Lux Cache
founder & editor-in-chief · 2020–present
luxcache.com →
'Prod' essay series →
Started in 2020 as a Patreon for production tutorials and sample libraries, launched straight into lockdown's DAW boom. The founding wager — that artists explaining their own process beats formal instruction — became the house format: a curriculum of experimentation rather than instruction, contributors teaching in their own words. Ten editorial seasons on, the catalogue runs to nearly a hundred commissioned tutorials, interviews, workshops and sample packs, plus more than 1,800 original sounds made for the Producer's Series.
Teaching partnerships with NYU, BIMM and Ableton followed — including the 'Digital Audio Fantasy' lecture run across six Chinese cities — and in 2025 the platform moved onto LUXCACHE.COM, a bespoke home built with Szymon Hernik. Alongside the editing sits 'Prod', the essay series properly titled 'Essays on Music Production in the Human Experience': a long-running attempt to articulate why a technique works, where it came from, and what it is really doing to the music.
Slate + Ash
marketing & content director · 2024–present
slateandash.com →
A small, deliberately serious catalogue of Kontakt instruments, sample libraries and plugins — tools rather than preset banks — that quietly ends up on a large share of contemporary scores. Instruments like LANDFORMS, SPECTRES and RUINS are built with artists including Stephen O'Malley, Lea Bertucci, Alessandro Cortini and Clark, recorded everywhere from Real World to Teldex to Funkhaus.
The directorship covers the front end of each release — how an instrument is written about, presented and rolled out — on the working thesis that a serious tool deserves serious description, and that the description is part of the product. The remit sprawls on purpose: sound design and preset work, editorial, the artist network, the odd studio session — a disciplined line into music software and the frontier of music technology.
scenes by Lux Cache
network-based artist discovery platform · 2026
scenes.luxcache.com →
Began as a manual practice: trawling SoundCloud likes and Bandcamp purchase histories to source artists for Lux Cache, following the trail of who bought what and who turned up in whose corner. The tool formalises that method — a force-directed graph of who works with who across both platforms, seeded with taste rather than listening history.
The design answers a specific failure: streaming discovery optimises for retention, handing back more of what has already been heard. Here the clusters read as scenes, the bridges tend to be the most interesting people in the room, and the overlaps surface names long before anyone is posting about them. Free, and no sign-up.
The Elder
forthcoming 2026
bandcamp →
The closing phase of a three-part total artwork tracing the collapse of the Zaganov bloodline inside The Krepost, a hermetic fortress-monastery in the fictional borderland country of Polesia. Each phase escalates the audience's position in the fiction: complicit servant in the browser RPG, witness in the theatrical play, and finally archivist — left holding the historical record itself.
Written and recorded in an ex-tractor shop outside Żeliszów, Poland, the record sits between post-industrial pressure and esoteric chamber malady. Brass is the spine — chosen for its air and audible fatigue, not its bombast — against felted, sheet-metalled piano detuned until pitch feels like a rumour, and a bench of corrupted Windows laptops running stubborn audio tools. Ceremony as weapon: an elegant sound, deliberately made to break under extreme stress.
It is not a soundtrack in the tidy sense — themes recur from the game and play in altered uniforms, and the record is a tombstone: the Hum, the danger-signal running through both, is locked into the run-out groove and loops forever.
XUL
3x ep series · 2024
bandcamp →
The fifth studio album, first staged as three discs — XUL1, XUL2, XUL3 — across 2023, then assembled into a single fifteen-track running order: forty-two minutes of monochromatic abyss. Titles arrive as single-word monoliths — SPITITOUT, DERPROZESS, THELASTXHALE — and the writing is deliberately stripped of any commercial or self-conscious voice.
Framed around a pure-dark cosmic-void event, reality tearing at its edges, the record closed nine years of relentless output and the artist project's first era — clearing the ground for the cross-media work that followed.
Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. (Extended Cut)
2023
bandcamp →
A seventeen-track edition widening Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. with new material and reworkings — the record's archive cut, holding everything the original pressing couldn't.
The expansion sits inside the wider F.O.G. constellation: the Div Era graphic novel, the Between Lures and T.F.J. videos, the Peace Convoy screenplay and the Dazed documentary all grow from the same New Age Traveller history.
Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.
2022
"explores the spaces between irony and sincerity, ugliness and beauty, nihilism and deep feeling" — Resident Advisor
bandcamp →
An autobiographical record drawn from a childhood in the New Age Traveller community, built around the sampled voice of Helene Whiston — mother, narrator and the album's central presence. The 90s rave canon of Massive Attack, The Prodigy and Orbital returns as secondhand memory — music inherited rather than remembered first-hand — with features from Pussy Riot, EDEN and Iglooghost.
