How do we react when faced with something that transcends our understanding? Do we stand with an awe-inspiring curiosity? Are we frozen in fear, gazing into the abyss, stuck between recognition and uncertainty?
For Opal Drums, the new electronic duo formed by UK turntablist/producer Jon1st and Denver-based electronic artist Mux Mool, these questions are not only avenues of deep thought and introspection but are engraved into the fabric of their sonic world. Formed in a place outside space and time, the reality within their debut album Sarsen Cinema is both ancient and future, human and machine.
Written between Leicester and Denver, the project imagines a realm where colossal monoliths appear without warning and offer visions to those willing to approach.
As the duo developed the music across continents, a shared fascination with world-building emerged, pulling together elements of instrumental beat culture, alternative club sound design, and a cinematic sense of scale. The connection between them quickly became the foundation for everything that followed.
“It feels fresh and exciting for both of us and has created a mutual feeling of excitement when we work together, they explained. “In addition, sharing backgrounds in live performance has really benefited our chemistry and given us a good understanding of how to work well together in the studio.”
From that energy, Sarsen Cinema grew into something more than a debut. The EP expands into a narrative shaped by uncertainty, exploring how ancient symbolism and modern machinery can coexist within the same mythic frame. Each track unfolds like a new chapter, blurring the line between sound and vision as the world forms in real time around the listener. With visual storytelling and immersive live experiences planned for 2026, Opal Drums is just beginning to reveal the universe behind their creation.
Following the release, The Daily Frequency caught up with the duo to discuss the makings of Sarsen Cinema, their fascination with sonic world building, and how the tension between ancient and modern formed the Opal Drops mythos.
Check out the full interview with Opal Drums below.
DF: Thanks for talking with us! You just dropped a massive debut EP, Sarsen Cinema. How does it feel to kick off the new project with a record like this?
Opal Drums: Thanks for having us! We started work on what would become the EP about 18 months ago, so to have it out in the world, fully realised with the visual world we’ve created with our friends George and Sam, feels really exciting for us.
It’s the first time either of us have worked on a project with a more realised visual accompaniment like this, too, so it’s also felt like a fresh experience for us both in that regard.
DF: As two artists on opposite sides of the globe, what inspired you to come together as Opal Drums, and what is it about your styles that work so well together?
Opal Drums: It’s all come together very naturally. We initially met and became friends through our mutual friend, DJ Shiftee, who Jon was touring with in the USA a few years back. Over the years since, we always made time to hang out whenever Jon was visiting Denver, and in 2022 he was in town for a week or so, so we decided to have some casual production jams together.
Over the course of the next year, we passed the ideas from the jams back and forth casually. By early 2024, we had a first batch of tracks written from those sessions that we felt had a cohesive sound and identity to them that had a lot of potential to us, and it was then that we decided to commit to turning this into a project to develop more seriously.
DF: What did those first batch of tracks sound like?
Opal Drums: The tracks had a dream-like quality to them that we felt would be suited to being accompanied by a visual element, and after some initial brainstorming together, we invited George and Sam to develop a visual narrative with us. Their early involvement and seeing what they were able to create in turn influenced us to develop the music more so that we could fully realise the animation concept we’d created together and make sure the EP had a musical arc that would be suited to the narrative we’d been developing with the animations.
DF: With Sarsen Cinema, you’ve delivered more than just an EP, but constructed an immersive sonic world. Centered around colossal, breathing monoliths, the record has such a unique and compelling narrative. What inspired the album’s theme, and how did it start shaping the direction of the music?
Opal Drums: Early in our brainstorming for visual concepts, we started talking about a recent news story where metal monoliths, seemingly influenced by those from 2001: A Space Odyssey, had appeared and quickly disappeared days later in California and New Mexico during the pandemic.
The story sparked an idea for wanting to experiment with creating a narrative around some sort of sentient ‘alien’ structure or entity arriving in a contemporary setting and exploring how people might react to it. The premise of seeing something ‘otherworldly’ that is clearly in contrast to its environment and has an ‘unknown’ quality to it evokes an emotional response, whether that’s a curiosity or perhaps even a fear of what it could do.
