four channels with no overdubs and little post-production once the take is down. “Our practice is more abstract than thematic,” Miller and Jones explain. “Every time we meet, we attempt a fresh start.” The Guardian described the result as music that uses “modular synthesis to settle into a smoke-fogged dub groove, decorated with meandering droplets of sound.”
The Q Mix tracklist follows the same nine-track sequence as the original: “Splendid,” “Brotherly,” “Ensnare,” “Stratum,” “Freezer,” “Earthen,” “Second Thoughts,” “Link” and “Conspiracies.”
About Sunroof
Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones have worked together since 1982, when Miller, who had founded Mute in 1978, asked Jones to work with him on Depeche Mode‘s “Construction Time Again.” The pair kept using the studio for their own sessions after the band went home each day, a habit that continued over the following four decades. By the mid-1990s, their collaboration had become a remix project under the Sunroof name, reworking tracks by Can, MGMT, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler and Goldfrapp.
In 2019, on their way to a Gyorgy Ligeti concert at the Barbican, Miller and Jones spent a couple of hours improvising with modular synthesizers and recorded the session, a rare move for them. Over a pre-concert meal, Jones asked Miller, “Are we actually going to make a record together before we die?” The resulting album, Electronic Music Improvisations Volume 1, followed in 2021, with Electronic Music Improvisations Volume 2 arriving in 2023 alongside a run of live shows at venues including Cafe OTO in London, the London School of Economics, the Museum of Modern Electronic Music in Frankfurt, Silent Green in Berlin, Ombra Festival in Barcelona, Oslo Cathedral, Golden Pudel in Hamburg, DG Kunstraum in Munich and IKLECTIK in London. A selection of those performances was released as the Bandcamp exclusive Electronic Music Improvisations Live in London and Frankfurt the same year.
Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 3 followed in 2024, and Side-Line covered its lead tracks “Brotherly” and the original mix of “Ensnare” as they were released. One track on the album, “Splendid,” was recorded on the original four-track TEAC recorder Miller used in the late 1970s to record The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” 7″. The quadrophonic Q Mix, arriving two years later, extends Sunroof’s practice of feeding live performance back into the studio work, with Miller and Jones now reworking the entire album for four-channel playback ahead of the Soho listening event.
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Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
