Lets start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
my first encounter with creating electronic music was at my friends studio in the mid 90s where he had a roland juno 106, Moog Prodigy and Boss DR660. i would play around with them a lot when i visited and he eventually offered to let me borrow them for a while. from there i got obsessed with all the different sounds they could generate and wound up buying a minidisc four track to record these experiments and explorations. so i suppose the tascam minidisc four track was my first purchase. i eventually convinced my friend to sell me the juno, he wouldn’t let go of the moog though unfortunately. my first synth purchase was a nord lead a few years later.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
i think i’m on the tenth iteration right now. i would never say there’s such thing as a “final” setup as i’m always changing things around / swapping things out. i’ve become a minimalist when it comes to gear, very particular with what i have setup and that gear is always live and ready to go when i want to use it.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
my favorite is the eurorack modular synthesizer. it’s an endless source of inspiration and sound creation. there’s just so many worlds in there to discover! in fact, it’s all i use to make music these days. i create music entirely within the modular, mix on an rupert neve designs 5059 then from there the signal path goes through a BAE 500 series lunch box with eq and compression then finally it’s recorded to a stereo track in pro tools.

And what about the software that you use for production?
the only software i use is pro tools HDX to record the modular.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
ah there’s so much i wouldn’t know where to start… i’ve been really into different harmonic processing hardware with different transformer types so looking into more gear like that. figuring out what transformers are good for which frequency ranges and using different combinations for different spectrums to subtly bring forward various elements with warmth and color. i always have a long list of eurorack modules. there’s always something new coming out that can inspire creativity. too much to keep track of!

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
to me creating electronic music is centered around the design of each sound. that’s a big part of why i love working in the modular format, you can design each sound in your palette to have the right feel and cumulatively these sounds create a vibe that can more uniquely capture what you are expressing with whatever you are creating.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
pretty much every track i make is a document of a new technique. it’s a big source of inspiration just looking at the black canvas of modular and thinking “i wonder what happens if i do this?” next thing you know two days have gone by… that said, it’s easy to reuse the same techniques or repurpose them with other new ideas. i like to keep it as fresh as possible though, so there’s that creative energy of exploration while patching.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
right now it’s non-existent! i’m currently planning a setup that will allow me to perform multiple patches / tracks as i do on my album “system”. it’s tricky because the way i patch often uses a lot of resources for a singular composition, so i’m finding a balance between entire tracks with multiple parts that are programmable and performable as well as generative elements.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
my setup right now is really refined. everything is in arms length and ready to go when i want to use it. it’s really fast and there’s no obstructions in the way of being creative which is really great. i would love a window in my studio. i find the simple light of the day can be so inspiring. though its funny, so many years in a windowless room i’m not sure how i would react being able to see the outside world. it’s also important to me that my cats are nearby.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
i never really go in and say “i’m going to make a track today”. it usually starts with a curiosity of interaction between various modules and that spirals into music. generally when i make a patch it goes through a few phases. first i’ll get the overall main section of the track going. then i will refine the patch so i can perform the parts i want to control in real-time and leave other parts for the modular to have control over.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are you reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
after i record a piece i usually render it out and listen on my sonos setup around the house as well as on my phone in different environments. i love the process of listening back in different environments, especially when you play back for your friends etc as well. offers a totally different perspective which can go both ways. maybe you see the good in something you weren’t originally crazy about. or something you thought was really good you then realize is not so great etc.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
not typically to be honest. creating music for me generally happens during downtime while working on client projects though my post production sound design company jafbox sound. so instead of waiting around for client feedback or new picture etc, i’ll start patching to keep the creative energy going. typically once i’m in the studio i’m making stuff all day. on off days i rarely make music. prefer to do other things / gather inspiration and perspective.

What gets you inspired?
nature is a huge one for me. documenting feelings from situations and energy from family and friends is also something i tend to do. another big one is trying out new combinations of modules or workflow can inspire a curiosity to create a lot of times.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
an interesting thing historically with electronic music to me is that various movements within electronic music output as a whole seem to be linked to the accessibility to a new or new take on musically oriented technology. these days eurorack modular is spawning a lot of people from different musical backgrounds to explore the worlds that modular offers which is great i think.

datachi.com

Lets start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
When I was about twelve, I was convinced that the only viable career I could ever have and love was writing and recording music. I’m sure this conviction seemed crazy and unwarranted to my family and friends in rural Florida since I showed virtually zero interest in taking lessons, learning how to play songs that other people knew, or displaying any signs of focused potential aside from locking myself away and writing and recording my own weird little half songs any moment I could get.

In spite of not having any way to gauge if I was actually talented aside from the “interesting sounds” I was making with our family piano, my dad’s tenor guitar and banjo, and a karaoke machine tape deck, my parent’s were completely and unwaveringly supportive of me. When I was 13 they got me my first pieces of “gear” all of which I still own and use to this day; a 1980 Alvarez acoustic guitar, a Shure SM-57, and a Yamaha MT50 4 track. From that point on I pretty quickly became an unrepentant instrument monger and my instincts and tastes for recording, composing and studio experimentation gradually began to take shape.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I’ve been through dozens of studio setups that have changed rather dramatically from being in tiny mother-in-law houses where I’d sleep on a blowup mattress underneath my marimba to a giant warehouse space in Oakland where I was basically just hoarding free pianos and pump organs. Right now my studio is in an old converted chicken barn from the early 1900’s with about 800 sq. feet of space. It’s packed pretty tight, but I’ve tried to delay the goldfish syndrome by not taking in orphaned instruments the way I used to.

While I’d hardly say that this is a final iteration of how I’d like my studio to be, it does currently work really well for me and allow me to capture most any sound I would want for both my albums and film work without having to utilize any virtual sounds. For me to be able to create the sheer amount of music needed for my normal workload and do so within a similar time frame as composers that rely on software instruments or sound libraries to demo or build their compositions, it was vital for me to focus my setup on being really versatile and simple so that I can track out a large number and wide array of live instruments without spending forever fussing over which gear to use. For this reason, I get so much use out of ribbon mics and vintage Electro voice dynamic mics because they are just so damn versatile and the sounds they capture just seem to slot together in the mix in really pleasing ways. I also have several matched pairs of Michael Joly’s modded mics (his Rode Nt-1 mods, and two sets of his original OktavaMod overhead condensers) that were a revelation to me and changed the way that I thought about gear in general.

The core of my studios functionality is based around my “hacked” old Ramsa mixing console that I had the output section upgraded, Opamps replaced and recapped, and the EQ amps switched out and gussied up a bit. It has a got some beautiful colored dust to its preamps, but it also is super useful because each channel has it’s own direct out which allows me lots of routing flexibility. I also use my Pioneer RTU-11 Mastering Reel to Reel daily both for mixing/mastering and for recording bounce downs of rhythm, horn and String sections. Otherwise my projects can balloon to a 100 or more tracks for film score work. For Preamps I use either the Ramsa’s upgraded Pre’s, an AEA Ribbon Mic preamp, Chandler Limited’s amazing Germanium Pre’s, or for really gritty stuff my Roberts AKAI Tube Preamp Hack.

I try to avoid in the box delays, reverbs and compressors as much as possible and almost always print my effected sound to tape or my DAW. For delays I use a Roland Space Echo RE-201, a Watkins Copi-cat, T_Rex’s Replicator and my dad’s old Akai 4 Track reel that I modded to have varispeed. For reverb, I have several reverb tanks of different sizes and styles that I’ll feed and impedance match with my Radial spring driver and for the large reverbs I use my homemade 5ft x 8ft plate reverb that I drive with a little custom tube preamp and an Auralex aural exciter (the Auralex is such an awesome tool to make an amp or reverb out of piano, metal trashcans or anything!). For compression I either use my Ashly Blueface compressor or my RNC, both of which are very much bang for the buck workhorses. For EQ, I honestly really only the Ramsa board or Fabfilter EQS in the box. The rest of my studio is just a boatload of instruments and effects pedals and a few very well-loved amps and DI’s.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
This changes frequently depending on what sort of sounds i’m experimenting with, but right now I LOVE my ’62 Gibson Falcon amp. It has both line and mic level in’s and I’ve been using its ridiculously awesome sound (literally my favorite reverb and tremolo of any amp ever) for everything lately.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use either Logic 9 or 10 as my DAW depending on if I need to utilize a 32 bit plugin or not.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
In truth I am always on the prowl for instruments and if I didn’t have the limitations that this studio space creates I’d probably find myself sleeping under another damn instrument again. At the moment, I’ve been thinking about all the ways I would use a celeste in my arrangements and it’s not very healthy since they are often 8-10k for just those cute little 3 1/2 octaves! I probably will own one at some point, but I’d venture to say it’ll be a very junky one though! I love recording gear very much, but unless it’s demonstrably and profoundly an upgrade over what I can get from simply modifying more affordable gear with good bones and personality then I tend to throw any big money purchases I make on acoustic instruments because of how they can transform the musicality of the whole room.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
As I mentioned in my studio setup description, I really love using transducers to turn other objects in amplifiers or resonance altering reverbs. For my latest album Ill Tides, I would often run my Jxp-3 through the transducer and use one my pianos or my harp as a sort of highly sympathetic speaker cone. This gave many of the synth lines a very spectral and acoustic quality that evoked sounds like an Ondes Martenot. I also very frequently play with varispeed with my tape decks and use it to change the range, timbre and character of my instruments. It gives me so many more possibilities to play with orchestration, that along with using ever changing tunings for my instruments makes my arsenal of sound feel much more vast than it is.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I discovered a few new performance techniques for the songs on Ill Tides using small handheld fans to play drones and evolving arpeggiated figures on the harp, guitar, Ronroco and piano. I bought several variable speed handheld fans and replaced their respective blades with different materials so that I could have felt, leather, fishing wire, cloth etc. as the material making contact with the strings. It made for some really otherworldly sounds that gave this album’s more ambient moments a very elusive texture that is somewhere between the song of cicadas and a synthesizer adjusting its pulse width. When combined with the other long sustaining instruments like pump organ, strings and bowed marimba it created the very kinetic and seething drones that defined much of the album’s sound.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
The last tour I did was a brief 2 1/2 week tour in EU last fall, but it was an incredibly clarifying and informative experience due to some some early technical problems that made me have to change my live setup on the fly. My step down 240/120V converter blew my portable mixer and multiple pedals/samplers I was relying on during sound check of the very first show. I had to very quickly rearrange my set and performance approach, since the setup I’d practiced with and performed with multiple times with was no longer possible. While it was definitely stressful in the moment! And it was pretty eye opening as to how I could pull off interpretations of my songs with a much more limited sound palette than I had previously thought possible.

My current setup revolves around guitar, voice, viola de gamba, an Akai MPX8 sampler to play percussion sounds and a few pedals. I play my 1959 Harmony Hollywood both as an acoustic and electric guitar (I put a LR Bagg lyric acoustic pickup inside) and run through two distinct signal paths so that with one guitar I can have pretty drastically different guitar sounds with their own unique effect chains running independently, simultaneously or intermittently overlapping. This was a big revelation for me since I was previous traveling with two guitars and was having to loop and switch instruments to create the same sort of complexity that I can get close to now in real time. My viola de gamba runs through the same effect chain as my acoustic and I use a Radial Tonebone PZ-Pre to toggle between the two and their distinct shelfing and EQ settings. For voice, I bring an Electro-Voice RE15 with me to run through a TC Helicon VoiceLive Touch for layering backing vocals and choir parts.

Right now the only change I would make between going on a tour that required flying and long travel would be to not travel with an amp, since it is a nightmare to tour with an amp that you really love and don’t want to see abused.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
This barn’s floor is made of thin redwood planks essentially act like a sound board. It is a very reverberant and live room. It is a joy to create and experiment here because sounds really move through this space and cause lots of instruments to resound. This quality is also its biggest downfall. I have had to live with the inevitable fact the floorboard creaks, outlier vibrations and other rickety artifacts will make their way into my recordings. Finding ways to temporarily tame the space for quieter recordings that don’t call for such rustic underpinnings is an ongoing project for me and one that I think could improve the quality of many of my recordings.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
In order for me to keep up with my workload I have to be composing constantly. I probably have to make somewhere around 30-40 completed, mixed and mastered pieces of music each month just for my film work. This rapid rate of production definitely changes the way you have to workshop and create compositions. Over time I’ve gotten to the point that as soon as I am singing a motif or rhythmic figure in my head I already have an idea of how I want to record or capture it, and the process between writing and recording has moved so closely together that they’re virtually simultaneous.