The Quietus made it Album of the Week under the headline 'Secondhand Memories', alongside a Resident Advisor review, a Dazed 100 placement and the Dazed documentary Rave Mysticism. The record seeded a wider universe: a graphic novel, two self-directed videos and a short-film screenplay all extend its history.
Drayan!
2021
"Somehow, Whiston’s concept record about a frustrated teenage alien is his most mature to date" — Resident Advisor
bandcamp →
A mixtape framed as alien transmission: the dream-broadcasts of Drayan, a teenage hybrid-child of the X'ziphursch VII civilisation, reaching an earth-father through a distortion implant device over three weeks. Each track channels a single human emotion — homesick frustration, lovestruck empathy — rendered in high-saturation Technicolor.
The fiction ran through every surface of the release — music, merch and rollout, up to and including PAPER Magazine horoscopes read in character. The campaign remains the project's most complete piece of candy-fiction worldbuilding, reviewed in Resident Advisor.
No World As Good As Mine
2019
"It’s hard to think of anyone arriving this fully formed since James Blake" — Bandcamp Daily
bandcamp →
Seven months of isolated writing in a woodland cabin in Snowdonia, trading bangers for live instrumentation — an avant-garde fusion of experimental rock and electronics drawn from the beauty and horror of the natural world. Joe Petersen and The Physics House Band feature; the thirteen-minute opus 'No World' closes it.
A Bandcamp Daily best electronic album of 2019. The record shipped with NWAGAM, a sixty-page art book and journal documenting the cabin process — readable in full at kaiwhiston.com/nwagam.
XYZ
with Iglooghost & BABii · 2019
"It sounds like an argument." — Iglooghost, in Loud and Quiet
bandcamp →
Three distinct hyper-club practices folded into a single record, made with Iglooghost and BABii and released on GLOO — the DIY imprint the three share. Reached 8th on Billboard's Electronic Album Sales chart.
The trio toured the record as GRID across Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo and Shanghai, and the shared universe earned a Loud and Quiet cover feature on the GLOO project's DIY worldbuilding.
Kai Whiston Bitch
2018
"like Aphex Twin and Lex Luger had a bastard child that exclusively listened to grime" — PAPER Magazine
bandcamp →
The debut: hyper-surrealist, painterly deconstructed club music — maximalist pastiche drawing on Arca, Hudson Mohawke, Death Grips and nu-metal, with Clarence Clarity appearing on 'Your Secrets'. Released on GLOO, the imprint co-run with Iglooghost.
The record drew co-signs from Kanye West, Skrillex and Mary Anne Hobbs and a place in i-D's Music Class of 2018 — and set the project's terms early: total aesthetic control, worldbuilding over singles.
'Krepost, Polesia'
rpg video game · 2026
krepost.pl →
A bureaucratic horror RPG set inside The Krepost, the hermetic fortress-monastery of the Zaganov bloodline. The player is a newly recruited cleaner — scrubbing stains, lighting candles, observing protocol — while investigating a murder foretold: Lady Anastasia, breaking protocol, warns she will be killed in five days, and cannot be saved.
Playable in-browser at krepost.pl, with desktop and mobile builds. The game opens the Zaganov trilogy — the fiction continues in the play A New Crimson Haze and closes with The Elder.
'A New Crimson Haze'
theatrical play · 2026
read the novelisation →
A theatrical play set in a shadowed, distorted Eastern Europe, where the Zaganov bloodline holds humanity's oldest obsession: eternal life. A rare genetic condition both accelerates the family's ageing and extends its lifespan, leaving the line worshipped and feared, its power brokered through a troupe of performing agents known as The Herd.
The play forms the middle phase of the Zaganov trilogy, between the Krepost, Polesia RPG and The Elder. A full novelisation — the play grown into long-form prose — is readable at kaiwhiston.com/anch.
'Div Era'
graphic novel · 2023
read online →
A graphic novel made with Helene Whiston — mother and son drawing the Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. mythology onto the page. The book is the diary of Div — Daniella Rosewood, a fifteen-year-old full-time raver living at the Tin Foil Jerusalem site in Semley, Dorset, 1993 — told in felt-tip confessions, flyers and portraiture.
Twelve pages and a cover, readable in full at kaiwhiston.com/div-era. The second mother-and-son collaboration of the F.O.G. era, after the album built around Helene's sampled voice.