As time went on, we developed that concept into more of an exploration of a theme of uncertainty and projection, both in terms of imagining the feelings the monolith might evoke in people who come across it, but also in terms of how the monolith can give people visions if they’re brave enough to approach it.
DF: On top of the mystery centered around these structures, you mentioned exploring themes of uncertainty and capturing the tension between the ancient and modern world. Can you expand on the role uncertainty played throughout the project and how it shaped the overall narrative?
Opal Drums: We feel a prevalent feeling in the modern world is uncertainty, and we wanted to explore that theme in our project abstractly. The monolith that appears in the animations has since developed into more of a symbol for ‘the unknown’ or ‘uncertainty’ in general and how one can react or project onto things we don’t fully understand in different ways.
As a team we’ve portrayed the monolith as being somewhat daunting but also bright, colourful and oddly beautiful, and while it could potentially seem menacing or intimidating at first, it’s also welcoming in its own way when it gives the protagonist a vision when she reaches out to it.
DF: It’s been theorized that monoliths like Stonehenge were used for large celebrations and rituals. Do you see any parallels between these ancient gatherings and today’s club and festival culture?
Opal Drums: While most modern club and festival music isn’t openly religious or spiritual, there’s an aspect about gathering for a shared participation in a celebration which is timeless, and people coming together in today’s music scene whether it’s for a celebration of a specific genre or community they’re passionate about or for a festival that they have a strong affinity with and attend year in year out that is certainly in line with that.
There’s also all the personal memories and attachments we all can have with certain places, events, artists and tracks that have significant value to us, and returning to those things can be deeply personal and ritualistic too.
DF: You explore so many different sounds, drawing from instrumental beat culture, alternative club music, and cinematic storytelling without locking into a specific tempo or genre. What’s the most challenging aspect of blending so many different sounds into one cohesive experience?
Opal Drums: The challenge of finding the connections between different genres, rhythms and tempos is what really excites us to create, particularly with this project.
Sometimes it takes a period of experimentation and making things that don’t necessarily make the final cut to find those connections between elements and develop a shared sound and identity for a project, but we think that’s a necessary and really enjoyable part of the creative process, and we wouldn’t have reached the destination we have had we not done a lot of exploration along the way.
DF: How do you begin working on a record like Sarsen Cinema? Does the theme itself inspire the music, or does the sound generate the world as you go?
Opal Drums: It’s been a bit of both for us. The initial batch of tracks we wrote inspired the desire to explore a narrative theme, and the subsequent development of that theme and the visuals informed the completion of the music and vice versa. As the project developed, both the music and visuals informed each other, whether it was the visual narrative changing as a response to the music, or us tweaking the music to complement and frame George and Sam’s visual ideas.
DF: Overall, Sarsen Cinema feels like a portal to a world of your own. When someone steps into this world for the first time, what do you hope they feel or take away?
Opal Drums: The theme of uncertainty with this project is really open ended by design. Everyone reacts to the unknown in a different way that is unique to them, and we want to encourage everyone to interpret and enjoy it in their own way. While we don’t want to influence anyone to have a specific reaction to the EP, if something we’ve made resonates with a listener and we’re able to transport them to a place of reflection in some way, that’s a massive win for us.
DF: Lastly, with plans for immersive live and visual experiences in 2026, Sarsen Cinema is just the start of your journey. What can fans expect in a live setting, and will future releases dive deeper into these ancient worlds?
Opal Drums: We plan on further exploring this narrative that we’ve established with this EP in the coming months.
In the immediate future, we are releasing ‘Sarsen Cinema Remixed’ on December 5th, which is a 6-track EP of reinterpretations of the EP featuring remixes by DMVU, Arcane, Anna Morgan, Sinistarr, Nikes, and Frythm and Seyaa, all of whom have continued the exploration of the theme of the EP through their own perspectives and techniques.
The Remixed EP is accompanied by more visuals that follow on from where the animations from Sarsen Cinema left off. You can also expect more new original material from us in the new year. In terms of live and visual experiences, we intend to make that step next year and are developing a means of bringing the feeling of the world we’ve been creating with this initial body of work into a public setting.