When we spoke recently, however, he was a long way from his desert home - some 11,000km away in Greece’s Ionian Islands. “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid and spend around three months of the year here now. It gets too hot in the desert during summer, and I need to be around some water,” he explained.

Situated off the northwest coast of Greece, the lush archipelago is a world away from the desolate California landscape Adam fell in love with all those years ago. A move which began, funnily enough, with a New Year’s resolution.

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“My 20s and 30s were pretty crazy and I was constantly on the road. I’d spent so much time around so many people and was craving some hermit time. I wrote down a list of things I wanted to accomplish: Buy land, build a house, take up archery. I found this place for sale in the middle of the desert that was so beautiful. I couldn't believe you could actually live there – it stole my heart. Long story short, I bought the property, moved an old Airstream trailer out there and started figuring it all out.”

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It sounds idyllic, sure, but making the off-grid dream a reality took serious grit and determination. Building his compound meant Adam had to turn his hand to everything from plumbing and electrical work to carpentry, solar power, and even digging his own well - a process he described as equally gruelling and rewarding.

“When you've lived without running water for two years and then dig a trench a thousand feet down through rock to pipe in a tap and a shower, you no longer take anything for granted. The satisfaction I get every time I have a hot shower is immense.”

For all the solitude, Adam soon discovered he wasn’t the only one drawn to life in the desert. “Moving out there, you meet other people doing the same sort of thing you are, building a house off-grid, and you realise, ‘Oh, these are my kind of people.’ Next thing you know, there’s a whole community of other hermits that you're hanging out with.”

When I suggest a symmetry between his retreat from mainstream society and the music he was making at the height of his DJ career - namely the 2003 crossover single ‘We Want Your Soul’, a funk-fuelled swipe at consumer culture and the invasiveness of corporate influence on modern life - Adam is quick to temper the comparison.

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“Those concepts are always present in my psyche, but I wouldn’t say there’s a correlation,” he replied. “It’s kind of crazy - that track was written before the internet or social media was a thing, and now all that stuff has become hyper-amplified. The media landscape might be totally different now, but the agenda is still the same: to shape our habits. Back then it was more about consumerism; now it’s fundamentally about controlling how we think. “These days I’m concerned about big tech surveillance. Palantir, specifically, concerns me deeply. I feel like maybe it’s time for a contemporary follow-up to that track. The fodder is certainly there for inspiration. I just haven’t found the hook yet.”

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While desert life meant stepping off the DJ treadmill, Adam never stopped making music. In 2013, he shifted gears to form indie-electronic band The Acid with Australian singer-songwriter RY X and producer Steve Nalepa, releasing their haunting debut album Liminal the following year. The experimental film score The Bomb followed in 2016, while more recently the trio resurfaced with the 2024 single ‘Breed’.

For now, though, The Acid is on hold. “We still have a lot of unreleased material, but I think we're all in different places now. I mean, literally geographically. If we actually got into a room, it might be different,” explained Adam. “To be honest, I'm more excited about DJ culture at the moment, and I just have to follow where my excitement is.”

That lure back to the dance floor has seen Adam making his first club-focused music in 16 years. The result is the Transhuman EP, a three-track collaboration with Duncan Forbes, one half of revered electronic duo Spooky. In keeping with the unlikely twists that seem to punctuate his life, the pair reconnected by pure chance in the Ionian Islands.

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“My friend called me up one day and she was like, ‘Hey, there's this DJ from the UK renting my house and he knows you.’ And it was Duncan. He’d literally rented my friend's house with his family for their summer holiday.”

The fortuitous encounter rekindled a relationship stretching back three decades, though it would be another few years before the pair found themselves working on music together.

“We’ve known each other a long time. I first met Duncan in 1995 when I interviewed him for a magazine. A couple of years later we both played Vibes on a Summer’s Day at Bondi Pavilion. Spooky’s ‘Relief’ was also on my first Coastal Breaks compilation,” recalled Adam. “When we bumped into each other again, we were just pals for a few years. I’d play him stuff I was working on and he’d give me feedback. He was really into what I was making, so we eventually decided to make some music.”

Essentially three dub techno cuts with murky breakbeats and the shadowy atmosphere of early Basic Channel records, the Transhuman EP is the first new music released on Adam’s famed Marine Parade label since 2009. Several other labels were considered, but ultimately none felt like the right fit, so reviving Marine Parade became the obvious choice.

“I've always self-released my music. The only time that didn’t happen was with The Acid, so it just made sense,” said Adam.

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And the Transhuman EP is just the beginning. A second EP is slated to be a solo effort from Adam, followed by another collaboration with Duncan, while a fourth release will come from English breakbeat duo and old friends, Evil Nine.

“I’ve been hammering those boys to finish some new music,” said Adam. “I'm just trying to take things slow and see how it develops. It's only been a month or so since we announced to the world that the label is coming back, but it feels good and we’re getting a lot of great feedback. It also gives me some accountability to finish music. It’s like, ‘Okay, we need releases, so I've got to finish them!’ I think a lot of the material will be my own.”

If Adam’s forthcoming solo material is anything like the Transhuman EP - or his recent DJ mix for John Digweed’s Transitions radio show - we can expect something far removed from the abrasive sound he was pushing in the late 2000s. If anything, he sees this new chapter as an opportunity to return to his roots.

“If you listen to the first Coastal Breaks, it was kind of deep and quirky, and I don't think it's a million miles away from where I'm at now. For a while in the late 2000s, I went kinda rocky and noisy, but I think I'm closer to where I started in the first place; a bit deeper and more experimental.”

Although he never fully left, playing a few shows each year, he’s now ready to focus on DJing again, this time without the pressure to chase big commercial festival stages.

“It honestly feels like I'm starting from scratch again,” he said. “I might have been away for a long time, but I’ve always been paying attention. I never stopped listening to or discovering new music.”

For an artist who once resisted being pigeonholed as ‘that breaks guy’, Adam seems happy to be returning to the scene, this time free from the shackles of any particular sound or expectation.

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“It’s exciting. I feel pretty damn lucky.”