For me capturing the spark and intensity of a new idea is vitally important, and I’d much rather throw out more ideas I took the time to record that were half-baked than have fewer ideas recorded that I’ve potentially over invested in. That can play mind games with you sometimes and make compositions feel too precious and potentially overwrought. This auditioning on the fly approach works well for me since I don’t have one instrument that is my primary tool and I can simply just compose on whatever instrument a piece is calling for; be it saxophone, cello, percussion, keys, voice, etc. This removes a step that many have to take and allows me to skip the mockup or sketch phase and head straight into mic’ing and recording each instrument like it’s the only chance I get to realize the piece. I am sure there is a lot of wasted energy and effort in this approach. Yet, it’s the only methodology I’ve found so far that can produce the amount of music demanded of me, at the quality I expect of myself without having to bring in a large number of collaborators.

Though my thought process on orchestration and production of my film compositions are pretty comparable to the songs I make for my records, the steps I have to go through to see them to completion is quite different. When working with a film there are so many embedded parameters to take into account before even playing your first note and this makes the writing process be far more reactive than free composition would be. I most often see films when they are in a rough edit form. From there, I will begin composing a number of pieces just trying to hone in on the gestalt of the film. I spend this time trying to explore what the feel, instrumentation, production aesthetic and general vibe of the music should be to really augment and enhance the story. At this point, it’s a fairly tedious dance of making scene specific cues that are coherent and stand well on their own but are also cogent and intrinsically linked somehow to the rest of score. All the while, accounting for the frustrating reality that there will be possibly dozens of edits and changes that will each inevitably alter the timing and effectiveness of the music’s fit with the scenes. So, even though the cues have a very organic birth and thoughtful maturation, they generally draw to completion with a mad dash to some deadline set by a major festival or other often arbitrary date that forces you to do damn near impossible changes and tweaks to the score in order to accommodate the bevy last-minute timing changes that most every film goes through. While this most often works out just fine, and you soon forget all the stress and compromises you had to make, it rarely gives you the same resounding buzz that you feel when you know that you’ve finished an album. It isn’t really until you get to see a screening of the film, often times 6-9 months later, that you can really feel that sense of satisfaction of knowing that it now has a life of its own.

For making records, I often just have an overarching concept or “problem” that I try to explore through making a collection of songs. I often times will have multiple projects going that I chip away at whenever I’m in that train of thought or ruminating on one of their respective pieces until I have a breakthrough with one of them. Once that happens, I become total obsessed and will fixate on realizing what I imagine to be an “album.” At that point, I normally wrangle in Ryan Keane, the head of my record label Lost Tribe Sound, to bounce ideas off of him and share what I think is a roadmap to a record. From there he offers his unique insight and critique as someone that has known me and my work for over a decade and a friend who knows how to push my buttons in a way that I don’t let my most glaring habits, tropes and oversights get in the way of the ultimate goal. Which is curating the best possible listening experience. This normally takes the form of him pleading me to go back to the vibe and imperfect alchemy of the earliest mixes.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are you reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I try to take my songs into as many listening environments I can before signing off on a mix. The car, my stereo setup, computer speakers, earbuds and the like are all tested for my records. However as much as you test in a variety of locations, I think it’s best to trust your most familiar and highest quality setup to determine how good a mix or master is, since the range of potential environments listeners digest your music can be maddeningly varied and compromised…. and I prefer not to think about optimizing my mix to sound good off an I-phone speaker in a public bus.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I am a dad now and I find that if I’m not in the throes of work (which is now often through the middle of the night) I am spending any and all free time playing with my daughter or cooking overly elaborate meals. These aren’t really diversions by any measure, but the last few months I’ve spent so much of my life existing in baby time that when my wife and my daughter are asleep I’m so hungry to make music that I have tunnel vision.

That being said, I certainly procrastinate on certain projects that just can’t seem to get their claws into me. If I’m working on a film or commercial piece that has stymied my creativity a bit I will often procrastinate by just getting lost in making a piece of music that is the total antithesis of whatever I’m having to make just to exorcise my compulsions to subvert an overly “safe” directive. I really love basketball and that used to be my #1 procrastination activity. When I was struggling to find a productive groove, and I’d be just empty minded shooting jump shots or looking up scores for NBA games and get lost in a brief trance until I’d catch myself like “shit I’ve only got 2 hours now to finish this stupid jingle!”

What gets you inspired?
Aside from the simple yet inexplicable vagrant moments of daily life which will forever be the biggest source of inspiration for me, the documentaries that I get to work on constantly turn me on to so many inspiring, depressing and beautiful stories. They often send me down rabbit holes of research to try and better understand a deeper context behind the film’s subject matter and that sense of curiosity these film’s stir up in me is invaluable for my creativity. I also try to stay pretty tapped into current global events and brilliant journalists like Amy Goodman/Democracy Now seem to always brings me to a place of deep concern or sickening disillusionment. It is easy to feel so overwhelmed by the mine field of complexity that most global sociopolitical issues are mired in, that all I can do is vent through music.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I think we are in the midst of a particularly fertile time for electronic music. The power and scope of digital music making tools is virtually limitless and it has both greatly democratized the process of creating recorded media and opened a pandora’s box of sonic possibilities for composers and sound artists to create some very radical and novel works that simply were not possible until very recently.

It is also highly exciting and encouraging the resurgence of new businesses creating beautiful hand-made analog hardware that gives artists amazingly musical, powerful and reliable tone creating and shaping tools that previously were only available in vintage pieces where the components and schematics were far more difficult to come by and expensive to maintain. With all of the increased accessibility of such instantly gratifying compositional and sound modeling tools comes the need to really sharpen skills self-editing and restraint, but from what I can hear there is no shortage of shockingly talented people who in the face of such bounteous possibilities still find ways to sound as singular and inventive as the most recognizable artists of any other era of modern music.

williamryanfritch.com

Lets start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

Ed: My first real instrument was an acoustic guitar, nothing special but it had a pretty nice sound. My background is the common ‘in a band at fourteen writing depressing (and bad!) guitar songs’ ! But then the drummer in the band (my good friend James) got a Korg MS2000 and I started using my old Boss digital delay pedal with no input; with feedback and synths everything started to get a lot more interesting!

Anna: I learned to play on an electronic keyboard, which had a really cheap, fake sound, a very uninspiring piece of kit! But then when I was thirteen my grandfather bought me a real piano (which is the one we used on the record) and it was a whole different thing, so nice to hear the notes ring out properly, this really got me started writing my own pieces.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?

Anna: ‘Studio’ is a bit of a strong word for any of the iterations we’ve had! Our first setup was in a bedroom, right behind the Iceland on Bethnal Green road, battling to keep the sounds of reversing lorries and sirens out of the recordings! Now we’re somewhere quieter the living room does just fine and it’s only the occasional bird that ends up on the tracks!

Ed: Our set up is minimal but does just fine for now, we’ve got a few choice bits of outboard, two pairs of nice mics and a decent AD converter to try and make sure that the recordings are as good as we can make them. We’re hoping to add more outboard for the mixing stage as soon as we can afford it!

Tell us about your favourite piece of hardware.

Ed: We’ve got these old 1950’s tube preamps that sound beautiful, they impart a very real, three-dimensional quality to anything you record with them. I couldn’t be without my various tape machines either, they’re all cheap, consumer pieces (sadly no Studers or anything) but for loops they’re perfect. Maybe it’s because they’re cheap, they give a familiar sound that anyone who grew up with walkmans would be very familiar with. I love how they shape whatever source you record onto them and give it an intimate, homemade sound.

Anna: The Juno is my favourite bit of kit. It’s so warm sounding, I really don’t like ‘lawmower’ square waves! This let’s you keep things nice and round! We didn’t use it that much on this record but will be using it live a fair bit.

And what about the software that you use for production?

Anna: Production wise we used Logic on the record. Not for any particular reason apart from that we already owned it and it saved us shelling out for any other software!

Ed: We’d love to have a nice desk and a multitrack tape machine but unless the used gear market relaxes a bit that’ll have to wait! We also used Max/MSP (I’m quite a Max nerd) and although, in general, we tried to keep the computer away from this record there were a few instances where some of the patches I’ve built helped us create some nice soundbeds.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it? At the moment I starting to collect a little range of pedal effects. A friend showed me the Montreal Assembly ‘Count to Five’ which is really interesting.

Ed: That ‘Count to Five’ looks nice! Thanks for the tip. I’ll add it to my list, which is very long and (mostly) very optimistic! I’d love a Siemens/WSW desk, which is unlikely to ever happen, as they’re very expensive! I’d also love some nice EQ’s, nothing too surgical, just something that can do broad strokes, some better mics would be nice too! Instrument wise my dream would be an ARP 2500 but this is probably even less likely than the desk!

Anna: I’d just like a nice Cello and some Cello lessons!

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?

Ed: We used Max/MSP patches (and some synths) for drones and the tape loops for other textural elements. We also daisy chained reel to reel machines to create a multihead tape delay. I really like working with tape, it’s a slow way of effecting sound but the tactility of the effect more than makes up for it and it’s lovely watching tape running around the room!

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?

Anna: Writing vocal harmonies and string arrangements are things that are pretty new for both of us. We’re actually thinking to move further into this direction for the 2nd record and integrate vocals a lot more.

Ed: We’d subject the tape loops to various different processes of degradation to so how this changed the characteristics of the source; from sticking bits of cellotape over the playing side of the tape to putting the loops in vinegar solutions and outside in the sunshine. We also experimented with driving the input of the tape machines quite hard, it gives a distorted and compressed sound that’s really satisfying.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?

Ed: Can we let you know in a few months?!

Anna: We haven’t played the new record live yet but Ed is tinkering with a few different machines at the moment that may or may not be stable enough to bring with us when we play some shows next year!

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?

Anna: The space that we have here is really important. We’ve got the ability to have the studio in the house and this gives us a real freedom to record at any time of day or night, which is really liberating.

Ed: I’d definitely improve the sound dampening! It’s a pretty reverberant room and this makes it hard to get clarity into recordings with fast transients.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?

Anna: It really varies with each track. Some tracks come out of improvising together with very little addition and editing (‘Falling In’), some are me writing parts to things Ed has worked on separately (‘Blooms’) and some are Ed embellishing solo piano recordings (‘Trills’).

Ed: We try not to have a default method of writing together as I think we’d both get bored quite quickly if each track was made in the same way. Hopefully there is still cohesion on the record, in spite of this!

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are you reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?

Ed: For me it’s always monitors, then some speakers in another room, then cheap in ear headphones and sometimes the car. If it works in all of those places then it’s done. Usually it’s a fairly endless process of tweaking which ends when Anna tells me to stop! I don’t ever really feel like a mix is finished but sometimes you just have to move on. Otherwise there’d never be a finished record!

And finally, what gets you inspired?

Anna: Usually I don’t know where my inspiration comes from; it’s from everything and nothing at the same time.

