THE small-town artist who packs up one day and goes and makes it in the big city is just about the most well-worn archetype in music. A less common development is the same artist frantically hitting the “eject” button a few years down the line and heading back where he came from. And even less common is the decision turning out to be the best artistic choice of his life.

The last couple of years have been tumultuous for Colin Bailey. Born and raised in Oban, Bailey attained both critical and commercial success in the mid to late-00s as the gothily face-painted producer Drums of Death. His music, a pacy and exciting blend of techno, house and electro, opened doors at will: he worked on the 2009 Peaches album I Feel Cream, toured in the US with her and Hot Chip, and remixed Tricky and Franz Ferdinand. Things could barely have been going better, but then came a major-label deal, and, not long afterwards, a huge and rather troubling realisation.

“One of the most vivid lessons of that time for me was that nothing that I want to do in music can be done under major record labels,” the friendly and engaging Bailey tells me from the large shared studio in Oban he now works from. “They can work for some people, without doubt, but it just isn’t where I want to be.”

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Bailey, an artist influenced in his formative years by the likes of Optimo and John Peel, spent a couple of years “trying to be normal”, working with Azealia Banks and the Black Butter label, but feeling a growing emptiness at the heart of the world he was inhabiting. “Eventually I realised that I’d been working really hard to get up this mountain, but that it was the wrong mountain. All of my friends, the people I respected and who were making the records I really loved, were over on another mountain. I’d climbed a mountain that would let me buy houses and big cars but that was making me hate music. I realised I wanted to make weird, cool records that my friends liked instead of the pop stuff I’d found myself heading into, and I realised that to do that I was going to have to do a very hard reset on my life, hopefully without totally detonating my whole career in the process.”

It was clear that Bailey had to change everything, but where he should go and what he should do didn’t come to him until a short visit back to Oban for his brother’s wedding. There he got to know a fellow Oban music producer who had a studio about a mile away from Bailey’s parents’ house. He went to take a look and decided to move back almost on the spot. “I killed Drums of Death at that moment, and immediately stopped making money,” he says.

“That was a very difficult but necessary thing, because under that name I’d become used to playing terrible clubs where people go around talking about ‘the drop’, when the clubs I want to be playing in are ones where obscene amounts of Afrobeat records are being played. I was really lucky that when I finally realised this I could move back up to my family home to make it all happen – it’s very cheap for me to be here and that’s allowed me the space to totally reinvent what I do. I couldn’t have done what I’ve done if I’d stayed in a big city, as much as living in London was actually very useful to me, and introduced me to a lot of wonderful friends and collaborators.”

Austin Ato, the alias that Bailey is now working under, is a nod to music theory (his great friend Brian D’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, who Bailey quotes several times during our conversation, once told him that the problem with being signed to a big record label was that he ‘knows too much about music’). “The term ‘ostinato’ means a repeating or looping rhythmic or melodic piece of music,” Bailey says. “This essentially describes a key feature of house and disco, so I turned it into someone’s name.”

Bailey started work as Austin Ato as soon as he got home to Oban, working with a new sound palette primarily informed by gospel, soul, disco and house, and says the last 18 months have been the most productive of his life to date. “Beyond all of my excitable rambling about this move I think having a separate place to go to work is the most important thing of all to me. Not having a place to clock in and clock out of is deeply unhealthy, and I did it for ten years. Here I have this wonderful place to go to and work, it’s surrounded by trees, and you can open the door and blast things out as loud as you want and nobody will ever hear you.”

A single for Futureboogie is coming next month, and the celebrated London label/record store Phonica will put out another the following month. “When I first started making this stuff I talked to a friend in Glasgow who runs an amazing, cool label that I love. He said to me, ‘it’s really nice you’ve sent me this Colin, but you can do better than us’. Which left me at a loss really as his label is one of my favourites anywhere. Eventually though I sent some stuff to Simon from Phonica. I think the email he sent me back in which he said he wanted to sign every track I’d just sent him, was one of my favourite emails that I’ve ever received. That was the moment when I knew I was on the right track.”

It’s clear that Bailey is still coming to grips with the unusual move he has made, and likes to be reassured of its sensibleness and validity. At one point in our conversation, he asks me straight out what I personally think of his decision. I tell him I think he’s lost his mind and very probably ruined his life, before hurriedly and loudly revealing the joke, lest this be a little too soon for such quips. His decision actually looks like a masterstroke – he has acted decisively on the fact that his brain “just isn’t made to have endless stimuli firing into it 24 hours a day”.

“Oban is a side-step,” Bailey says, “and who knows, maybe I’ll go mad and move back to a city sometime soon. But for the now I’m really happy, and living in Oban is allowing me the space to set up the thing that will guide the rest of my life.”

Austin Ato’s Music Will Save The Day is out on Futureboogie on September 22