Brighton Producer Jim Purbrick Builds a Downtempo Groove From the Creaks of Old Automata
Within seconds of The Handles Turn, a soft vocal is singing the title over a rustle of percussion. Underneath, the rhythm lurches like a machine that needs oiling. That lurch is real, because the beat grew out of field recordings of old mechanical toys being cranked by hand. The song is the work of Alien Alarms, the project of Brighton producer Jim Purbrick, and it came out on 7 March 2025.
Alien Alarms’ The Handles Turn sits in our electronic chillout and downtempo playlist below, and the act’s full coverage sits on the Alien Alarms profile. The single came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Hit play on the playlist, then read on to find out who it is for.
Who The Handles Turn Is For, From Downtempo Fans to Listeners Who Like a Song With an Idea
The Handles Turn sits where downtempo, breakbeat and experimental electronic music meet. It runs for three minutes and thirty-one seconds, and it never hurries. The drums shuffle rather than march, while soft keys and synth flutter drift over the top. Meanwhile, the vocal grows more spliced and treated as the song goes on. Plastic Magazine pointed it towards fans of downtempo electronic music, trip hop and experimental sounds, and that is a fair map of its audience.
For most listeners, the groove is the hook. Instead of locking every hit to a grid, Purbrick lets the rhythm wobble. As a result, the song feels loose and slightly uneasy, as if the machine might stop at any moment. Several reviewers traced that feel to Flying Lotus, whose records Los Angeles and Cosmogramma turned off-grid drum programming into a style of its own. Listeners who came to electronic music through that wave of beat-making will hear the lineage straight away.
There is a second audience too: people who like records built from real-world sound. For example, Matthew Herbert made a whole album, Plat du Jour, from the sounds of food and its production, and used them to make an argument. The Handles Turn works the same way on a smaller scale. It turns the creak of a museum exhibit into a beat with a point of view.
An Automaton Dreams of Escape, Then of Revolution
The story behind the song is easy to follow. It imagines the thoughts of an automaton trapped inside a machine, moving up and down each time someone turns the handle. At first the figure dreams of escape and a break from the grind. By the end, it decides that only revolution will free it.
The idea came from The Mechanical Circus, an exhibit at the Hove Museum of Creativity. There, Purbrick recorded the sounds of its cranked machines, and those recordings became the foundation of the track. Purbrick then shaped them in Ableton Live. Apricot Magazine also noted the triplets and granular processing that unsettle the bridge and the coda.
The lyric is short, and it repeats like the motion it describes. Its last move is a pun worth catching. Revolution means both one turn of the handle and an uprising, so the word that traps the automaton is also the word that frees it. Purbrick wrote both the words and the music. The video then carries the theme into Lego, with minifigures worn down into skeletons who end up holding pitchforks.
How Listeners and Curators First Responded to The Handles Turn After Its March 2025 Release
The first wave of support came from independent blogs and playlists. Folded Waffle covered the single and set it in the context of climate-minded electronic music. Mesmerized heard a lighter, more buoyant and wonkier turn for the project, with playful hip-hop glitches and heavily treated vocals. Meanwhile, Tape Ranger added it to its Indie POP! playlist on Spotify.
The response also travelled beyond English-language blogs. French readers found it through Iggy Magazine, which framed the song around automata dreaming of revolution. The Spanish-language site La Caverna focused on its irregular rhythm. In Brazil, Indie O’Clock picked up on the boom bap feel of its beat. In short, a song about one machine in a Hove museum reached French, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking readers within weeks.
The Brighton Community Around Alien Alarms
Alien Alarms grew out of a scene as much as a studio. Purbrick has made electronic music since the 1990s and released jungle and drum and bass on Formation Records in the 2000s. The project itself began after Purbrick became involved in climate activism in 2019. Since then, the albums 0 To 1, Android Dreams and Utopia Or Dystopia? have followed, with The Handles Turn the first release of 2025.
The live circuit matters just as much. The project has played Splitting The Atom at the Green Door Store in Brighton, CRUX A/V in London and The Underdog in Cardiff. It has also been a regular on Fresh On The Net, where readers voted the earlier track Alone into the Fresh Faves in October 2024. Collaboration is part of that community as well, with releases made alongside vocalists Rebecca Hill and Linda Ronald.
GetMusic.News’s curator team: “The Handles Turn hides its argument inside a loop you could hum to a child. By the time the last line lands on revolution, the listener has been nodding along to the very machine the song wants to break.”
For listeners new to the project, The Handles Turn is the easiest way in. Start there, then move to the albums for the bigger and darker statements.
Stream Alien Alarms on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud. Follow the project on Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, and the YouTube channel.
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