Ed: I find making music meditative, it grounds me in a way that nothing else does, that’s why I’m inspired to keep making it.

dead-light.com

Lets start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
I was introduced to classical music while taking piano lessons as a kid and I was fascinated by the sound of it. Listening and trying to play classical pieces such as Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin waltzes, I was inspired to write my own music for piano although I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of my efforts. Besides a keyboard which I was using to practice my piano lessons, I had a Commodore 64 and I remember that it had a simple music software on it which I can’t recall the name but I loved it and spent a lot of time on it even though it was very basic and I had no idea how to put it into use at the time.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
My current setup is fairly simple an all digital. The only piece of hardware that I have and use regularly is my Zoom H4n recorder, which I use a lot to collect materials for my music. The rest is all on computer.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I’m running Ableton Live, Max MSP, Audiomulch and some plugins connected to few controllers. I started with Pro Tools and produced my first two albums on that system but I find Ableton faster and more fun. I still use Pro Tools but only for mastering. I have a small collection of soft synths which are responsible for lot of the sounds that you can hear on my albums. My favorites are Aalto and Kavio from Madrona labs and also Absynth and Reaktor from native instruments. Sound toys are also amazing plugins. They’ve been my go to plugs for years and I use them almost on every track I compose. I also use Soundforge for editing. I love the idea of transforming an audio sample to something completely different through heavy editing. By slicing the audio and moving the pieces around. Deleting parts, reversing them, slowing them down and applying impulses using Sound Forge’s acoustic mirror. It is a slow but very fun process with interesting results.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
There are plenty, I’m not quite sure where to start. My ultimate fantasy is to put together a completely hardware based setup and produce something without the use of computers. A nice modular system, some outboard pedals and processors, and a few reel to reels. At the moment there are two pieces of gear that I really love and hope to lay my hands on someday: a Nord Modular G2 and a Kyma System. Of course a faster computer, and better audio interface and studio monitors are always appreciated by a computer musician.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
As a computer musician, I think of sound design as a crucial part of the process. My pieces usually start with a single sound, something that I can build a track around, something that can prompt ideas. Therefore, designing that very first sound is an essential aspect of my work. I spent a lot of time working without any plans, just making all sort of interesting sounds and store them. I always start with a piece of recording. It can be a field recording or a sampled sound or a synth patch. I edit and manipulate it to the point that I feel like I have an interesting sound to work with. I also love the idea of recycling my old pieces, borrow some parts that I like and use them again in a new piece. Sometimes I try to transform them into a completely new sound or maybe simply bury them under other sounds. For example there is a single sound that you can hear on Unstable, White Forrest, and Homecoming.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I use convolution a lot for sound design. This technique has always produced great results for me, especially when I use unusual impulses, long pieces of recordings, field recordings, sounds of random objects and etc. It is always fun to capture tonal characteristics of one sound and apply it to another sound. There is a technique in audiomulch which I use sometimes by creating this huge and complex patch, starting with a looper device and run it through a long chain of processors. Then I put a few recorder devices in different parts of the chain and record them simultaneously, Finally I import all the sounds into an editor and comp them down to one clip. It is possible to recreate something similar to that in Ableton using live’s effect racks, creating different chains and switch between them in real time and record the results.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
My studio is quiet and has a lot of room which are the most important aspects for me especially the isolation, but I’m not happy with the design at the moment, I might make a few changes in future or maybe redesign the whole studio. The one thing that my studio really lacks at the moment is a nice view to the outside world. I like the idea of having a studio in bare nature.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
Well I don’t have a fixed method and each album and each track has a different story. I try to work all the time, record sounds, make patches, experiment with different plugins and techniques. I have a large sample library of all sort of interesting sounds so when I want to start a new piece, I go through my sound library and find something that I think I can use as a starting point, and build on it by adding instruments, small melody lines, field recordings and what not. I usually work on several tracks at the same time, going back and forth between them. I try to work on them for a few weeks and leave them halfway done and switch to work on another album or collaboration projects. This way when I go back and start again, I have a fresh perspective and new ideas. Most of the times I work without any plans but there are times that I have a complete idea of the album in my mind before starting, the theme, how the album is gonna sound and even the titles. For example on “The Garden” and “Arrivals and Departures” I knew exactly what I wanted and how the album should sounds like, of course they ended up sounding a bit different than what I had in mind but close enough.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are you reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I stop listening to the piece for a while, then I go back after a few weeks or so to listen and decide if I’m happy with it or not. Then I bounce down the mix and transfer it to my iPod and listen to it in different environments. The most important thing for me is to move away from computer once the piece is finished, and try to listen to the music from a listener’s perspective and try not to think of it as something that I can change or improve.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Yes, when I do I read or watch a whole ring cycle, which both are great sources of inspiration for me, so it’s not always a bad thing, sometimes you come back with really great and fresh ideas.

What gets you inspired?
Anything really, books, music, art, places, memories.

poryahatami.com

You have been playing music for decades. Was the concept for Memorybell already in your mind before you started working on this music, or is it a more recent artistic project?
Memorybell is a very recent project. I wanted to focus on ambient music following the release of Genus Euphony, but the way this album came into being was decidedly unplanned. I had been composing, shaping, and reshaping 20 or so songs but could never quite get them to feel the way I wanted them to. After I got out of the hospital, playing the songs was a uniquely unpleasant experience. They sounded awful to me and I had trouble remembering why I had written them in the first place. When a song felt wrong, I either threw it away completely, or focused exclusively on its essence (often just one or two chords) and explored that as granularly as I could. My close creative collaborator from The Very Hush Hush, Peter Bo Rappmund, had heard most of the songs in various stages of their composition. When I was able to play these new, post-amnesia versions for him he strongly urged me to release the record under a new name. The songs were so different from anything I’d ever recorded that it made sense that they be the start of a new project.

What are your main influences and sources of inspiration?
It sounds odd, but a lot of my musical ideas come from mundane objects. There is a particularly pleasant sound that the metal vent in the roof of my house makes when it lightly rains outside. In my old neighborhood, there was an old row house whose laundry exhaust whistled beautifully whenever it was in use. I could listen to the sounds of an oscillating fan all day long. I enjoy sitting still and listening to the world, though it’s far too loud for me. This is one reason why I’m drawn to expansive silences. I draw an immense amount of inspiration and solace from the quiet that descends during a snowfall. Less esoteric and more to the point, I find the following works very influential (in no particular order):

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
Air – Moon Safari
Billy Holiday – Solitude
Gas – Pop
Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

You seem interested in exploring extreme minimalism in your music, creating a slow, surreal experience for the listener. How did you come to develop such a style?
When I was studying classical music I was most attracted to dissonant passages. These “sour” notes and chords represented for me a warmer, more interesting way of approaching musical expression. I would sit for hours playing a single passage over and over, slow it down, and make subtle changes to it. As I grew older, I looked forward to this monastic repetition far more than completing whichever increasingly difficult piece of music I was learning. Starting in the early 2000s, I played bass in The Very Hush Hush. Like the piano, my method of approaching the bass has changed over the years but, even back then, I was more concerned with playing the most interesting note than playing the root. One well-placed note can heighten anticipation in ways little else can. My ears most want to hear what happens in the moments after a note is played before it dissolves into silence. That tension is powerful and shaping that tension is my primary concern.

In terms of your creative processes, are you driven by your technique, or do you let your emotions drive your composing and arranging? Or is it a combination of both?
Emotion is the driving force behind my music. To my ears, technique is only as useful as one’s ability to use it to express emotion. Technique for its own sake does little for me.  It’s not that I don’t admire accomplished musicians, I do; I fully understand the time and dedication it takes to become an accomplished musician. But when technique becomes the focal point music becomes hollow. There is a whole spectrum of emotional experiences to be had while listening to music and feeling awe at someone’s ability is only one. When I compose a new song, I try to keep my mind blank. Turn off my brain. Focus on what I’m feeling and sensing. What do I hear? What do I smell? Taste? I often begin with my eyes closed and open them once something interesting has presented itself. From there, repetition and manipulation of time and silence. How best to amplify what I’m feeling in the moment? What is the simplest way to say what needs to be said?

Is there is a special place or time that you write music?
There used to be, but now I’m restricted to when my toddler son is either asleep or out of the house. Otherwise, he’ll come bounding from wherever he is and start mashing the keys. Adorable and amazing, but not conducive to thoughtful creation. I’m lucky if I get an uninterrupted chunk of 20 minutes per day. Place is an interesting problem with the piano. You’re stuck wherever the piano is. My work around for this used to be scribbling ideas in a notebook, studying them when I couldn’t be at a piano, etc. Now, unless I’m particularly inspired and one of my 20-minute mini-sessions produces something more-or-less fully formed, I’ll hold a strong phrase in my mind for as long as I have to until I have time to explore it at the piano. This results in a kind of fermentation. The most emotive part of an idea tends to become stronger, while the less necessary, more ancillary bits float off. This won’t always be my song writing process but, considering my 2 year-old just had a baby brother, I don’t see it changing in the near future.

How do you work on individual songs? Do they keep evolving as you experiment with them over time, or do you find it quick and easy to finish each piece?
It depends on the song. Many songs are vague and gauzy at the start and I have to sit with them for a while before they reveal themselves to me. I try not to force anything onto them, just wait for whatever emotion it was that drove me to sit down at the piano to come out. Sometimes this process is quick, other times it is glacial. It took 14 years for ‘Somnolent’ to become what it is. That’s an aberrant example, though. Most songs take on average 2-3 years before I finally leave them be. So, at any given time, the batch of songs I’m working on tend to have been initially conceived several years previous. Occasionally, a song will emerge and I can’t figure out how to improve it. Those are always happy moments, though infrequent. I quite enjoy the long, slow evolution of a song. When one is finished, it may sound quite unlike it did in its infancy.

In regards to your artistic process, are you a perfectionist, or more of a relaxed creator?
A complete and utter perfectionist, though I’m trying to let that go. My compromise is to direct my perfectionist tendencies toward my process rather than toward my music, to stay dedicated to giving the songs room to breathe, to grow, to change. Rather than try to force the songs to be something I want them to be, I allow them to be what they are. Even if I don’t like the end result, being true to the process feels like being true to my nature. The most important part of my process is letting go. Ego can be a useful tool, in crafting personae, in pushing yourself, but I find it a barrier to making meaningful music. My best songwriting comes after I’ve processed whatever drove me to write a song in the first place. What remains after the dust settles.

Silence, and the ambiguity it evokes, plays an important role in your music. Is this aspect of your music planned, or do you improvise?
Very much planned, as much as one can plan silence.  I can never predict the affect any given length of silence will have, so I conduct tests. Do I add a single beat here? A measure of seven? Thirteen? It’s a little like introducing oneself to a strange animal. As consumers of popular music our ears have been trained to expect predictability in regards to rhythm. 4/4 and 3/4 dominate the sonic landscape. The ghost of the Western classical music tradition is persistent. The purposeful shirking of predictable time signatures is a good thing but if not approached carefully it can estrange the casual listener. When I shape the silence in my songs, I pay close attention to what my ears want. Then I give them something else. Unusual time signatures often do the trick, but I try not to employ them for their own sake. Sometimes a standard time signature alternated with an irregular or changing amount of silence has a magical effect. The ultimate test is if someone can’t tell that a song is in 17/8 or 13/4. The ideal is to make the unexpected feel natural.

Can you tell us about your experience of transient global amnesia and how it influenced the creation of this album.
In late February of 2014 my first son was two weeks old. He was curled up with my wife on the couch and I left to meet up with some friends. We had a couple of beers and I made my way home. It was lightly snowing. I walked in the house and my wife and son were still curled up on the couch. I took my son upstairs, swaddled him and put him in his crib, and put on my headphones. I woke up in a hospital roughly ten hours later on a gurney, obscenely bright fluorescent lights flashing over my face. I saw my wife and asked, “What am I doing here?” She patiently recounted the story of how I had come into our bedroom saying I couldn’t remember where I had been, what I had done, the people I had been with; how she had called the police, to whom I had apparently been quite charming and funny, who in turn summoned an ambulance that brought me to the hospital. My poor wife told me this story over forty times before it stuck. Tests were run; EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, toxicology screens. At one point, a group of medical students with clipboards surrounded my bed. Throughout it all, my wife sat holding our absurdly small son wondering if I’d had some sort of stroke. I was diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia, which is, maddeningly, a diagnosis by exclusion. Once everything else has been ruled out, that’s what you get, a rare condition about which little is known. Extreme stress, sleep deprivation, and excessive physical exertion are thought to be the triggers.

The effect was as if a bomb had gone off in my brain. All memories months into the past and future were turned to glass. The tests showed an increased sensitivity to light and sound. This proved problematic with a small baby at the house. I was given to carrying earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones with me for diaper changes. Going outside without sunglasses triggered a migraine. A screaming police siren triggered a migraine. A teakettle triggered a migraine. A loud sneeze triggered a migraine. I quit my job. The thought of trudging through that soulless routine coupled with my new condition caused me so much anxiety I couldn’t function. I was home all the time. When my son was sleeping, I had to do something. When my son was at day care, I had to do something. When I couldn’t sleep, I had to do something. I turned to the piano. The songs I had been working on for the previous few years sounded like boxes of broken glass. Some of them literally gave me headaches. To heal, I picked them apart, focused on the parts that were soothing, that felt right, and threw out what remained. I reshaped them, let them ring out into silence, and created something new.

