March 10, 2026March 9, 2026

Interview with inpc

“It’s done absolute wonders for my mental health hanging out with nice people listening to records each morning rather than doom-scroll for an hour.”

NHAM: Hey inpc! Come on then, tell us where that name comes from?

inpc: Well… I’ve had numerous aliases over the years and this current iteration stands for I’m Not Phil Collins, mostly because…

1: I am not Phil Collins (this has been independently verified by multiple sources)…

NHAM: Keen listeners to NHAM Radio who’ve heard your jingle on the channel might still take some convincing!

inpc: …2: I was experimenting with ideas for songs and was using CR78 drum machine samples, the same machine Mr Collins famously used on In The Air Tonight. My thinking being, what would Phil Collins not do? And that was the start of the track State Intervention from the recent EP.

NHAM: That fantastic EP is called ‘it’s not ok computer’ with videos for each of the four tracks already on rotation on TIBtv. Where did the inspiration come for the EP and its videos?

inpc: Well the original plan was to be as not Phil Collins as possible, which I think I achieved (bank balances confirm this lol) but more so, the EP’s theme is navigating our digital dystopia, the time spent battling our computers/tech acting against our best interests. Add to that the general state of the world, the surveillance, the death tech and just the general bad vibe of companies enshitifying to add ‘share holder value’ while screwing actual customers. I tried to capture that essence through the medium of funny noises.

Obviously the title is a poke at Radiohead’s OK Computer, which was released at a time when I felt so much more optimistic about technology. The promise being computers would do so much cool stuff…, and they do, but vampires everywhere ruin the experience and we’re captured by them in so many ways, I don’t want to be too doomy but we all see what’s going on. Quite frankly, it’s bollocks and they can all do one!

NHAM: A little birdie tells me your first solo gig is coming up soon. Where and when is that?

inpc: Date still TBC but it’ll be the Crash Of Moons Club, a monthly night in Canterbury UK, not too far where I’m based, I was the sound guy there for a while so it’ll be nice to be on the other side of things!

NHAM: That little birdie was flying around on the Kali Mera show (at least until George woke up and chased it out!)… Tell people who don’t already know, what the Kali Mera show is and where to catch it.

inpc: So The Kalimera Show is a music show I host each weekday, hosted on my home server. Essentially a lo-fi production radio show live streamed from my shed, featuring my dear old cat George, who’s coming up for 18 years old! I mostly play vinyl records from my collection and there’s some chat between tracks, info on forthcoming releases etc. A key feature is my co-host George, who commands the live feed and helps with the daily weather forecast. He’s the resident temperature guide and he tells the people if it’ll be warm (he’s outside) or less than warm (he’s inside), he’s pretty accurate and even though it may look like he just sleeping on the sofa, he’s doing serious work.

There’s a wonderful chat crew who join the live stream each morning, it’s a lovely community and the same folks join most mornings. It’s done absolute wonders for my mental health hanging out with nice people listening to records each morning rather than doom-scroll for an hour. The playlists are pretty diverse and there’s obviously a fair bit of On U Sound/inpc/Liotia music but I play all sorts, jazz, prog, hop hop, indie, funk, folk, whatever piques my interest in that moment. Sometimes I drop info on the recording process and there’s a lot of love for delay and spring reverb effects, which I sprinkle liberally and somewhat haphazardly over proceedings. I often play unreleased tracks from myself and friends. Also, a lot of listeners are also music makers and I enjoy playing their tracks too and they’ve created brilliant guest mixes when I’ve been on the road. Whilst the show is technically a side hustle, listeners contribute time and skills, be that with guest mixes, technical help or support from NHAM and the wider Fediverse. It’s really cool.

NHAM: You’re a big advocate of the indie web and ‘being your own internet’. You self host your own Fedi accounts, from GoToSocial to Peertube, and you stream from your own Owncast server. Tell us more about why this is important to you?

inpc: The internet was making me sick. Up until 2019 I had all the usual mainstream accounts, Spotidie, Facebacon, LinkedInPark etc. you know, all the horrid vampire stuff. I was sick of how the world was becoming distorted. Facebook famously ran experiments on people, filling their timelines with negativity etc. to see if messing with peoples’ mental health was good for business, absolutely vile behaviour, just to boost profits and just one of many, widely reported misdemeanours. We’ll never know the true impact of such acts but I’ve no doubt that contributed to a lot of bad outcomes.

Spotify famously screw indie music makers but rather than moan, I figure we should instead focus on our own networks and parallel economies, let those platforms drown in their own faeces. The wider internet went from a place of fun to a heavy, bad vibe. That’s just two examples but we all know the deal, it’s all of them!

I heard of the Fediverse via a podcast in 2019, shut down all the horrible apps and made it my digital home. In 2019 it was VERY slow moving, you could check back in an hour and see no new posts, it was actually pretty cool having being used to being bombarded with info. I slowly learned the basics and then began self hosting what I could on the ActivityPub protocol (Peertube, Owncast, GoToSocial, Castopod). I have my own Nextcloud server (like g00gle docs), Navidrome, a self hosted music streaming service I can access my own music collection from anywhere and a few other things running on a little computer I got second hand for £200.

