About

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“Some things are easier to feel than they are to explain”

If you want to understand more about me, and why this exists, start here.

Why I made this, and why I decided to share it

I've always used music to remember things. Not simply songs I like, but moments. People, places, nights, journeys, relationships, periods of my life that felt significant at the time and sometimes those that didn't seem significant until much later.

There is something remarkable about hearing a piece of music years after you first discovered it. Within a few seconds, you can find yourself somewhere else entirely. You remember where you were, who you were with, what was happening around you, perhaps even what you were thinking. Sometimes you remember someone you haven't thought about for years.

But occasionally something even more interesting happens. You remember yourself.

You remember a version of who you were at a particular point in your life, before you became the person you are now. The music has stayed exactly the same, but you have not.

That relationship between music, memory and feeling is where Lost Keys began.

I've never experienced music as background

I've loved music for as long as I can remember, but I've never really experienced it as something that simply sits in the background.

Music gets attached to our lives. A song can become inseparable from a person, a place, a summer, a relationship, a night, a journey or a particular period of time. We often don't choose those associations consciously. They simply happen.

For me, music has always been one of the ways I process what is happening around me and, sometimes, what is happening inside me.

I'm someone who spends a lot of time thinking. I analyse things, replay conversations, question decisions and try to understand what I am feeling and why. Sometimes that helps me make sense of things. Sometimes it just means I have managed to think about the same thing from twelve different directions and somehow become less certain than when I started.

Music gives me another way in.

There are feelings that are difficult to explain while you are living through them. Sometimes you don't have the words. Sometimes you have the words but they don't quite capture what is happening. And sometimes you simply do not understand the feeling yet.

Music does not necessarily require you to understand. You can listen to something and simply recognise that it feels right. That has always mattered to me.

The music doesn't change. We do.

One of the things I find most fascinating about music is that the same piece can mean completely different things at different points in our lives.

You can hear something one day and think very little of it, then hear it again years later and wonder how you ever missed what was there. Think about it, have you ever listened to an album and skipped a track because you don’t like it, but then some time later you hear it again and its your new favorite?

Nothing about the recording has changed. The notes are the same. The production is the same. The artist has not gone back and rewritten the song for the person you have become.

But life has happened in between.

You may have loved someone, lost someone, become a parent, changed direction, failed at something, succeeded at something, been frightened, been excited, experienced something you never expected, or simply grown older and seen the world differently.

All of those experiences become part of you, and they change what you hear.

Sometimes music brings back a specific memory. Sometimes it brings back a feeling without a clear memory attached to it. Occasionally it brings back a version of yourself that you had almost forgotten existed.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

A photograph can preserve what a moment looked like. Music can preserve something of how it felt.

At some point, listening wasn't enough

For years, I made playlists, collected music and built little soundtracks to different periods of my life without really thinking about what I was doing. My earliest memories of doing this was to when I was about 10 years old recording mixtapes off the radio and mum and dads record collection. I usually did it to hold on to a feeling or to go back to it when I needed something from it.

Then I started DJing. That gave me a different way to work with music. Instead of simply choosing individual tracks, I could place them together and create something that moved through time. One piece could change the meaning of the next. Energy could build, disappear and return. A particular sound could take you somewhere completely different from where you started.

I became interested in what could happen when music was treated less like a collection of songs and more like a journey. That is where the idea of a chapter came from.

I don't start a Lost Keys chapter by deciding what genre I want to make or by choosing a collection of tracks I happen to like. I start with something that has happened.

A moment. A feeling. A person. A place. A period of my life. Sometimes I understand exactly what it means to me. Sometimes I don't. The moment comes first. The music comes second.

I then search for the music that feels like it belongs there. It might be something I've known for years, something I've discovered recently, something I've produced myself, or another artist's work that somehow expresses something I cannot.

The technical side still matters. I care about transitions, structure, energy, timing, keys and all the details that come with making music work. But eventually I always come back to a much simpler question:

Does it feel right?

Something can be technically perfect and emotionally wrong. Equally, something that should not work on paper can sometimes be exactly what a moment needs.

That is the part I trust.

Why chapters?

I call them chapters because that is how life feels to me. There are periods of our lives that seem to have their own identity. We may not recognise them while we are inside them, but afterwards we can often see where one thing ended and something else began.

Some chapters are beautiful. Some are painful. Some are confusing. Some are completely ordinary and only become meaningful once they are gone.

I wanted to capture some of those moments while I was still close enough to them to remember what they actually felt like. Not to create a perfect record of my life, but an honest one.

That distinction matters a lot.

Life is never neat and perfect. There are contradictions, uncertainty, bad decisions, good intentions that go wrong, things we regret and things we do not understand until much later. There are moments we think will matter forever that eventually don't, and moments we barely notice that quietly change everything.

I want Lost Keys to have room for all of that.

The music becomes the way I preserve something of the feeling.

The journal preserves the context of each chapter. Together, they allow me to return to a moment later and remember not only what happened, but who I was when it did.

Why write the journals?

This was something I came to understand gradually. I could make a mix or a session that captured exactly how I felt and then return to it months later, still able to feel something when I heard it, but no longer remember precisely why I made it.

If music was going to become a way of preserving moments in my life, I realised I did not only want to preserve the soundtrack. I wanted to remember the person who was listening to it.

That is what the journals are for.

They are not explanations of what you are supposed to hear, and they are not instructions for how a chapter should be interpreted. They are simply a record of what was happening behind the music. Simply put, where my head was. What I was feeling. What I thought I understood. What I didn't understand at all.