Did you know beforehand that you were writing songs specifically for this album, or did you choose from songs that had already been written?
I chose from songs I had previously written, but completely altered them, post-amnesia. I had a concept for an album I had been pursuing before I awoke in the hospital. That’s the raw material to which I returned. At the time, it was important to me to force the issue, to make the collection of songs work even if they felt wrong. That’s when I really started focusing on silence. I threw out the superfluous, ornamental bits and chiseled the songs to their core. Then I wrapped them in silence.

The title of the album, Obsolete, is very evocative. How did you settle on this title, and what does it mean to you?
I really don’t like titling my own songs. When I do, they’re almost always non-sequiturs. I reached out to an old friend, gave him the raw, un-mastered tracks and asked him to title the songs. He suggested the title track be named “Requiem for Obsolete Technology.” A great song name, to be sure, but I felt single word song titles were more apropos, given my editing method and interest in silence. In general, I often feel like I was born a couple hundred years too late. The world is the loudest it has ever been, and for someone who craves quiet it is a struggle to remain focused amongst the head-splitting sounds of squealing brakes, screaming people, crackling electric lines, and wailing sirens. I like to imagine what the world must have sounded like before the industrial revolution. Actually finding a quiet place is becoming more difficult. I live in Denver, Colorado and the legalization of marijuana, along with our city’s policy of being as inviting as possible for new businesses, has created an immense influx of people. City streets are jammed beyond capacity, and what used to be an easy drive into the mountains has become an arduous chore. Hiking trails are as clogged as motorways. Landmarks are being vandalized. Quiet places are vanishing. So I create them in music.

Did you work on the songs for Obsolete individually or collectively? The titles of the songs suggest a link between them.
The songs I ended up including on Obsolete were originally written at completely different times. The only thing they had in common was the fact they were the ones I had been drawn to in the years and months leading up to my amnesia. When I slowed them down and picked them apart after my return from the hospital, I noticed new patterns and arranged their order on the album accordingly. I rarely worked on one song at a time. I typically shaped the whole set of songs at once. If I made a severe edit on one, it often let to a complementary edit on another. I touched on this earlier, but I find naming my own songs difficult. My natural inclination is to be abstract and sarcastic with names, but I felt it would be a disservice to the honest and existential nature of these songs to name them so. The titles of the songs are representative of various themes that were woven through my life when I reworked them. Koan is inspired by the Richard Brautigan poem, “Karma Repair Kit, Parts 1-4.” Ambulator is in reference to the Max Frisch novel, Man in the Holocene. Both of these speak to me on a level that is difficult to articulate. “Karma Repair Kit” is a reminder to be still and accepting. Not of anything in particular, but of everything in general. Man in the Holocene is a meditation on loneliness and struck a note within me during my recovery, despite the fact I read it a very long time ago; it just bubbled up out of my mind. The other song titles are fairly literal and loosely based on my friend’s suggestions. 2014 was unequivocally the worst year of my life. The amnesia wasn’t even the most difficult struggle, but I’m not going to elaborate. The songs are my way of processing what happened.

What’s the main intent behind your music? What are you trying to communicate to your listeners?
That sitting still, especially when it is uncomfortable, is important; that the act of listening, whether it’s active or passive, is important. It slows down your thoughts, so you can spend time with them. Depending on your type of mind or life situation, that may not be desirable, but then it is all the more impactful. Modern city life is fast and loud. We run around from place to place, from work to home, from the gym to the grocery store, checking our watches or phones, making sure we don’t miss appointments; little of that matters to our internal lives. We focus so intently on what we have to do that we rarely stop to think what we would like to do. Or what we should do, not only for our own happiness but also for our own mental health. Slow down and take a nap. Memorybell can help.

Do you have a lot of unreleased songs?
I rarely make a proper recording until I’m satisfied that I have a cohesive collection of songs. I have a few songs that didn’t make the cut for Obsolete, but if I do anything with them, I’ll probably chop them up and use parts of them in another project. I’ve reworked one song that didn’t fit the way I wished it had for Obsolete and will most likely include it on the next record. I don’t have a lot of unreleased material but I do, however, have a lot of unrecorded material. I don’t write any musical ideas down, I just run the songs through my head over and over. I have several albums worth of songs in various stages of completion floating in my brain. Sometimes I’ll carry a song around for years before I return to it. One song I’ve been working on for 19 years and it still hasn’t fully revealed its mysteries to me. My approach is that if something is worth recording, I’ll remember it. Thankfully, the part of my brain that stores my musical ideas seems largely unaffected by my amnesia.

Are you currently working on something? What can we expect next from Memorybell?
I’ve had my fill of reworking old material for the moment. I’m moving forward with my new approach and writing an album from scratch. It’s very freeing, and my process has quickened; I’ve let go of thinking of any given idea as precious, as worthy of meticulous appreciation. If something doesn’t feel right, it’s gone. If some essence of it sticks around, then it has merit and will find a place in some different form. It’s a looser and faster method than I’ve ever used before. I’m halfway done with the follow-up to Obsolete. The songs still breathe slowly and are still melodic, but it’s somehow…different. My main obstacle is lack of time. I have a 2 year-old and a newborn at home (both boys) and, unlike when I wrote Obsolete, I am now gainfully employed. My time to write is limited to naptime, or those rare occasions when I’m home alone. I’m finding it helps, actually. I carry around the songs in my head, tweak them, try different arrangements, and then when I finally have the time to play them and test my ideas out, the good ideas tend to present themselves more or less immediately. Whatever comes next will be looser and more organic.

granthazard.com

Interview by Wagner Hertzog for Hidden Shoal
Republished with permission of the label

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

I discovered the ‘Oxygene’ album by Jean Michel Jarre when I was a kid and that blew my mind. It was so different from all other music I heard before. Years later I was finally able to buy a used Roland Juno-6 and started playing in a band. But that was not really my thing, I always wanted to make pure instrumental electronic music. After moving to Berlin in 1990, everything came together, techno, academic computer music, computer science, and earning some money to buy equipment. I never had any formal musical education, but I read a lot and tried to learn by doing, and I like the fact that computers allowed me to bypass virtuosity in some ways. I could code an idea and was not forced to play it by hand. My Juno got stolen a few years ago, and I really miss it. It was modified to do some special things and it was used on all early Monolake releases.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?

The first releases both as Robert Henke and as Monolake together with Gerhard Behles were produced in my small flat in former East Berlin. I had one big room which was a studio, living room, kitchen, and bedroom all at once, separated by a lot of plants. Then I moved to an empty office building right at Alexander Platz, together with a lot of other artists. It happened that Andreas Schneider became my neighbor next room, with the first incarnation of his modular synths shop, Schneidersladen. My studio was on the 9th floor with a view over the whole city and I loved that place. At some point, we all had to move out and found a new home in the former print shop of a newspaper. I got a total crisis there, I did not like the atmosphere, and one day I took it all apart and left. I set everything up again in my flat until I moved out to a larger place. Then I had a phase where I wanted to do it all in software. That did not last long, and I built a very small studio again. Recently I changed it completely as far as the layout is concerned, but my choice of equipment became more constant over the years.

I don’t want to become too much of a collector. I love technology and I admire machines that have a history or are important milestones of technical invention. But it makes no sense to own them all, it would not change the music I make. I have some Yamaha FM synthesizers, a few early digital keyboards including a Synclavier system, a medium sized modular rack, and a lot of hardware reverbs. The hub of it all is my desk with a large screen and computer. There is no mixing console, just a small mixer for processing and routing of outboard gear and a big patch bay. I have eight speakers in my studio, which allow me to either route the stereo sound to a specific place or working in surround.

The studio is only a part of my work, I spend a lot of time coding and I am doing this deliberately not in the studio, but on my office desk. I learned that separating the process of instrument creation, and of using them is very important to me. When I am in the studio I like to work on sound, not on coding. And then there is my work on installations or audiovisual performance pieces which often requires me to rent a bigger rehearsal space.

For a long time, I was hesitant to dive into modular synthesis, I was not convinced I would benefit from it, but I got into it via a detour. I bought a Linn Drum and wanted to filter the sounds and apply envelopes. I built a small modular rack exclusively dedicated to that. And then one thing lead to another. It took me quite some time to find the right modules but now I am very happy with what I have there and it adds new colors to my palette.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

Nearly impossible to answer, I love them all. The ones I did not fall in love with are all gone. Probably my PPG Wave 2.3 is the winner, followed by the Synclavier. The thing with the PPG is that it sounds like nothing else, it looks like nothing else, and it has knobs to play with. It is complex with a lot of interesting detail, but simple enough to be intuitive. And I cannot get tired of its sound. It is the perfect mix of digital grittiness and analogue filtering. It is also connected to a few records, including ‘Exit’ and ‘White Eagle’ by Tangerine Dream, which were very influential for me, and sometimes I wonder if I like these records because of the sound, or if I acquired a taste for the timbres because of the records. The PPG to me embodies some sort of futuristic nostalgia.

And what about the software that you use for production?

For obvious reasons that is Ableton Live and Max. I write a lot of Max patches and Max4Live devices, it is part of my artistic practice, out of necessity in some cases, and for the fun of it in others. My laser works completely rely on my own tools, and for music production, I sometimes come up with small ideas which I then turn into a ‘special interest’ sound processing / generating device. The most prominent example would be my Granulator synthesizer which became part of the standard Max4Live distribution, and which I still use extensively. I almost never use plug-ins apart from what I create by myself or what comes with Live, which to a varying degree are also things I created. Operator is very much my child and I use it quite often, which is actually a surprise. It was created with the intention to provide a ’nice little FM synth’, and that was it. The reason why I am not diving into plugins that much in general is, that I enjoy the haptic side of hardware too much, and the combination of my hardware plus Max plus Live offers me far more than I ever can explore.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?

Not anymore. There are a lot of lovely historic instruments which I enjoy, but they are all on the same level of excitement for me: A Jupiter 8 is nice, so is an Emulator II, so is an Arp 2600, or a Prophet 5, and so on. Not a single one is totally above all the others, and having all of them, in my opinion, is the death of creativity. From a musical perspective, if I am looking for a specific metallic sound and I have a DX-7 and nothing else, I will find it quite soon. If I have 10 different synths with a similar concept, I might spend way too much time figuring out which machine to use, before even getting started being creative. The collector in me says I want it all. The artist strongly disagrees. Having a physically small studio helps.

However, I’d like to have a cathedral in my backyard, with a huge pipe organ. That would be nice.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?

I like inharmonic sounds and more dusty textures, I like the grittiness of early digital stuff. I don’t like resonating filters, especially when they sweep in a very obvious way. I like chorusing wide reverbs, and I don’t mind if they are grainy with a lot of audible reflections. Based on those preferences, there are numerous ways to achieve results I enjoy. I am a huge fan of FM synthesis, thus my collection of Yamaha FM Synthesizers, the development of Operator, and my love for the Synclavier, which offers a very different flavor of FM. The other big thing is granular synthesis for me, mainly for creating lush complex textures.

Some projects require a different approach, for my Lumière concerts, I developed a synthesizer which allows me to switch presets at audio rate, 44.100 times per second if I would push it that far. That created its very own constraints, which are reflected back in the results.

Perhaps worth noting is that I don’t find compressors useful at all. I really tried, and I end up each time bypassing them. Whatever compressors can do, I can do better with envelopes and volume automation. To my great surprise, I recently learned that Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel fame shares that notion with me.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your last album?

For the VLSI album, I made quite excessive use of my modified Linn Drum, which allows to dramatically pitch its samples. That in combination with filtering and envelopes from my modular rig contributed a lot. And I designed a specific synthesizer for the creation of dense layers of slightly detuned samples. That’s did contribute a lot to backgrounds on the track ‘Geometry Engine’. But the most important change was the fact that I mixed the album with a big console in a fantastic sounding studio together with Mark Ernestus, and that provided me with a lot of unexpected insights. I tend to do too many things alone, and collaborating with a person whose work I admire and who has in parts a very different perspective was an eye opener. It helped me to re-adjust my focus, and that already paid of for a remix I recently did.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?

