Circular emotion sketched out by Romy Church's e4444e

Romy Church, aka e4444e, started his third album I Spend All Day Drawing A Circle as a means of coping with stresses in his personal life.

FOR Romy Church music is at "the centre of what everything revolves around" in his life.

So naturally when the Newcastle experimental artist, known as e4444e, was struggling with several major shifts in his life last year, he turned to songwriting.

The meditative and reflective musical sketches, complete with field recordings from his backyard, weren't initially designed for public consumption.

"I was just going through some personal stuff and I was making stuff that made me feel better," Church said.

"I'm pretty 'ungrounded', so I wanted to make music that was calmer and more simple."

After receiving positive reactions from friends, Church decided to turn the ideas into e4444e's third full-length album I Spend All Day Drawing A Circle, out on Friday.

The title is taken from a short story Church wrote about "a dejected person who sheds most of his stuff and spends his time drawing circles with charcoal on paper."

It follows e4444e's early electronic EPs and his Australian Music Prize-nominated 2020 album Coldstream Road and it's 2021 follow-up Autumnal Eve.

e4444e - Sunday Taking Me To The Mangroves

I Spend All Day Drawing A Circle sees e4444e use more traditional instruments like guitar, than his earlier material, but he's played them in unconventional ways.

The 24-year-old also incorporated eastern influences into his music, including Laotian canon singing, where different voices sing the same note and pitch, but at different times, to create a droning cacophony.

Lyrically, Church also delved into his interest in Buddhism and Taoism, which he's been exploring in recent years.

"I would never try to outwardly say this is Buddhist music, because it's not, but it's definitely influenced by that sort of stuff," he said.

Church has almost completed a fourth e4444e album, but he's immediate plans are to tour throughout October with shows in Melbourne, Beechworth, Sydney and Wollongong.

There's a listening party for I Spend All Day Drawing A Circle at Franky's Noodles in Carrington on Saturday, and e4444e will perform at Jam's Karaoke on Sunday as part of West Best Bloc Fest.