needed to find himself. A songwriter with no small degree of acclaim following his every release, he felt stuck and in need of a change.

Shifting his practise, the multi-disciplinarian focused on his visual art output, before finding his battery had become renewed.

New album ‘CAFE PARADISO’ is the result. Out now on Transgressive, it’s a many splintered thing, piecing together art-pop electronics with club culture aspects, citing the likes of Saint Etienne and The Silver Apples to Towa Tei as influences.

It’s a record where Mykki’s non-musical references have come to the fore. Focussing his thoughts on long walks, that passion has resulted in extensive hikes across the English countryside.

Writing for CLASH, Mykki Blanco discusses his passion for hiking, and the way it impacts in a mediative fashion on his creative practise.

A long walk creates this liminal space where you are in constant dialogue with your surroundings but also somehow free of them. Something about a lengthy pastoral stroll that lasts for hours gliding from city block to city block allows you to exist as a biblical figure in modern times. You are “in the world but not of it”.

I’ve never learned how to drive and so for me it has always been and always will be a life on foot. It had never occurred to me until last summer that I could apply this same logic of the cosmopolitan flaneur to the great outdoors. Before I discovered long distance hiking I always thought of both hiking and camping as this singular one and done experience. A person went camping in that you went into nature to one destination, set up and existed within the confines of that one natural environment and took in the beauty of this one circumstance.

The same with hiking, you hike for a few hours, take it all in and return home. It had never occurred to me that I was actually someone pretty much built to do long distance hiking and that all my years hitting the pavement would amount to some of the most beautiful walks and multi-day camping experiences I’ve ever had.

It’s thrilling to set out into nature, on a path or a pilgrimage and have time dissolve around you. As your slowly absorbed into the green silence and stillness time collapses and it’s as if you’ve returned to the primal zero point of creation. There is no worry about “making good time” and so you become this observer of the grand design, no calendars and for me at least I try to limit the amount of photos I take each day so I can fully give myself to each natural environment I encounter.

You’re in constant motion for hours but it becomes this childlike back and forth of interacting with the world in an entirely new way away from the judgements of other people. I often take my shoes off for stretches if the weather permits and I can’t even begin to explain how gratifying it is to walk on moss for an hour. You dissolve into each new day, finding a new campsite to keep warm or with the best view or keep the wind away or to keep the wet at bay and it all becomes more strategic than any video game ever could. Mother Nature becomes your mate and as everything much more relaxed, I’d say so much more is revealed.

Humans need boredom. We need stillness we need quiet. We need time to move through the world less stimulated giving us these mental blank sheets and clean slates to create on. This is what long distance hiking gives me, it provides these amazing long distance meditations where I connect to the core of what being human really is all about without any external noise, praise, need for validation or critique. Things are as they are because each day out on the land and on the hike you’re dealing with the reality of that moment and that moment in nature is all there is.

There is a particular stillness to hiking the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, a quiet that gathers slowly with every step. Rain trickles softly across your face and taps against your jacket as you pass mossy knolls and look out over rolling cliffs, the world reduced to the rhythm of walking, breathing, and weather. Along the path, the lush pale blue of cornflowers follows like a thread through the green, evoking a mythic England—King Arthur’s England—where the land seems older than memory and every headland holds the echo of a legend. In that gentle rain, surrounded by wind-shaped grass and ancient stone, the mind begins to loosen its grip on everything unnecessary.

To walk alone beside the open ocean is to discover the deep satisfaction of being left with one’s own thoughts. The sea stretches outward without end, meeting the horizon beneath vast, endless sunrises that spill gold and rose across the water, and in their presence the self becomes both smaller and more complete. There is a reverence in standing before such immensity: the cliffs, the ocean, and the changing sky humble you to your core, while also returning you to something essential. With each mile, the noise within falls away, until there is only the path, the weather, the breath in your chest, and the profound inner stillness of being exactly where you are.

‘CAFE PARADISO’ is out now.

Catch Mykki Blanco at the following shows:

3 The Hug and Pint
4 Belgrave Music Hall
5 The Deaf Institute
6 Xerox
7 Strange Brew
10 Concorde 2