The Monolake Live Surround setup is very straight forward: A laptop with Live, a multichannel sound card, a bunch of MIDI controllers. I wanted a system that I can setup and remove quickly, and that uses parts I can get pretty much all over the world, in case things break. It all fits in hand luggage. Lumière is the other extreme; three people traveling, lots of big heavy cases for lasers, computers, etc.

I always spend a lot of time thinking about what to control in a performance situation and how exactly. My favorite MIDI controller is an old Doepfer fader box. I learned to really articulate these faders, and if I assign the right parameters with the correct curves, I can turn that simple piece of gear into a very expressive instrument.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?

I need daylight. Working in a basement kills me. I also need a space that is clean and organized. That can be a cozy and personal space, but it cannot be cluttered. Every single item in my studio is there for making music. I’d rather compromise other rooms than turning my small studio into a storage space. I also spend a lot of time on work ergonomics, it took me a while to find an arrangement of instruments, speakers etc. which makes working fun and easy. I’d like to dive deep into my machines, and that’s impossible if e.g. a reverb is located in a rack 10cm above the floor. An example: I have an EQ which is routed per default to the output of my noisy Yamaha DX-27. That’s a killer combination, but I would not do it if I had to re-patch it all the time. The EQ is located near the DX-27 and that turns it into an integral part of the setup. Such things are important to me. By placing objects in physical proximity, I create a suggested workflow. It is like synthesizer design: if there is a nice know for filter cutoff, people will play it. Imagine a Roland TR-808 with a tiny display and +/- buttons for parameter adjustment…

What I miss is having more space and lots of plants. My bedroom studio scenario back in the days had that. In my dreams I have a very large good sounding room that works as a music studio, but also as a production space for my installations.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?

I have no single strategy here. Some works start from a conceptual framework, others emerge from toying around with the things in my studio. Often I have an idea, I try it out, and it does not do what I want, but on the way I find a detail that catches my attention. Then I try to move on from there. My work is full of detours. Finalizing music is, of course, the biggest challenge. I could change my pieces forever, I find it hard to make a definite statement. That’s were deadlines help a lot. Or a clear conceptual focus.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?

It is a painful experience very often. Hearing the work in a different context makes judging an already fragile construction even more difficult. But it is never the less quite important. I learn a lot from listening to my own music together with selected friends. Their presence alone changes my perception of what I am doing. My partner, Susanne aka Electric Indigo is a very helpful reference here. She is always spot on with here evaluations of my work. Playing my music to the wrong people before things are finished can kill it all. One wrong word and I discard everything. But getting feedback from people I trust, and who understand how to approach me in that fragile state is very helpful and appreciated.

I find it actually hard to prepare material for a live show after finishing a track or an album, I just want to move on and not being forced to reflect on what I just did. When I have to listen to my own music I am most of the time just super critical and tend to only hear the flaws.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?

I read too many newspapers, and I plan to stop that because it does not make me any happier these days. I’d like to improve my procrastination skills, though. Not less of it, but with higher quality. Like spending time with a cup of tea and a good book, or taking care of my plants and then go back to coding or working on music.

What gets you inspired?

Other music, mainly from a non-electronic context, concerts of friends of mine, going to museums, traveling, reading books, and still and forever my occupation with technology. My lasers are very limited machines of expression, they force me to think about what I want to achieve in a very specific way. That is difficult but also inspiring. I am also working on a project that involves learning a very limited and old programming language ( 6502 assembler ), which requires a totally different mindset than coding in high-level languages. Learning that involves reading computer books from the 1980s, and the funny part is, that there is a cultural subtext even in those technical descriptions. That provides inspiration on a very different level.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?

For a long time, electronic music was strongly connected to technological advances. New synthesis techniques became accessible to a broader group of artists, new interface concepts made it possible to create music in a different, faster, more intuitive way and that naturally shaped the result. We reached a point of saturation here, and technology as a motor for artistic innovation in the domain of sound lost its momentum. Envisioning a new genre emerging mainly from a tool perspective seems unlikely. The area where technology still provides limits is the visual side, and I guess the growing number of artists combining sound and vision reflects that.

Ironically the fact that selling music became much harder these days, could also mean one can stop thinking about it too much. I see a big chance in that evolution, and that’s a more introverted perspective. If I don’t need to worry about new technologies anymore, I can start mastering what I have. If I don’t need to think about sales, because they are so low that it is not big business anyway, I can focus on music which is very personal, instead of trying to copy what already exists and I can try becoming as good in it as possible.

And, times of apparent stagnation in history often turned out to be the moments before something new emerges out of known elements.

roberthenke.com

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
In the 90’s I was heavily involved in the midwest rave scene and did some DJing. Towards the end of the 90’s I started to get into the ambient and experimental side of electronic music, started to get more into DJing, and also started to branch out gear wise. So I guess my first piece of gear other than a pair of turntables was a BOSS SP-202 Dr. Sample. Shortly after, I had to sell everything to fund a move to Seattle and it took me until 2002 to afford a laptop, an iBook if I remember correctly. That was the first piece of gear that contributed to my current studio practice. Shortly after that I was invited to participate in a program called Super 8 that was part of the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in which non-filmmakers are given a roll of Super 8 film and a camera to make a film. I decided to score it as well, and that was the first public presentation of my work. Soon after, a coworker and choreographer was looking for someone to score her next full-length dance piece – she invited me and I went from having scored a three-minute experimental film to spending over a year composing a score for an hour-long dance piece. I guess you could say I got involved by hitting the ground running.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I have had at least eight different spaces over the years, always part of my living space, but I can’t tell you how many variations because I like to rearrange things quite often. My studio mainly changes due to my visual practice, either needing printer space, painting space, or projection space. My current iteration has probably had the most longevity, it has stayed the same for just over 2 years now. My audio setup has stayed pretty much the same throughout the years. It’s based around a laptop running Ableton Live, a mixer (currently a Mackie 802), an audio interface (currently an Apogee Quartet), some kind of MIDI controller (currently an Ableton Push 2) and of course a field recorder (currently a Zoom H6). In the last few years I have expanded a bit: slowly built a modular synthesizer over time, added a few pedals and this weird and wonderful little synth called the Drone Commander. I also have an iMac for my heftier video rendering needs. It is also tasked with all my administrative chores which is a gift when I am working with sound and don’t have to have emails and notifications buzzing in my face and ears.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
For a long time it was my Sony PCM-D50 field recorder, but after 10 years it had to retire and I have not had a chance to try its replacement. Because I have shifted away from field recordings towards modular synth I would have to say my current favorite is the Eventide H9 Harmonizer/Effects Processor. When I started integrating synths into my workflow it was really hard to wrap my head around their mono signals. Coming from using stereo field recordings exclusively, everything I was making with the synth felt dead and lifeless, one-dimensional. The Eventide H9 gives me the ability to place the synth in a stereo field and give it depth and space so it can sit more comfortably within a field recording. It also offers some really dense algorithms that can transform a synth or field recording almost completely. I have had it for just over a year now and I feel like I have only scratched the surface which is really exciting!

And what about the software that you use for production?
I have always used Ableton Live as my DAW, I have used Reaktor on and off for years, and different free things here and there as they appear and then become unsupported or outdated. I think software-wise, EQs are the most important tool in my studio. I use one or two on every track and on the master of pretty much everything I do. I used to use one called Periscope by Audio Ease that had 32 bands, but you could zoom in on a small part of the frequency range and that range would still have 32 even finer bands. It was amazing for getting really precise, but sadly it has been discontinued and became intolerably buggy for me about a year ago. At that point a switched to this beautiful EQ by Fab Filters called the Pro-Q 2. It has all the precision of Periscope without its severity. It’s amazing the kind of transformation that’s possible with just an EQ.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
I am quite happy with my studio right now and even paring down the modular, but I have always lusted after a rack-mounted Eventide Effects Processor. I would love to give the Eclipse or the H7600 a go. I share a studio with my partner Robert Crouch, who has an Eclipse, so I know how amazing it can sound, but we both have really specific signal paths on our individual sides of the studio and I would be terrified to start messing with it only to find that he had it set up for a really particular thing he was working on. So for now, we keep things separate. I am happy with my H9 and if I can ever pay down some of my modular debt maybe I will go into Eventide debt instead. I have always dreamed of having a rack-mounted something or other.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
My process usually revolves around a single field recording. Each composition would use just one recording and I would render as many processed iterations and variations of it I could. Then when I had exhausted the recordings I would start combining those elements and build the composition. This is still very much a part of my process but now I do something similar with the modular synth, where I create a patch and record multiple variations until I have exhausted that patch, then tear it down and repeat. Once the dust has settled I go back and eliminate everything I don’t like and further process the things I do like, sometimes again making multiple variations. I also un-patch the modular between every project so it feels similar to starting with a fresh field recording. This process results in each project having a 15 – 25GB folder of files. Very costly to archive!

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
On my new release for Touch, Ornamentation, I actually did something pretty different where I went back through my archive of field recordings and used only my rejects. So I was using flawed recordings from different projects over the last 10 years, mixing multiple sources, locations, and recording devices. It became a total mess, but that was my intent. With this release, I really wanted to make it as hard on myself as possible, as laborious as possible. When working with one field recording over and over I don’t really have to worry about pacing or space because no matter what I do to the recording it always inherits a kind of DNA that will work with other variations. On Ornamentation I had to spend a lot more time pairing sound because one might loop really quickly and if a second sound had to close a loop they would create a rhythm, or maybe one was originally mono recorded on my phone and I had to simulate space for it – how would that sit with something naturally spacious? It became a jigsaw puzzle and I think the ending composition was the only way they would all fit together harmoniously. Now that it’s over I am really happy with the work I put in because I think it really spoke to the ideas I was grappling with in the piece.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I never go on extensive tours, maybe 3 dates max, but my live setup is always the same. I have my laptop, an Apogee Duet audio interface and a MIDI controller (right now it’s an AKAI APC Mini), and a copy of my set on my keychain thumb drive. When I first started performing I never had a laptop beefy enough to do a lot of live processing, so I got in the habit of mixing rendered files which fits my compositional style just fine. I also can’t afford to upgrade my laptop very often so it’s often a little iffy (my current laptop has a mysterious vertical red line through the screen that comes and goes). All this uncertainty has led me to create a live set-up that could be easily duplicated if anything goes wrong. For instance, I now only use the built-in effects in Ableton Live if I need effects for a live set. I also chose the AKAI controller because it’s $100, so if it ever gets broken or lost on the road I can hit a Guitar Center or something wherever I am and get a new one. That is also why I have my live set on my thumb drive, so in a worst-case-scenario, I could potentially play it off any laptop with Ableton Live installed. It’s not a sexy answer, but it sure reduces a lot of travel stress when you are poor and traveling to perform.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Our new loft is huge – which I love because I don’t work very loudly, so I don’t have to worry about reflection or room treatment that much. The cool thing about the complex we are in is that it’s an old brewery and our particular building used to be the distillery, so there is a layer of cork on the large metal beams on the ceiling and on the concrete columns. I think it was used for keeping the humidity even? But whatever reflection there would be in a big concrete box like this is absorbed by the cork. I think the only improvement I could make is to figure out how to afford more time to work on sound.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
It varies from piece to piece, sometimes it’s a field recording, sometimes it starts with the visual component, other times it comes from an invite to exhibit or perform in a specific venue or location. Once the idea is there I usually circle it for a while and think about it before I try to work on it in the studio. I also have multiple jobs so I don’t have a huge amount of time in the studio, but that works out well because I like to let myself get a little pent up and excited about the idea before I let myself work on it, then I lock myself away until the idea is totally fleshed out and either finished or it’s in the garbage. There is a real ebb and flow of activity and what might seem like idleness, but it’s really a need to really sit with ideas and nurture them before trying to bring them to fruition.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I consider a piece finished when I can listen to on a loop in my studio and not need to pick it apart. Then I enter the part I hate, where it gets played on lesser-quality speakers so I can make sure the mix is similar on other speakers. That stage is then done if I can make it through once on those speakers without picking it apart. Finally I need to walk away from it for about 2 months so I can forget how I made it and why I made all the decisions I did. After 2 months I can listen to it objectively, but during that two months there is a transitional stage where I kind of remember how I did things, but maybe forget why I left something in or why I made some that transition that way and I just spiral into a pit of insecurity. Thus the two-month rule – so I can avoid the spiral at all costs.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I do, but usually not in any exciting way. Mainly I will work on my label (Dragon’s Eye Recordings), or work for a design client, or answer emails for the artist organization I work for. If it gets really bad I will start making esoteric changes to my website that no user would ever notice or care about. Procrastination for me is about avoiding making work because making work is when I am most exposed and vulnerable, so I look for tasks that keep my mind from that place. I also become a badass house cleaner when I am out of emails to answer.