'Between Lures'
live action music video · 2022
video →
A self-directed video for the lead single from Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.: a caravan hauled up a hillside by hand and rope, then set alight — the film breaking into colour as it burns. Archival footage of police clearing rural raves runs throughout.
The burning caravan sets the album's family history inside the wider story of British counterculture — the state's long campaign against the travelling way of life — compressed into a single image.
'T.F.J.'
animated music video · 2022
video →
A self-directed animated video for a single from Quiet As Kept, F.O.G., made with early AI image generation — 2022-era tools, before the boom — rendering New Age Traveller dreamscapes in strobe imagery.
Stop-motion sequences collage into frenzied fantasy worldbuilding: the album's secondhand memories hallucinated rather than documented.
'NWAGAM'
art book · 2019
read online →
A sixty-page art book and journal released alongside No World As Good As Mine, documenting the seven months of woodland recording and illustrating the record's narrative in print.
Readable in full at kaiwhiston.com/nwagam, with a downloadable PDF.
'Peace Convoy'
short film screenplay · 2024
read online →
A short-film screenplay drawn from the New Age Traveller history behind Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. — the peace convoys of the 1980s, the Battle of the Beanfield, and the state's long campaign against a way of life.
The script distils the family history running through the record into a single narrative — readable in full at kaiwhiston.com/peace-convoy, with a downloadable PDF.
sample studio+ by Lux Cache
ableton live extension · 2026
luxcache.com →
A right-click on any recording in Ableton Live opens a four-tab workspace — slice, design, layer, export. Slices cut against the tempo grid with Serato-style nudge controls; each hit is trimmed, faded and processed with automatable breakpoint curves; samples stack into layered composites.
The export tab writes a tagged, named, pack-ready folder — naming schemas, auto-tagging, key detection — alongside a new track of clips in the Set. Lux Cache's first piece of software, sold one-time through luxcache.com.
midi studio+ by Lux Cache
ableton live extension · 2026
luxcache.com →
The MIDI counterpart to sample studio+, built around the one thing Live has no concept of: harmony. The analyse tab reads a clip's key, named chords and scale degrees; generate voices chords, bass, arp and lead lanes from one shared progression; variations auditions endless subtle, in-key rewrites of the clip, the keepers written back to clips or tracks.
The mutation engine is rule-based and deterministic — pitch nudges, fragment transposition, swing and revoicing, never a black box. Released weeks after sample studio+, completing the studio+ bundle.
'Ť (Hanging By A Thread)'
alternate reality game · 2024
video →
bandcamp →
Played out across Instagram stories over two weeks, the audience steering a collective choose-your-own-disaster in real time through poll responses: a protagonist trapped beneath a luminous yellow sky in a sea of endless mud, a punishing landscape, a stubborn crow, and a slow negotiation toward freedom or drowning in the soil.
The unfolding story was soundtracked by a fourteen-minute generative sound piece, modulated live by the audience's choices — released as 'Ť (Hanging By A Thread)', with an official visual on YouTube.
Rave Mysticism: Kai Whiston and The Story of the New Age Travellers
Dazed · documentary · 2023
dazeddigital.com →
The Travellers Were Right: An Interview With Kai Whiston
The Quietus · interview · 2022
thequietus.com →
Kai Whiston for Mary Anne Hobbs
BBC Radio 6 Music · guest mix · 29th September, 2022
soundcloud.com →
Secondhand Memories: Kai Whiston, Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.
The Quietus · album of the week · 21st July, 2022
thequietus.com →
Kai Whiston — Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.
Resident Advisor · review · 2022
ra.co →
Kai Whiston — Drayan!
Resident Advisor · review, Zach Tippitt · 30th July, 2021
ra.co →
Kai Whiston and His Hybrid Alien Son Read Your Horoscopes
PAPER Magazine · interview, Matt Moen · 20th July, 2021
papermag.com →
The Best Electronic Albums of 2019
Bandcamp Daily · best of 2019 · 19th December, 2019
daily.bandcamp.com →
Kai Whiston for Diplo & Friends
BBC Radio 1 · guest mix · 16th November, 2019
soundcloud.com →
GLOO — The DIY Universe of Iglooghost, BABii and Kai Whiston
Loud and Quiet · cover feature · 9th August, 2019
loudandquiet.com →
i-D's Music Class of 2018: Kai Whiston
i-D Magazine · interview, Ryan White · 15th November, 2017
i-d.co →