Wordcolour

Nicholas Worrall, an electronic musician residing in London, assembles club-oriented sound collages that merge playful innocence with intricate detail, reflecting a collector’s habit of drawing fragments from varied sources in a manner akin to digital musique concrète. Born and raised in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, more than fifty miles north of the capital, he later relocated to London to develop work as a composer and arranger. Over time he supplied music for stage productions and television, writing cues that appeared on prime-time BBC series including The One Show and Gardeners’ World. Although millions across the U.K. encountered these pieces, his primary interest remained elsewhere. In 2018 he launched a side project that layered abrupt rhythms and fluctuating tempos beneath assorted spoken fragments taken from films and online videos; he titled the project Wordcolour in reference to a 1994 composition by abstract artist Paul Lansky. The following year he included “Word Color” within a mix hosted by Blowing Up the Workshop and titled I Want to Tell You Something after the Jenny Hval track that concluded the set. Additional selections on the mix, drawn from Delia Derbyshire, William Basinski, Robert Ashley, and Kate Bush, further revealed Worrall’s broader listening. Barcelona’s Lapsus Records subsequently issued Wordcolour’s first EP, Tell Me Something, in July 2020. On that record Worrall revisited the communicative themes already present in his earlier mixtape while employing deep bass accents and sampled voices whose inventive, eccentric character recalled the palette of 1980s electronic groups such as Yello and the Art of Noise. His debut release for Houndstooth, Juno Way, arrived in November 2020, prompted by a pre-pandemic evening at Juno Café in south-east London. Although 2021 proved comparatively subdued, national outlets singled him out as an emerging act likely to gain wider attention. That year also brought his second mixtape, People Can You Hear Me, which examined performance and artificiality through excerpts from Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. A standalone single, “Bluster,” appeared in February 2022, followed in April by an EP of the same name containing remixes by DjRUM, the Soft Pink Truth, and DJ Python.