What gets you inspired?
I read somewhere that a studio practice is like breathing, where your own creations are akin to the act of breathing out, and at some point you have to breathe back in. I think it’s a great way to think about being an artist and self-care. So for me, I get inspired from seeing others perform, seeing exhibitions, from altered states of consciousness, or even a simple night out with friends having a drink or a smoke and catching up on what they are doing. I think at its core, my work is about creating spaces for shared experiences and the best way for me to get inspired to do so is sharing experiences with others.

yannnovak.com

Photography by Christopher Wormald

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

ANDY: There are three key things. The first was Jean Michel Jarre whose Equinox album I religiously listened to on cassette as a kid. Equinox parts 5 -7 on the B side in particular – all those crystal clear electronic sounds, the way he strung the tracks together into one continuous piece, all those fantastic incidentals! I wish he’d left Part 8 off, though. The second was a seminal moment hearing Kraftwerk’s Tour de France on offshore pirate station Laser 558. Around the same time, the Street Sounds Electro compilations were appearing featuring artists like Newcleus and The Jonzun Crew – all of which sparked a never-ending obsession with electronic music and a gnawing desire to get involved and make some myself. Equipment wasn’t cheap back then so it was with huge excitement that I read about the SpecDrum, an affordable drum machine that plugged into the back of the ZX Spectrum which was a popular early home computer in the UK. This was the first bit of kit I bought, followed shortly by a Casio SK-1 sampler. Dom and I have been mates for years and around this time he bought a four-track Amstrad tape deck so we plugged it all together and made some terrible music that will never be shared!

DOM: Andy would do some mean body popping to Newcleus.

ANDY: I once moonwalked onto a wasp in my socks which, of course, stung me. The following contortions were described by a friend as “the best body popping I’ve ever seen you do”…

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?

ANDY: We’ve had countless iterations – a particular favourite being at the back of my parent’s garage in Kent where we had a PC running Cubase, a Kawai K7 and various other bits with which we attempted to make tunes after a night at the pub. We now work separately with our own studios but occasionally get together to jam. We’ve found a nice way of working together despite being in different places – sharing renders and being brutally honest / accepting whenever either of us shares something shit! Current set up is based around a Moog Voyager, Access Virus KC and a Nord Lead Mk 1.

DOM: That garage setup was such a man cave, but very hard to be productive in after a few pints at the pub. I remember spending the best part of an hour trying to diagnose a ‘ghost in the machine’ in the form of a Donald Byrd sample that was incessantly looping in our sampler… we were too drunk to work it out and came to the conclusion that we were haunted by Donald Byrd so we switched off all the electricity until he left us.

We later moved in together in London and started writing a melodic style of drum & bass. It was the first time we really took it seriously and cut our teeth with real tunes, up ‘til then it had been dicking about and writing parody tunes, which we still do from time to time, we are lifelong friends who regularly descend into childish play!

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

ANDY: It would have to be the Voyager which I bought second hand around 5 years ago. I’ve expanded it with the VX-351 voltage control box plus the CP-251 control processor. It’s often too distinctive for lead lines so I like to drive it through plenty of stomp boxes and effects then bounce to audio for further editing / processing. It’s amazing for creating big filtered sweeping effects, techy hits, percussive elements, incidentals, weird ever evolving modular patches and of course fat bass – endless versatility that you can easily get lost in!

DOM: I cannot choose one! My modular corner is a beast, it’s a holy trinity of Moog Mother, 0-Coast, and a Doepfer rack. The Machine Drum for hi-hats is sublime when applying random square LFO to the decay (so funky). Mono Moisturizer spring reverb to add warm but dirty verb dynamics. And finally my desk, recently custom built with 3 levels of sliding desk surfaces for different parts of the music lifecycle. Bottom: keyboard mouse and midi controller for programming, Middle: piano keyboard for notation / performance and Top: Traktor S5 and drum pads for live performance / rehearsal.

And what about the software that you use for production?

ANDY: We do everything in Ableton with plenty of plugins. We have thought about switching to another DAW, as Ableton definitely has a particular ‘digital’ sound, but we’ve got so used to working with Ableton we’ve stuck with it. Things like Massive and Omnisphere 2 get regular usage too and I love the Fab Filter Pro 2 EQ and Pro MB compressor.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?

ANDY: A Buchla synth would be pretty nice – a 100, 200, Music Easel or Skylab. Hmmm – I’d better start saving up! Like Dom I’ve also invested in a 0-Coast – a cute standalone piece of kit that combines east and west coast synthesis philosophies… something to counter all that Mooginess.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?

ANDY: I’ve got a bunch of Ableton templates full of different follow action midi clips which I feed into my kit for quick and random results. I’ve also set up templates with different configurations of midi controller enabled instances of various glitch tools and effects. I shove elements of tracks we are working on into this on loop, and tweak as many elements as possible whilst recording the output. From this audio I then pinpoint and edit out micro elements that will work in the track, or adjust the template set up to hone the output in further. We almost always use plenty of field recordings via a Zoom H4n which heads with me everywhere I travel. I often head into churches or large open spaces to record quiet background ambience and natural reverberations – a ready-made atmosphere to sit behind a track. I recently bought a lovely contact mic built by Leafcutter John which has been great for creating percussive sounds via the banging of various hollow objects!

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?

Dom: For me, band passing or high passing so much more. Squeezing much into the mid / upper mid range to leave room for sparkle and sub in a much more controlled fashion. Also compressing or expanding the stereo field or EQ, not just amplitude, with the rhythm to give more illusion of power without just hoofing up the kick and losing clarity or tightness.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?

ANDY: This has varied considerably. A few years ago we were regularly doing decent sized gigs and had a full set-up of stands, controllers, synths, effects units and two synched laptops – all of which could be packed into nice flight cases. We’d also have Mach V our VJ joining us on stage as visuals have always been an important element of our live show. These days we are gigging much less so we have paired things back to the visuals and one laptop running into the machine drum, a Virus kb, controllers and effects units.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?

ANDY: The absolutely ideal environment would be something like Minilogue’s studio in the Swedish woods, or Taylor Deupree’s amazing looking set up. But we both live in London and isolated cabins full of synth gear are hard to come by. As such I like working in a small darkened room, surrounded by dials and twinkling lights with barely enough room to swing a cat / mic.

DOM: Let’s buy a cabin with the massive proceeds from Spotify. Homebase do a good line in garden sheds from £80.

ANDY: To be fair to Spotify they have been very nice and included us on some of their playlists recently!

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?

ANDY: As we mostly work in separate studios, we set ourselves particular parameters to work within when embarking on a new project – so structure around things like bpm and genre. Otherwise, we’ll head off on completely different tangents. We’re trying to keep our next album in 70 / 140 bpm type territory with drum and bass and old skool rave themes so these are our current starting points when it comes to our new album project.

DOM: The seed of a tune can be anything. I try different things every time. It might be building a melody with a nice patch on the keyboard, it may be noodling on the modular. It may be a sample loop or programming the machine drum. But get arranging quickly or you’ll get stuck!

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?

ANDY: It’s strange how listening to your own music with other people skews how you hear it. It’s a really useful process to go through – although can be a bit awkward. It’s great to get really honest feedback – even if unmentioned and only acknowledged through my own discomfort or embarrassment around mutual listening to a particular track – heh heh! Then perhaps it’s time to change it.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?

ANDY: The information overload on the web is fantastic from a time wasting / dithering point of view – I enjoy reading music blogs and listening to new sounds. I write about music for Inverted Audio and Igloo Mag and use this as a way to justify any music listening procrastinations. For further procrastination, we have also just started our own label and blog VLSI so have been fiddling with site design and plans about world domination through that. The aim is to release more of our own music through this platform and we are on the hunt for new artists to support and release too.

What gets you inspired?

ANDY: I love seeing live large-scale art / music / installations – things by Ryoji Ikeda, Robert Henke and Autechre’s ‘in the dark’ shows. Max Cooper’s new ‘Emergence’ AV show is also excellent and really inspirational. On the other hand, less known acts and labels can be equally as inspiring – people like Kane Ikin and labels like Bokeh Versions are current favourites.

DOM: Same. Live performances do the most for me. Max Cooper, Moderat, Robert Henke, Origamibiro, Digitonal, Jon Hopkins, Amon Tobin and Infinite Scale have all inspired us at some point over the years.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?

ANDY: It feels like a bit of a golden age for electronic music. At one point over a decade ago, hardware synths seemed pretty unfashionable – now everyone has gone modular and Roland has released new versions of the classic kit. As an electronic music consumer, it’s never been better – there is so much to discover from DIY tape releases to re-issues of obscurities. As a kid listening to Jarre, our current ability to research and listen to so much excellent music would have blown my mind.

vlsimusic.co.uk

Lets start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
I have an older brother. When I was around 10 years old we were into Hard-Rock and Jeans. So I wanted to play the guitar. I learned playing the electric-guitar by playing along to “Iggy and the Stooges”, but I also learned classical guitar at the same time. Actually I still enjoy switching between different worlds, for example, at the moment I enjoy listening to dub and punk. Anyway, my composing process usually starts with playing the guitar. First gear? I had a stereo cassette-player (SABA) with a built-in speaker when I was a kid. I recorded my voice with it, playing hit-parade…

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
After that stereo cassette-player I had a four-track tape-recorder (YAMAHA) and then an 8 track digital-studio-workstation (ROLAND). Now I record on any PC, but I often still let the signal run through my VS880 or my Gallien-Krüger bass amp and my Boss-pedals. I guess I am a rather minimalistic kind of guy, I only have very few pieces of gear. I do not collect stuff. When I didn’t use something for a year then I dump it, I don’t want it to stand around. Too much material rather holds me, like, having a weight on your feet while you want to run.. I know that’s kind of luxury problem…

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
It is still that Roland-VS880. I really like the handling, I like the effects and virtual guitar pre-amps inside. I like the size, cause you can take it to the rehearsal room, or to the countryside, or even on holidays. You can achieve an intimate situation with this tool, plus (!) you’re not staring at some monitor all the time, the monitor on that machine has the size of a matchstick, so… you cannot trust your eyes, you have to trust your ears.

And what about the software that you use for production?
Wavelab 5, sometimes feeding it with fruity-loops.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
No, nothing particular, just the most expensive preamp in the world and the most expensive condenser mic, because I experienced that you can actually hear the price difference in that field.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
I always try to shape the sound before it gets on the hard-drive. I first want to achieve a certain atmosphere and inside that atmosphere I want to create the musical idea, because I think it’s a feedback: the sound and the sentence that you’re phrasing. Also, I like the idea that the listener gets into the same cloud that you were in when you actually gave birth to your musical idea. You know? And later, while you do the producing and mixing, your contact is much weaker, you’re not at that core anymore, you’re designing the… appearance, let’s say.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
On my last record I was singing a lot, so, after I recorded my voice I did send my vocals back on a guitar amplifier, used distortion, prepared membranes and I recorded the signal with microphones, as if the speaker was my voice. I did send everything to my Marantz tape-recorder, leveled to the max, saturated tape, because the Marantz has a limiter and I really love that sound when you hear the limiter and the tape.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
You can see my live setup as a sketch on the above pic. I bring the following: Classical Guitar, Boss-Bass-EQ (GE7B), Boss-DD6, Boss DD7, Boss-Bassman, Boss-Fender-Reverb, Roland R-05 wave-recorder, Boss-FV50 volume-pedal, Roland AC33 acoustic amp with built-in Looper. Then lots of tiny noise- and toy-instruments and finally, in case I bring the jazz guitar, I ask the club if they can provide me with a Fender-Twin-Reverb or a Roland-Jazz-Chorus. Oh man I really should get sponsored by Roland/Boss ;)

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I record at home, and I have a walk-through room, so, first I would change that and then I would ban the tram, ban the cars, ban the neighbor… hmm… I actually should shift my studio into a 100 square-meter detached house with ocean view.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
Again… still… it always starts with the guitar… that’s where it grows and grows up.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I return to the first sketch, I play that sketch and then I let it grow again into a new direction to gain a live version of that idea.