While I’m not a coder, the ethos’ of FOSS and the protocols over platforms movement really chime with me. They echo the ethos of the early Punk movement in music. We don’t need big corporations, let’s develop and use open tools and we can do something better over here instead.

I’ve also been using the Nostr protocol, which has some serious potential, having p2p payments built in at the protocol layer. As an indie music maker, that’s SUPER interesting and I’ve been releasing music using the RSS protocol, which is as old as the web itself, I think of it like the MIDI of internet. There’s actually a lot of tools at our disposal and it really is up to us to figure it out. Either that or be under the control of whatever Peter Thielesque vampire, politician or other bastard poisoning the well.

Again, I’m NOT a coder and anyone who’s interacted with me online knows I bugger things up A LOT but I also muddle through and persevere regardless. Fortunately, some very cool people in the world building brilliant, accessible tools to make this all possible and there’s lots of super tech savvy people on the indie-web who are incredibly helpful. I’m sincerely heart warmed by the help I’ve received when things have gone wrong and I’ve still had less downtime than X!

To have full control of data is empowering. I’m of the mind that, whilst it’s easy to complain about the current state of tech, it’s on us to change it, not government, not some next corporation, not a single entity. The internet used to be cool and it IS cool, we just need to leave the spiritual vampires behind.

I should say a big thank you to Yunohost and Opencollective and all indieweb/open source developers here, Yunohost empowers non-coding people like myself to be fully self sufficient. I don’t have any relationship other than being a happy user but it’s important to point out, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do any of this without the people making simple front end tools for us. It’s a meme but if you can spare a coin for you’re favourite indie developers it can make a real difference. As a wider point, I think we need to rethink our whole approach to funding the internet, I’d rather pay people I like and respect than be surveilled for shitty ads for pointless shit I don’t need, while selling our personal info to the worst humans ever to human.

NHAM: Us regulars at the Kali Mera show are aware that you do the show for an hour before you begin your day job – a day job that is also of great interest. Tell us about that…

inpc: Well my day job is as a sound engineer and noise maker. I also teach music production part time for a little local music charity. I’ve worked in music most my adult life, all be it in the indie world and local community scene, never in the mainstream. It’s been my passion since school and in all honesty, I don’t know what else I could even do at this stage. I love music and I’m lucky to be in music and amongst musicians I love and respect, even though I don’t actually play any instruments, I get to see first hand some really great singers and players create live magic!

NHAM: You’ve been doing a fair bit of touring lately for your boss man, Adrian Sherwood. You’ve been to Japan, various places in Europe and had a slot at the Barbican in London. How have you found it being on the road?

inpc: This last year has been very exciting/busy on that front. I’ve worked with Adrian (and the wider On U Sound fam) since 2013 when I first did gigs with Little Axe aka Skip McDonald as his Ableton guy. Skip’s retired now but his contribution to music is immense. If you’ve not heard of him, you’ve certainly heard him on radio. He’s still my favourite musician. I hail him up whenever I can, a true unsung hero. (He also has some albums recently reissued, well worth investigating!)

I really got deep working with Adrian during Covid, we live near each other and it was getting hard for his previous engineer, Dave McEwen, to travel. For the most part it was just me and Adrian in the studio while we communicated with musicians over the internet. We made 7 albums in that period! It’s a really nice landing as musically it’s right up my street and it suits my skillset perfectly. The On U Sound logo has used the quote “Disturbing the comfortable, comforting the disturbed” for over 40 years. I mean that’s just perfect as far as I’m concerned!

Adrian’s solo album came out last year (on which I’ve engineer and programming credits) and was very well received so that’s lead to a bunch of shows and the chance to travel, lots of EU dates, Japan, possibly the USA (although that’s pretty challenging right now) and plenty of other shows is coming in regularly. We recently did a show at The Barbican, London with Speakers Corner Quartet, African Head Charge and Adrian accompanied with musicians Doug Wimbish, Alex White and Mark Bandola. The show was packed and the reports have been fantastic. Really cool to have a full house and a show free of any technical issues. We all breathed a big sigh of relief after that!

It’s exhilarating and, at times a little stressful, as I now double up as tour manager, which is certainly not something that comes naturally but so far so good. The shows also feature wonderful visuals from artist Peter Harris and videographer Mike Hodgeson, they look seriously cool!

NHAM: I mentioned earlier about your first solo gig, but you have of course been gigging with Liotia too. Tell us more about Liotia. -Who is involved, what have you done up to now and what’s in the pipeline?

inpc: So Liotia is myself making funny noises with a computer and Abigail Hubbard, songwriter, singer, musician. She actually came to the youth project I work at back in 2012 on an internship, I heard her music, which was on cassette, and I totally dug it, we did an EP under her name but this grew into what is now Liotia. There’s been other musicians involved in the project along the way and I still miss our drummer Joel (RIP) but essentially it’s myself and Abi putting it all together.

We’re currently working on an album which it should see the light of day later this year, I’m very happy with how it’s shaping up so far and we’ve contributions from Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish, Josh McGill and the Fediverse’s own SnakeInTheGrass which I’m very excited about. I think it’s a huge step up from our previous works. There will be new tracks on TIBTV soon!

NHAM: Exciting! Great to talk with you inpc. Looking forward to everything on the horizon!

inpc: Thanks Sam! And big up all you do for Indie music too!!!