BRIAN D’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, has been one of the brightest stars in Scottish music for some years now, having burst into view in 2011 with his Highlife and Oh My Days records for the Huntleys + Palmers label he co-runs with Andrew Thomson. From Glasgow but of Goan descent (“GlasGoan”, as he is fond of terming it), D’Souza’s music skilfully blends influences and, frequently, collaborative contributions from around the world with the European and American dance music more commonly heard in clubs in this country. His second full-length album, Theory Of Flo, was an inspiring update of this limitless way of working and included collaborations with Ghanaian singer Anbuley and various Cuban musicians, as well as the likes of Shingai Shoniwa of The Noisettes and Richard Thair of Red Snapper. Praise for the record duly rolled in from all of the right places, but the aftermath of its release didn’t quite go to plan.

“Theory of Flo initially raised my profile quite a bit because of all the press around it, but the complexity of getting the collaborators together meant that the big plans we had to tour it as a live act around a lot of festivals last summer never happened,” D’Souza tells me. Instead, he and drummer Laurie Pitt of Golden Teacher played around a dozen shows that were a live variation on the Sun Ritual parties held by D’Souza and Thomson’s Highlife club night. The Sun Ritual events have been a yearly fixture in Glasgow and Edinburgh for several years now, and have evolved from a tongue-in-cheek celebration of sunshine in the middle of winter into a more fully realised contrast between northern winter darkness and the heat and sounds of Africa, India and elsewhere.“I came to see last year as a year of transition,” D’Souza explains, “So the live Sun Ritual shows we did were a good way of moving out from where I’d been with the album. Working with Laurie was new and exciting, and we progressed the musical idea of the Sun Ritual events a lot, with ambient-drone stuff early in the set gradually giving way to ecstatic, hands-in-the-air music and full-on lights later on."

"We got lucky with where we were able to take the parties too. The first place we were asked to do one was in the Arctic Circle, in Tromso in Norway, which is kind of the perfect setting. It was a party in January where they celebrate the first light reappearing after weeks of darkness. I love listening to the people there talk about how everyone lives under artificial sunlamps and goes a bit crazy during that time... it’s a bit messed up, but they’ve got their own amazing sense of humour about it,” he laughs. “We took those shows to various great places in Europe after that, anyway, which was a good way to move away from the album and onto the next thing.”

That next thing is a stripped-back, pastoral two-tracker called The Soniferous Garden for the Sofrito label, whose reissues of lost or obscure records from around the world have been a huge influence on D’Souza and Thomson for many years. The title and idea for The Soniferous Garden, as D’Souza states in the release notes for the record, are taken from and idea of ecologist R Murray Shafer of a ‘garden of acoustic delights’ to help us escape from our noisy and oppressive world.

The trippy, transcendental music on the record was conceived in Kampala, Uganda, in 2015, when D’Souza was in the city for a cultural exchange project, and the tracks feature contributions from local artists Mame D’iack, Hakim Kiwanuka and Giovanni Kremer Kiyingi. “I recorded the bass tracks with the guys in Kampala and then worked on it at home for a few months in 2016. The record was meant to come out in 2016 but as usual everything was a bit delayed and it ended up being this year. "That’s ended up being a good thing though, because I also have a couple of other EPs coming out soon on Mule Musiq, so The Soniferous Garden can now fit in as the first in a run of releases in 2017."I make music in small bursts when I feel inspired,” he continues, “and whenever I sit down to make something new I try to completely change my set-up. I don’t think I produced anything in the second half of last year, but in the first few weeks of this year I’ve produced a ton of stuff. I spent a bit of money getting new bits of kit and trying to build a studio at home where I can just go in and record stuff whenever I feel like it. In the past I’ve found myself falling into the trap of over-using technology and ending up making things too precise, but with the tracks I’ve been making lately I’m managing to get back to leaving things as they are, even if they’re a bit rough and raw.”

This new-year burst of creativity has arrived alongside a gradually gathering, unexpected second wind for Theory of Flo, thanks to a remixes project that was meant to be confined to one EP but has “grown arms and legs” to become four EPs, an album release collecting all of them together and a tour in March that will feature D’Souza DJing with the remix contributors at a clutch of shows in Europe, England and Scotland.

“I think these remixes are giving some more life to it,” he says. What we found when we released the album was that H+P is still a very small label and I’m still a very small artist, so it’s still pretty difficult to get music out there to people because there’s so much music around to listen to. So it’s nice that maybe a wider audience is going back to the original album because of the remixes.”

The list of contributors is certainly impressive – Kornel Kovacs, DJ Sotofett, Africaine 808 and Mehmet Aslan are among those tapped – and it is easy to believe their involvement will be pulling in significant numbers of new listeners to a record that deserves to be widely heard. The biggest remixer of all, however, is the enormously influential German DJ/producer Dixon, and the story of how his remix came about is a parable for the kind of dizzying, domino-effect way such things often happen in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-deregulated music industry.

“Andy (Thomson) originally didn’t want Waiting For A (Woman) to be remixed, because it was his favourite track from the album and he wanted to just leave it as it was. But then we heard (Scottish DJ/producer) The Revenge play what sounded like a special edit of it on an online mix. I got in touch with him and asked if he wanted to just give me the edit he’d made and we could release that as his remix, but by then he’d passed his edit on to Christian from Ame, who had passed it to Dixon, who was now playing his own edit of the edit, with an added kick drum and hi-hats and more of a big-room feel.

“And suddenly I had all these crazy Dixon fans messaging me going ‘what’s this Dixon edit of your track??’, and I was replying saying ‘I don’t know! I thought it was just The Revenge who’d done it!’. But anyway, Dixon getting involved made a huge impact of course, so last week we had the surreal thing of a track we released a year and a half ago being played by Pete Tong as this ‘breaking track’,” D’Souza laughs.

“It’s funny that the barometer of success in electronic music now isn’t record sales or Radio One plays or chart positions or anything, it’s ‘has Dixon played it, or has Jackmaster or Ben UFO or Four Tet played it?’ Actually Four Tet has never paid much attention my music,” he says, warming to the theme, “but he does really like The Soniferous Garden. “I sent him a demo ages ago and he tweeted at the time saying how much he liked it, and I thought ‘why couldn’t you have tweeted about it in three months when it comes out? You could have doubled our sales!’” he laughs. 

“But the release is looking good anyway," he concludes. "And you never know, maybe we can get Four Tet to tweet about it again! Then we can just sit back and put our feet up.”

Auntie Flo’s The Soniferous Garden is out now on Sofrito Super Singles