Do you ever procrastinate?
No ;)

What gets you inspired?
Playing with other people, talking to people.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
Sorry, I’m afraid, I’m not the right guy for that question, I really listen to few contemporary electronic music, I like some digital dub, for example the music that you can find on that label “jahtari”… well but even that music is not 100% “todays electronic music”, cause in my opinion, it’s based on something that Prince Jimmy discovered 30 years ago: “computerized dub”.

fsblumm.free.fr

Cover photo of F.S. Blumm by Takehito Goto

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
At the very first beginning, there was a good friend of mine playing guitar and starting to compose his own music when we were 14 or 15 years old. I never learned to play an instrument but I really felt like I want to create something too. At that time I was heavily into computers, games, and programming. So it felt natural to me to create music by using the computer. Since then I was basically making music in the box and when I was 19 I got my first synth, which I still use, a Korg Polysix. Still, I do many things with software just because it feels so natural to me.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I moved places quite often in the last years so I had quite a different workspace every year. I never had a separate studio, it has always been a part of my flat. At the moment the room is a bit smaller again. Before that, I had a studio that I also used as a painting atelier. Now it’s for music only and focused on functionality by just having set up what I really use.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Even though it’s not a synth or effect, the Olympus ls5 field recorder in combination with Ableton Live feels like an instrument for me as I’m using it on nearly every piece. Still, I do many micro-recordings playing just a chord on the Nord Lead for example but recording it with this little thing and creating something from it with Sampler in Live or Native Instruments Battery when it comes to percussion. Also, I like to record external sources and work with it on the Teenage Engineering OP-1.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I went to many different programs and combinations of them. A long time I was using Cubase in Rewire with Reason. Also, I was working with working with Logic a long time ago when it still was a PC software. Since I started playing live with Ableton Live, I also switched to it for productions.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
At the moment I starting to collect a little range of pedal effects. A friend showed me the Montreal Assembly ‘Count to Five’ which is really interesting. Also, I’m looking for the Tonal Recall.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
For the percussion, it is a lot of layering. I have all those little sounds recorded by myself or super small parts, pitched and reworked from libraries. So for a snare sound, for example, I can have up to 6 or even more sounds playing simultaneously all with different velocity and timing. Melodically my music is always based on pad sounds. So when I’m starting with something I’m looking for a good lively atmospheric basement. Underneath that there is usually a heavy sub bass as a fundament. For finding my sounds I use Native Instruments FM8 as an effect on the channel. Building effect chains in it and putting in on samples or synths. My favorite is the Psyche/ Delay.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I recorded a lot by myself. ‘Silk’ is based on a melody I played on a little kalimba. Or in ‘Pacific’, I played the lead melody on a steel tongue drum. Some rhythms are tapped on the table for example and I converted the recording into a MIDI file triggering samples.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
Right now the setup is me, Mohna on the vocals for our collaborative tracks and a friend performing the visuals that filmed myself. I use Ableton Live controlled with an APC 40 and an old UC33 Evolution. All the drums are coming from the Elektron Analog Rythm. Besides that, I have a MIDI keyboard which I use to play key elements in some tracks. Also there a piece of wood with a contact microphone which I can knock on for wooden sounds running through filter, reverb, and delay.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
The room isn’t treated acoustically at all. So that’s definitely a point I would love to work on.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
I’m trying break out of my routine. After all the years you have strategies that are always leading to a result. But now it really feels inspiring to experiment. For instance by just putting an insanely huge line of effects on an arpeggiator melody, sampling, cutting and pitching it, again some more effects, so it becomes something really different to the original material. If you record this again and play just a short single note on the sampler, you will probably come up with an interesting new sound. The pieces that I’m really satisfied with have been finished super quickly, sometimes even in one or two days. Sometimes you hear it and it I maybe would like to polish it and add some details but everything is already said and it’s honest just like that, so I stop working on it. The best ideas don’t really mature. Usually, I don’t go back to an old project, I just start something new. That’s why I have hundreds of loops.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I have this routine that I upload my sketches to a private soundcloud account combined with a photo. I always have a picture for every piece I create. So if I have a walk on the beach I’m listening through it. And being outside, having an open view, brings new ideas how the song could evolve from there.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I take a break for some days or even longer and do something else. Maybe not even listening to other music. Riding my bike and going for a swim is always refreshing.

What gets you inspired?
It’s mostly the silent moments. For example, while traveling when you’re sitting in a taxi or train after a long flight and everything is passing by. Also, I’m very interested in art like painting or photography. So discovering new artists or seeing exciting exhibitions are getting me inspired. But of course also music, books, and movies.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I think it’s very difficult to have an overview of electronic music as it’s very diverse with so many different styles and sub-genres. But for me, the actual state feels really positive. There is a lot of electronic music with an emotional, melancholic, artistic feel lately, also in club culture.

christian-loeffler.net

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
I started composing with a Fostex four-track cassette recorder when I was about 17-18 years old. I started playing drums since 1993 when I was 14 years old, and I got my first drum kit around that time. When I discovered the multitrack cassette tape recorder, I realized I could overdub drums, bass, and guitars, all by myself. I started experimenting my first musical ideas as a composer. This object expanded significantly my perspective as a musician. It gave me the input to create something original without being dependent on writing music (which is something I learned a few years later) and to make music that came directly from my brain and hands, without other people involved.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
My studio set up has been always very simple. When I compose, edit and mix, I simply use a good audio interface, an RME Fireface UC, a pair of monitor Genelec 8040A and my ears.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Re drums: I’m very attached to my Ludwig Super Classic 1967, but I recently fell in love with Saari drums. Saari is a one-man company based in Tampere, Finland. Hannu, the artisan (I can also say the “artist”), makes these incredible drums out of Finnish birch. They are extremely light and resonant, very similar to some early 20th century drum kits. When I found it out I was looking for something similar to a Slingerland Rolling Bomber, a rare drums made in the USA in the 40’s (due to a lack of metal parts drum companies were forced to use as fewer metal parts as possible) and I accidentally found a Facebook post from a drummer I really like, Stephen Hodges, where he was praising these drums. After a few weeks, I went up to Tampere, driving through the southern Finnish landscapes with snow and frozen lakes. I checked the drums out, fell in love with them, got an endorsement deal with Hannu and brought back two big kit and three snare drums to Berlin.

Re electronics: I’ve been exclusively using the Clavia Nord Modular G1 since 2001 as my electronics sound source. Despite Clavia halting the production of these instruments back in 2003, I think these synthesizers are still amazing. I have all the three models they made: the one with a two-octave keyboard, the rack version and two micro modular. I tried to find other synths that suited my way of playing and composing, but I found none that really satisfied my needs.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use both Pro Tools and Logic. I program the Micro Modular with a dedicated software, which has been very recently been available again for Mac (thanks a bunch to the people at stage-engine.com, you rule!), as Clavia, unfortunately, discontinued upgrading it back in 2007.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
One day I’d probably like to own a Slingerland Rolling Bomber, two or three huge gongs and a newer custom-made version of the Nord Modular with faders and buttons… but the reality is that I have already too many drums, I don’t know where I would store huge gongs and I don’t think Clavia will never make that instrument anymore, especially with buttons and faders!

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
My work has always been based on creating a dialog between acoustic drums, percussion, and electronics. I’ve been developing several ways to create acoustic sounds that sound electronic, and electronic ones that sound like acoustic instruments. My sound design ideas come mostly from my live setup. When I started working on my solo set, I wasn’t thinking of playing on “normal” stages, but for relatively small rooms where I could play in front of the P.A. My original concept was to compose and play real-time music using three different sound layers: the acoustic drums without amplification, the electronic sounds diffused the P.A. behind me, and a third “electroacoustic” layer of electronic sounds diffused by small speakers placed on top and around the drum kit. Creating both musical and technical immersive sound environments it’s been always at the core of my live and studio work.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I composed an album starting from drums recordings, which was a new experience to me.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
My live set up consists of a drum-kit and, percussion and few electronic instruments. I prefer big sounding bass drum sounds, with a smooth attack and a warm and long decay. My actual electronic setup is composed of one Roland Spd-Sx sampler pad, one Clavia Micro Modular controlled by a Faderfox Midi Controller. I’m now expanding my electronic set up with a Keith McMillen K-Mix (thanks to Keith McMillen for sending it to me!), plus a couple of microphones, effects, and controller, but it’s still a work in progress. When I tour with my solo set, I only bring my electronics and percussion. As a drummer is always difficult to bring drums on tour.

In my opinion, that’s one of the two big drummer’s frustrations: the first one is not hearing properly what is the “real” bass drum sound that the audience hears by standing in front of it, the second is not playing his or her own drum set every time. Back in 2000, I did a workshop with one of my drummer heroes, Joey Baron, who were suggesting other drummers get used to traveling as light as possible, sometimes not even with your sticks, and adapt your playing to all sorts of drums you find along your way. That’s, unfortunately, the reality if you tour a lot and you are not able to bring your drums every time because it’s simply too expensive to fly it around. This tip actually helped me a lot to understand how to develop a technique and style that could work on almost every drum-kit I play with. I only bring my own drums when I tour with bands in Europe, and travel by van or bus. It’s always much better to play on my instrument, it really affects positively the performance.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
My home studio is my living room, which has the great quality of being very luminous. My rehearsal space is a bit outside the city center. It’s in a building made almost entirely of rehearsal rooms which mean I can play as loud as I want. Besides that, it is on the fourth floor and has lots of windows, a total luxury for drummers who are used to rehearse in dark cellars. The biggest improvement I can think of is finding a studio where I can play, record and mix at the same time, without spreading instruments and cables all over the city as I am doing now.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
While improvising with other musicians, the most interesting ideas are usually the ones that come from a mistake, a wrong hit on a snare drum or a percussion that fell off my hands, something that creates a break, a drastic change, which then would be developed into something completely new and inspiring. I like to use this metaphor for my compositional work as well, as I tend to create frameworks where I allow myself to stumble upon, and create something by letting my instinct to flow freely.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I usually like to play my music for some trustful friends, from whom I can receive very useful feedback. Sometimes I also like to play specific tracks while I DJ in Berlin, when people are not 100% focused on the music I’m playing, and see how’s the reaction in those contexts as well. My reactions when I listen to my music in different context really varies from time to time, sometimes it can be really frustrating, but when you see people smiling or closing their eyes and enjoying it, that’s a moment that motivates myself a lot.

And finally, what gets you inspired?
People, lots of good shows I see in Berlin nowadays (I can perhaps mention the magic CC Hennix’s sound installation/performance I saw in March), specific drums and percussive sounds and patterns that set up an inspiring and meditative mood, Jamaican roots reggae and dub, Eliane Radigue’s music, Ennio Morricone’s compositions, pure sine waves, Jim Keltner and the early Tony Williams’ drumming, Congolese rumba and soukous from the 60’s-70’-80’s, Simenons’ “Maigret” novels.

andreabelfi.com

Andrea Belfi photo by Steve Glashier

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
My first piece of equipment was an Electro Harmonix 2880 super multi-track looper. It looks really simple but is surprisingly versatile. I wrote the original version of my track ‘Grounds’ on here, which was one of the first pieces I wrote when I started composing. I still used the looper live synced with an MPC until a few years ago. I started composing quite organically. I had always thought I was going to be a performer and hadn’t really considered creating my own music until I was asked by a couple of friends to create soundtracks for them. I loved the process and discovered something very different when performing my own work. Everything developed very naturally from there. Around the same time as the looper I also bought a Zoom H4, with which I recorded pretty much all of my first album. When I first started, all I had was a laptop, a Zoom, and I invested in a set of Adam Speakers which I still use now.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I’ve been through a few studio stages, however, only now in the last year am I starting to build the studio I really want. I live with Joe Acheson from Hidden Orchestra and we both have a studio at home. Joe’s studio is in the basement and has an isolated soundbooth. It is really easy and nice to record down there. My studio is upstairs and is very simple. My grand piano is in the living room.

