Mr. Chop

Coz Littler operates under the alias Mr. Chop and has established a distinctive position through his affinity for retro audio textures and hardware. During adolescence the musician briefly pursued music-theory studies while picking up guitar, though he has emphasized that his deepest schooling arrived via immersion in his father’s record shelves. Those shelves mixed beat-era pop, progressive rock, psychedelia, early funk, and Northern soul, fostering in the young Littler a lasting regard for the sonic palettes and engineering approaches that defined the 1960s and ’70s. He later added bass, keyboards, and percussion to his instrumental skills while cultivating a focused interest in studio craft. Frequent sessions alongside MF Doom, whom the rapper once called “the illest to grace the boards,” helped build Littler’s standing within Britain’s electronic-music community. Growing unhappy with existing facilities, he launched his own APE Studios—an Analogue Production Environment stocked with extensive vintage analog recording and processing gear, period instruments, and contemporary digital tools that let him merge historic and modern techniques. A colleague’s observation of his forceful Pro Tools editing gave rise to the Mr. Chop nickname. Littler first appeared under that name with the 2008 album Sounds from the Cave, which was soon joined by the EP Lightworlds. The following year he issued For Pete’s Sake, an homage to hip-hop figure Pete Rock, and in 2011 came Switched On, an album that refracted the classic sounds that had shaped him through a contemporary lens. For the 2013 release Illuminate he enlisted guitarist Bill Ryder Jones of The Coral and drummer Malcolm Catto of the Heliocentrics.