Ownglow

Ownglow is Sam Reeves, an American drum and bass producer whose early career took him from Montana and Arizona to Britain. In his first UKF interview, he identified B-complex’s Beautiful Lies VIP as the record that made him want to understand production. His interest in music developed alongside graphic design, which he had already undertaken professionally as a teenager. His first official Ownglow release, Gold / Tension, appeared on Pilot Records in 2014.

The move to Britain brought him closer to the music that had encouraged him to start. A Walk To Remember, released by Hospital Records in August 2016, records parts of that journey in a four-track EP. Hospital’s account describes him gathering sounds from his surroundings, including woodland, school hallways, and the Californian coastline. Angels Sing was connected to a Pacific Surfliner train journey, while The Night Is Still Young with Blake developed after a night out in east London. Reeves also designed the record sleeve.

His later Won't U / LA single on Drum&BassArena explored a darker side of his production. In a 2018 UKF interview, he explained that he wanted to avoid becoming associated with only one sound, and was interested in combining liquid tunes with more forceful rollers. The same conversation confirmed Gold and Tension as his first release under the name. That balance between emotional material and a rougher drum and bass vocabulary is grounded in his own description of how the project developed.