Sometimes that means being honest about things that are uncomfortable.

I don't want hindsight to rewrite the past into something more coherent or flattering than it actually was. If I was confused, I want to remember that I was confused. If I was struggling, I want to remember that too.

The journal belongs to the moment it was written. And, like I said before the music stays the same. We don’t.

Perhaps that is the most interesting part of the whole process.

So why share it?

For a long time, I didn't. This, for many years has been very much a private practice.

I've spent years making music and DJing, discovering music obsessively and spending ridiculous amounts of time building, studying and exploring music of all kinds. I've made things that genuinely make me proud, only to find another part of my brain explaining why they weren't good enough.

Not original enough. Not technically good enough. Not important enough. And, perhaps, underneath all of that, I wasn't good enough either. Keeping it private was safe.

If nobody heard it, nobody could tell me it wasn't good enough. I could enjoy making it without having to deal with somebody else's opinion. But eventually I realised that the same thing protecting me from rejection was also preventing me from being seen.

I had spent a long time waiting to feel ready, confident or worthy enough to properly call myself a DJ, a producer or even an artist.

To be honest, I'm not sure that feeling ever arrives. And as I watch my kids grow up and tell them to follow their dreams, I realised I havn’t listened to my own advice.

So I stopped waiting for it.

I also had to separate two things that I had allowed to become tangled together:

• Creating something because I love it, and;

• Creating something because I want other people to validate it.

I'd love people to discover Lost Keys. I'd love people to listen, connect with something and tell me that a particular chapter meant something to them. I'd love to see where it could eventually go.

But none of that can be the reason it exists.

If nobody listens to a particular chapter, that does not make the moment that created it any less important. If someone dislikes the music, that does not make the experience that produced it any less real. The value of the work cannot depend entirely on what happens after I release it.

I make Lost Keys because making it matters to me.

Sharing it is what allows the possibility of something else to happen.

And that is where you come in

I've always been fascinated by the fact that music created from one person's experience can become something completely different for somebody else.

An artist can create a piece of music from a very specific moment in their own life, while the person listening knows nothing about that moment. Yet somehow, the music can still reach them.

It can remind them of somebody. Take them somewhere. Change their mood. It can even make them feel understood. Or, simply give them an hour where they can disappear into something.

The artist's meaning and the listener's meaning do not have to be the same. In fact, I think it is better when they aren't.

That is why I don't want to tell you what you are supposed to feel when you listen to a Lost Keys chapter.

Instead, I can tell you where it came from. I can tell you what was happening in my life when I made it. I can tell you why particular music found its way into it. But once you press play, it becomes part of your experience too.

Maybe you will recognise something in the story. Maybe a piece of music will take you somewhere completely unrelated to where it took me. Maybe you will hear something at exactly the right point in your own life. Or maybe you will simply enjoy the music for what it is.

That's enough.

What Lost Keys means to me now

I think I used to believe that I needed to understand everything while it was happening. I wanted to know what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, what it meant and what I should do about it. Music has taught me that sometimes I don't have to know.

Sometimes I can simply sit inside a moment for a while. I can let it be uncomfortable without immediately trying to fix it. I can let something be beautiful without worrying about how long it will last. I can allow a feeling to exist without needing to give it a name.

Perhaps the understanding comes later. Perhaps it doesn't. Either way, the moment has been lived.

Lost Keys is my way of paying attention to those moments before they disappear into everything else that life inevitably brings with it. It is a record of where I have been, what I have felt and the music that helped me experience it.

I wish I had started sooner. I wish I had trusted myself earlier and understood that I didn't need somebody else to tell me that something I loved was worth doing. But, I can't go back and make that decision then. I can only make it now.

So this is me, finally, doing the thing. Not because I know where it will take me. Not because I know whether anyone will care. And not because I've suddenly become completely confident.

I'm doing it because I've finally understood that waiting to become someone who was allowed to do this was never going to work.

I was already allowed.

I just didn't believe it. And perhaps that is the real beginning of Lost Keys. Not the first mix, the first chapter, the website or even the name. The beginning was the moment I stopped waiting for permission to take something I love seriously.

There are still plenty of chapters to come. Some have already happened and are waiting to be understood. Others haven't happened yet. And somewhere along the way, perhaps one of them will find you at the right moment.

You might recognise something. You might remember someone. You might hear yourself in a sentence. Or you might simply put your headphones on and disappear into the music for a while.

Either way, I'm glad you're here.

Because for a very long time, I didn't think I'd ever be brave enough to put any of this in front of anyone.

Now I have. And that feels like a beginning.

Remember;

• The feeling comes first.

• The music follows.

• The journal remembers.

• You bring your own meaning.

Why the name “Lost Keys”?

It's partly a joke because I lose things. A lot. My keys, wallet, phone in particular have a habit of disappearing at exactly the wrong moment, and what should be a small frustration can sometimes blow up and become something much bigger. Panic, frustration, accusations, and a huge amount of self-blame and that familiar feeling of having somehow failed at something that should have been simple.

Over time, I noticed that music was often what helped me come back down. It gave me somewhere to put the noise in my head, helped me regulate and, occasionally, reminded me to give myself a little more grace. Not always mind you, I am still partial to a nervous breakdown when missplace things.

So Lost Keys became a quiet nod to that part of me: the things I lose, the feelings that can follow, and the music that helps me find my way back.

Whenever I think about it, it brings me back to the understanding of who I was, who I am and to just be ok with that.

Thank you

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy the chapters.

Matt