Second Thought was formed one evening in August 1999 by myself and my friend Dale. We'd messed around with tapes before, but this time we wanted to start a proper band. We initially took it quite seriously, getting keyboards and DJ decks, and began writing songs, mixing spoken word with techno and trance in an Underworld-inspired manner. Within a year, however, Dale had taken more to DJing, and my own interest was moving towards ambient and experimental music, and so the project quietly ended.

I burned some CDrs of the album of instrumental demos I'd written for the band - regrettably still under the awful name Second Thought - and gave them to a few friends. Encouraged by their positive responses, I continued on my own, gradually deconstructing the sound over the course of a couple of years, eventually releasing my debut album, the creepy ambient/illbient record Purlieu, in 2004, followed by the more IDM leaning Vacuum Road Songs shortly afterwards.

After a long break, I returned to the project in 2009 with a new album, Safernoc. In an attempt to make up for lost time, I followed this by ploughing ahead and releasing way too much new music on various netlabels between 2010 and 2011, and eventually felt that I'd run Second Thought into the ground. The very final release from the project was Another Setting Sun, a retrospective work collaging together material dating from the project's inception to its very end. Despite the presence of some very dodgy demos, the collection has always held a place in my heart for the restless creativity of the era in which it was recorded. The 2001-2003 period, in particular, found me developing my knowledge of music software with nobody to teach me, and thus this era features a lot of bizarre experiments, strange dead ends and signs pointing to the future. It's also filled with a nostalgia for my hometown.

Sorting through the many gigabytes of still unreleased music in 2022, I realised I had another album's worth of intriguing material from this era, and decided to see if I could create a third album with the same mood. This new collection, Rooftops, is therefore a retrospective of old demos, sketches and lo-fi works. It takes the name and art of an EP from this era (I've also used the EP's release date for some false authenticity).

We often find the most value in naivety, and in music that exists for itself without anything to prove. No matter how my production skills may improve over the years - and they certainly have since the bulk of the material here was recorded! - the tracks here retain a genuine exploratory feel and sense of fun that nothing I make these days comes close to. So while much of the music here may sound amateurish, it remains hugely important to me, and I want to share that feeling with you all.