British producer Martin Wheeler, who made music as Vector Lovers, has died. The news came from The Black Dog, the Sheffield electronic duo, who posted a short tribute to Instagram on September 21: "Very sad to hear that Martin (Vector Lovers) has passed away, he was a lovely bloke." No cause of death has been disclosed.

Soma Records, the Glasgow label that carried most of his catalogue, added its own line: "Martin was a lovely person and a very talented producer." It is the kind of tribute that undersells what Wheeler actually built. He was never a headline name outside the IDM and electro corners of the scene, but inside them he was a reference point, a producer other producers paid attention to.

Where did the Vector Lovers sound come from?

Wheeler, who grew up in Reading, started releasing as Vector Lovers in the early 2000s on his own label, Iwari, putting out a self-titled debut in 2004 and Capsule For One the following year. The records leaned into hardware synths and drum machines with a clear debt to Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode: melodic, slightly melancholic electro that sat closer to IDM than to functional club music. That run got him signed to Soma, the label Slam co-founded in Glasgow in the early 90s, where he put out three more albums: Afterglow in 2007, a second self-titled record in 2008, and iPhonica in 2013, alongside a steady stream of EPs and singles.

"Martin was a lovely person and a very talented producer.", Soma Records

What else did he leave behind?

Outside the Vector Lovers name, Wheeler worked as Rosenbaum and as Badly Born Droid, and stepped outside his own catalogue in 2007 to co-produce Tracey Thorn's solo album Out of the Woods, her first LP after Everything But The Girl went quiet. Capsule For One got a second life in 2022 when Lapsus Records reissued it with new remixes and two previously unreleased tracks, a sign the record still had an audience two decades on.

Why it matters

Vector Lovers never chased the festival circuit or the big room. What he made was the kind of record that gets passed between producers rather than played out at 3am, and that is exactly the tier of the scene that keeps IDM and electro alive between the bigger waves of interest. Losing one of its working names, quietly and without warning, is the kind of loss that scene feels for a long time.