Vague Memories and the Art of Coming Home

For years, it seemed like Vague Memories was over. After releasing the fourth instalment in 2019, UK producer and Absolute Loss founder Irrelevant (Jay Pratt) had quietly closed the door on the series that had come to define the most intimate corner of his musical identity. Each entry had taken months of careful sculpting, long, drifting pieces stitched from fragments, atmospheres, and ghosted moments, that demanded an emotional investment many artists can only make a handful of times in their lives.

But something shifted in the years that followed. “I’d gotten it into my head that I really wanted to revisit this approach,” Jay says now. “And I was actually a bit disappointed with myself that I had decided not to carry them on before.”

This internal pull, became the quiet force behind Vague Memories 5, a record that isn’t a reinvention so much as a return home. “The tracks don’t need a new angle or approach,” Jay says. “The process for me has always been the same, and there was no need to change it, especially if I wanted to capture the same essence I had before.”

For Jay, that essence has always been instinctive: pieces built not from concepts or plans, but from a kind of emotional drift. “Sometimes it’s guided by emotion or circumstance,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s purely random and ‘of the moment.’ I never set out with a preconceived idea of what I’m going to create. This was no different.”

Across the five instalments, the series has formed an unbroken thread running through Jay’s creative life. Listening back to earlier entries, he feels a sense of maturity, “maybe that’s more clarity about what I’m trying to convey musically,” he reflects, but he doesn’t intellectualise it. For Jay, it’s emotional clarity, not technical refinement. “Each release feels less muddy to me, but maybe that’s just how I experience them as the artist. I’m sure anyone else would experience them their own way, and there’s beauty in that too.”

One of the most distinctive elements of Vague Memories is the way it blurs the line between abstraction and reality. Beneath the foggy synths and stretched drones, you hear hints of the world: distant conversations, room noise, atmospheres carrying the outside in. They’re subtle, sometimes barely audible, but they ground the music in something lived rather than imagined.

“They’re a mix of self-recorded atmospheres and cool ones I’ve found over the years,” Jay says. He uses them not as clues to a narrative but as textures, a way of stitching emotional realism into pieces that might otherwise float away. “They help ground the tracks in some kind of shattered reality.”

If earlier instalments leaned more heavily on sampled messages or clearer voices, Vague Memories 5 is more abstract, less like a diary entry and more like a memory smudged at the edges. The result feels internal, private, and, paradoxically, more universal.

At the center of Vague Memories is the long-form structure that Jay gravitates toward instinctively. “It’s probably the format I get the most out of creatively,” he says. “It allows me to explore whatever direction I want.”

He traces this affinity back to the extended pieces of Ricardo Villalobos or Radio Slave, tracks that stretch far beyond conventional runtimes and allow the listener to disappear inside them. The pieces that make up Vague Memories are softer, more spectral, but the principle is the same: creating spaces where time loosens its grip.

“Pacing is key,” he says. “I like each piece to ease in, reach a zenith or climax, and then almost exhale. I don’t know if it’s been fluke or design, but I think each release has achieved that.”

Immersion is the goal. “Headphones on and just zone out,” he says simply. Vague Memories is music designed not to be heard, but to be inhabited.

Though his music feels solitary, Jay’s creative world is anything but. As the founder of Absolute Loss, he’s spent years curating, releasing, and elevating music from artists he grew up with, producers, DJs, and lifelong music obsessives. “It’s been a privilege to be trusted to release and promote music from so many talented artists,” he says. “I don’t think you can help but be inspired by people you respect.”

This influence isn’t literal, no direct stylistic borrowing, but it shapes the environment Jay’s own work grows in. “I don’t doubt I’ve taken inspiration from conversations or time spent with any of them,” he says.

Despite the emotional continuity, Jay’s toolbox has evolved. The past few years have seen an explosion of new soft synths, effects, and generative tools, innovations he’s welcomed with the curiosity of a lifelong music nerd. “The nerd in me wanted to discover new approaches,” he admits. “The outcome I was looking for was the same, but any opportunity to explore new things is always exciting.”

The result is a series that sounds unmistakably like Vague Memories, but rendered with a modern subtlety, textures that smear more delicately, atmospheres that feel more three-dimensional.

For someone whose music is deeply personal, almost private, Jay admits it took him a long time to accept that other people form their own emotional attachments to it. “I’ve always made music for myself primarily,” he says. “But I’ve realised that others invest in it too. If it can resonate with someone in the same way it was conceived, create an emotional moment for them, that’s about as good as it gets.”

That simple hope, quiet, sincere, unforced, sits at the heart of the series.

So what does Vague Memories 5 represent for him? “It’s certainly a continuation,” he says. “Just a restart of more to come.”

He speaks of the next instalment with the same excitement he brings into the studio each time he starts something new. “I don’t know what is going to be created. It’s the same whenever I head into the studio, close the door behind me, and fire up the computer, I get goosebumps every time.”

In the end, Vague Memories 5 isn’t a culmination or a reinvention.

It’s the sound of an artist stepping back into a place that has always been his truest creative home, quietly, instinctively, with the lights low and the world outside dissolving into soft, familiar blur.

Vague Memories 5 is available from 24th December 2025 on Digital, Vinyl and Ltd Edition Cassette from the Absolute Loss store

It will also be streaming on all major streaming platforms.