GLASGOW producer Gary Caruth has created some of the most considered, slow-burning electronic music of the last few years under the name Sad City. His career, which has so far taken in three EPs in five years, has been a similarly slow builder, but with his excellent debut LP coming out on the Emotional Response and Meda Fury labels tomorrow, and blanket praise thus far for his bucolic, textured electronica, the virtue in his patience is obvious.

Born in Bangor, Northern Ireland, Caruth moved to Aberdeen for university, which is where his early experiments with music started to become a little more serious. “I first started tinkering with music back home in my mid-teens, and then in Aberdeen I began doing noisy, improvised live electronic stuff with my friend Julian Lynch (now of the band Real Estate). I gradually realised though, that you can’t really capture the feeling of that on record, and that if I wanted to actually start releasing records I needed to write things rather than just doing improvised stuff.”

With Caruth’s post-uni move to Glasgow came the beginning of his solo Sad City project. A first EP, Gestures, appeared in 2011, but it was two EPs in 2013 and 2014 for the London label Phonica that really began to bring his name to prominence.

Caruth’s music strives to create a palpable sense of “place” – something you could say about a lot of atmosphere-focused electronic music. His commitment to the cause goes well beyond that of most producers, however. Field recordings of voices, birds, tides, cars, and countless other things have long been a central plank of his production technique, and have added a striking sense of texture and atmosphere to his records that couldn’t have been achieved artificially.

“I first started taking field recordings on an old dictaphone when I was about 16 or 17,” he recalls. “Hearing musique concrete a little later was what really got me into it though, in particular the work of (legendary French composer) Luc Ferrari. After that I started to listen to people like Chris Watson, whose work is more focused on pure field recordings.”

Prior to the album, the prominence of field recordings and the meshing of Caruth’s music with the sounds of the outside environment were most notable on the 2014 EP Introduction To Lisboa / Sloe, the first side of which is, true to its name, a full-blown homage to the Portuguese capital, based on recordings taken on a holiday there.

“I actually took some equipment with me so I could sketch the tracks out while I was still there, which I think really helped make them sound as close to the city as possible,” he says.

“With this album, rather than the field recordings being tied to a specific location, I’ve tried to create a new environment for the music to exist in, as arsey as that sounds,” he laughs.

“If you go to a beach and have a speaker and you’re listening to music with some mates, you don’t want to remove the beach from that,” he continues.

“The amalgamation of music with the natural environment is essential to that experience and that’s something I’m trying to do with my music. With noise-cancelling headphones, music can end up isolated entirely from the environment around you, which to me isn’t very natural.

“I’m hearing outside noises as I’m making this stuff, so to then isolate it from the outside environment when you’re listening to it strikes me as the wrong thing to do. It may work for other people’s music, but for mine I think keeping the link with ambient noises and the outside world is vital.”

Caruth says he tends to record in batches, and Shapes In Formation was eventually made in a relatively short time, though some of it was profoundly influenced by tracks he had made years previously.

“I had spoken with Emotional Response and Meda Fury about doing an album,” he says. “I’d sent tracks for it, but I then I decided I’d moved on from those songs so I scrapped them and started again. They influenced what I went on to make, but I got to the point where I felt I had to start again and do it in one continuous session or it would have felt like a collection of odds and ends.”

Three digital bonus tracks accompany the album and are the primary surviving material from what was originally to comprise the record.

Caruth makes music almost constantly and sees Shapes In Formation as just the beginning of a deep exploration into the meshing of environment and music. Plans for a fleshed-out live show are afoot, though in keeping with the gradual way the Sad City project has developed, he’s happy to wait for the right time.

“I’ve done a load of Sad City live shows on my own,” he says, “but playing most of the stuff I actually release would be physically impossible for me on my own – I generally have to write a load of new material when I play live so I know I can actually play it. So eventually I’ll try having a band I think.

“The key part of that for me would be a really excellent drummer, because I think live drums and electronic music are a wonderful combination. I have this image in my head of a drummer who can do the best free jazz drumming, but drummers of that quality aren’t easy to find, so I think it’ll probably be years rather than months before that plan comes to fruition.”

Like his records, then, the full-band Sad City live show is something that’s likely to take a long time to appear, but be thoroughly worth the wait when it does. In the meantime, we have one of the year’s finest albums in Shapes In Formation to enjoy, preferably with the windows thrown wide open and the noise-cancelling headphones lying outside in the street.

Sad City’s Shapes In Formation is out tomorrow on Meda Fury/Emotional Response.