Tell us about your favourite piece of hardware.
I’m in love with my APC40 controller at the moment. Ableton Live is amazing, and with the APC I find it feels like playing another instrument as it is so flexible and responsive.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I work with Logic in the studio and use Ableton Live when performing.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
I’m very excited by my new Helpinstill piano pick up. I’d been using an older model for the past few years which was great, but recently I used a newer model at a gig and the sound was incredible, so I have upgraded. For looping live the pick up is invaluable. It also enables me to get a really nice rich bass sound from the piano.

Are there any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
Usually I record everything myself in my home studio, but since Sketches is a solo piano album, I thought it might be nice to do things differently. I recorded at Retreat Recording Studios just outside Brighton. We recorded every track with a number of different microphone placements. I later mixed the tracks with Joe in our home studio. With all the tracks recorded on different sets of mics we could pick and choose which placements, or a combination of placements, worked the best for each track.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
On Sketches, even though I intended it to be a solo piano album, there are two tracks with field recordings. Just at the point when we started recording the acoustic version of ‘Rain’ for the album, it started to rain. We placed a microphone next to the studios ceiling skylight window and recorded the rain at the same time as the track. Amazingly the rain got heavy and then died away with the music, it was perfect. For ‘Birdwoman’, we recorded the birds outside the studio and then layered it with the piano. I also used field recordings on a couple of tracks for my first few albums. I love the way the sound of birds, traffic, rain or clock mechanisms blend with percussive sounds from extended piano or violin techniques.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
My live setup currently consists of Ableton Live with the APC 40 Mkll. On the piano, I use a Helpinstill pickup and DPA 4099P microphones – the combination of the two sound great together. I use the pickup to create a strong bass sound, and the mics for a more natural sound with some definition. I also have a lovely acoustic violin, but when performing live I tend to use a Starfish electric – which was made for me, built with exact same dimensions as my acoustic. I put it through an Art Preamp and TC Electronic Nova System.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
The most important thing to me is light and space. The next step is proper sound treatment and a more modern upright piano in my studio.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
I find that every track is different. What is similar is that each track must come from something strong – a story, an emotion, a reaction to something. I always have a feeling, like there is something trying to escape. Something I need to say but cannot be said in words. I then sit down at the piano and see what happens. Once the initial ideas are down I work in a similar way on each track. My approach is kind of like sculpting. I let the composition lead me. It takes a lot of time. I listen and listen, and then add or remove what I feel works or doesn’t work. It is all very instinctive and organic.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or sound system?
I love to run in the mornings and this is a good way to listen to the album as a whole. It’s a nice way to hear the album developing over time during the last months. It is strange how being away from the piano and computer screen lets you hear the music in a different way, which I find often it is quite reassuring and refreshing. I also always have my latest mixes with me and listen a lot as I walk around the city. It is also always an interesting experience to listen to the tracks on headphones as well as speakers.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Sometimes, but these days I am much better at getting started on things. If I’m not focusing then I use the Pomodoro technique. It doesn’t work for everyone, but I find it helpful. I don’t think you can force the creative process. If I’m not in the mood I’ll try and do something else useful, such as emails, tour planning, or admin tasks. It’s hard for me to be in the studio all day when the sun is shining. If I’m meant to be working and the sun is out, then I will come up with a list of things that I absolutely have to do which means I have to be outside!

What gets you inspired?
So many things. People, friends, family, stories, love, travel, nature, music, art, dance, food… the list goes on forever.

Be sure to pick up Poppy Ackroyd’s upcoming mini-album, Sketches, out on July 14th, 2017, on One Little Indian Records.

poppyackroyd.com

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

MICHAEL: I learned guitar in 6th grade by playing along to The Ramones on my dad’s 1978 Gibson “The Paul”. At the same time I was playing trombone in our school’s jazz band and our teacher always emphasized listening: to each other, to the way our instruments’ tones were blending, and the whole band’s dynamics. I fell in love with creating more textural music and when Andrew and I lived together in college, we had a lot of time to experiment with recording it.

ANDREW: Mike and I are twins, so unsurprisingly my origins as a wannabe punk rocker are very similar. However, in high school I fell in love with ‘50s and ‘60s cool & modal jazz – “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis rocked my world – and I got my first taste of “composition” while writing and gigging regularly in a funk/jam band on bass guitar. In college I went down a very deep rabbit hole of discovery and became fascinated with minimalist and ambient aesthetics, and determined I had to try making my own “furniture music” in the vein of Satie, Eno, Cage, Young, and the dozens of other modern composers being thrown at me on a daily basis in music history courses. I bought a horribly noisy Tascam USB interface and began writing very bad ambient and post-rock music using Garageband, effects pedals and cheap MIDI synths with Mike in our shared apartment. Hotel Neon didn’t come about until 2012 when we decided to get serious with the thick, droning style we developed.

STEVEN: When I was young, I remember sitting at my family’s piano and recording little parts with a cassette player and listening back to them. I had no idea how to play but enjoyed experimenting and trying to create something. In middle school, I played trumpet in the band and started to learn more about the arrangement, dynamics, and structures of music. I suppose my first “real” piece of gear that I owned for myself was an Applause acoustic guitar. I ended up walking out of the store with a Zoom 505 multi-effects pedal too. It was not until later in life after getting out of college in 2006 did I begin to really make an effort to work on my own music using Garageband. I met several false starts beginning projects with friends so I made the decision to just start making music by myself. During that time I began learning to record and mess around with layering textures. Looking back, all those efforts in learning prepared me for joining Hotel Neon.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?

MICHAEL: My setup hasn’t changed much at all over the years- just a Focusrite interface into my MacBook Pro. The amps I own are only for practice; we use software amps live and on the recordings. The geographic distance between the 3 of us means that we bounce ideas back and forth often, and they change constantly. I like to have as little in the way of that flow as possible, and I’m rarely doing anything that needs an elaborate studio setup to record anyway.

ANDREW: I have gone through a constant change in my setup, mostly as a byproduct of frequent relocation. Since those first days of experimentation in college, I have moved a total of 7 times over the last 9 years, and have never allowed myself to accumulate much gear…in fact, it is almost embarrassing for me to show my humble little collection to the world. It’s not at all a “professional” arrangement. But the core of my setup remains to this day simply a MacBook Pro, Logic and countless plugins (I return most often to the Soundtoys suite), a Focusrite 2i2 interface, an Arturia Analog Lab MIDI keyboard, and a MicroKorg synth that has found its way into virtually every track we’ve ever written as Hotel Neon. There has been a legion of guitars and basses as well, frequently traded, swapped, and sold.

The need for mobility has also informed the way I compose. I hate feeling overwhelmed with choice, and I hate being surrounded with LEDs. I need a simple, clean, bare workspace to do my best work. I have grown so used to NOT having a dedicated studio space that I simply can’t function in a typical “fixed” studio setup. When I am composing music, I carry my gear all over the house to find a space that I’m comfortable in and to find new perspectives… quite literally seeking new vantage points, much to my wife’s chagrin.

STEVEN: My current setup has pretty much stayed unchanged for the past several years. The recording setup consists of an ADA preamp into my MOTU interface then to my MacBook Pro running Logic X. I’ve recently begun experimenting with Ableton for our live setup and look forward to diving into the recording functions of it. My computer has quite a few plugins and similarly to Andrew, I really enjoy the Soundtoys suite. On our last album, I experimented a lot with VSTs powered by Kontakt and used Altiverb & Toraverb for reverbs. Like my recording setup, my pedalboard has pretty much stayed the same for awhile now but recently I got a Hologram Infinite Jets that I’m excited to dive into. I’ve got a few Les Pauls, a 72’ tele custom and an acoustic. One of the Les Pauls is equipped with a Fishman midi pickup which is a lot of fun. It allows you to blend your guitar signal with a midi VST or just have straight guitar/VST output. The only studio frustrations I’ve struggled with is changing spaces. I’ve moved several times over the past few years and it takes me awhile to feel comfortable in a space.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

MICHAEL: My 1978 Gibson “The Paul”. It’s technically my dad’s, but I’ve semi-permanently borrowed it.

ANDREW: I will always have a soft spot for my Korg MicroKorg. As mentioned previously, it has found a place on virtually every recording I’ve made in the last 5 years, and its A36 patch is a staple of the Hotel Neon sound… I always return to it and can always find comfort there. It’s ugly, clunky, and not very versatile at the end of the day, but I love it just the same. It has thunderous lows and is easy to control live with the cutoff knob.

STEVEN: This is a tough question, I have several pieces based on what I’m doing but I’d say my favorite is my 79’ Gibson Les Paul. Last year we toured with Lowercase Noises and because I flew out to start the tour I borrowed the LP to play throughout. By the end, I had really bonded with the guitar playing it on our first “real” tour. I told Andy from Lowercase Noises that if he ever wanted to sell it I’d buy it from him in a heartbeat and a few months later he sold it to me. I really treasure the memories and the vibes that surround that guitar.

And what about the software that you use for production?

MICHAEL: I use Garageband. It does everything I need in a simple and streamlined package, and the limitations it has kept me more focused on what I’m doing.

ANDREW: Logic is my DAW of choice. I have tried to adapt to Ableton, Reaper, Pro Tools, etc. but I simply find the Logic interface to be best for what I’m doing. I’m always experimenting with plug-ins and won’t bother listing every single one, but I return most often to the Soundtoys suite of effects. The Echoboy delay alone is worth the price of admission, but I also love using distortion, bitcrushing, and other tools of destruction in our music, so I’ve found great sounds with the Decapitator.

STEVEN: I’m a Logic guy too. Similar to Andrew, I just find that it works best for me. Now that we are working on tracks remotely from each other, using the same software has benefits in sharing files. As I mentioned in a previous question, I’ve recently gotten into Ableton and am excited to further explore the seemingly unique things you can utilize it for.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?

MICHAEL: Honestly, no. I enjoy trying new things for fun, but when it comes to recording or performing, I always find myself going back to what I already know and love.

ANDREW: To support my field recording addiction, I am in hot pursuit of a Sound Devices recorder, whether it’s the 722 or 744. I’m always scouring the used markets for one. On that same topic, I’d also love a stereo pair of Sennheiser MKH8040 condensers… I’ll definitely have them someday!

STEVEN: I’d like to get my hands on a Universal Audio Apollo Twin Duo interface. I have a few friends who have upgraded to the Universal Audio offerings and love them. The Duo seems like it would be a simple and minimal fit in my setup. Not to mention, access to the plugins/sims that Universal Audio offers would be great too.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?

MICHAEL: We’ve always been really fascinated with trying to meld “clean and clear” with “dirty and grungy.” Our unofficial band motto is that if something sounds good, it’ll sound even better distorted and bitcrushed.

ANDREW: I’m not sure how the other guys feel about this, but if I had to make a blanket statement for the band then I would say that everything we do is sort of an experiment in sound design. We aren’t really making songs so much as we are making sounds… that reads a little lofty and pretentious, possibly, but I don’t think we’ve ever written a song and viewed it as a neat, tidy unit. We are always viewing it from 10,000 feet up, and view it more as a fluctuating or flexible statement. We’re constantly warping, twisting, editing, and manipulating the entire track, roughing it up, adding dirty and distorted elements and generally trying to mask any semblance of “normal” instrumentation that might be there. We’ve always been obsessed with creating thick blankets of sound. A song in the DAW is really just a single piece of clay for us; it’s always shifting and being shaped, to an extent. We make heavy use of field recordings, distorted non-musical sounds, and noise of all types – static, electrical hum, etc. – in order to mask traditional instrumentation and add a real sense of mystery for the listener. I want people to ask “What is that sound? Where’s it coming from?”

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?

MICHAEL: Andrew incorporated a lot of field recordings into “Context.”

ANDREW: “Context” was definitely filled with more field sounds than we’ve ever incorporated before. That’s an area of obsession for me. I feel that the recordings we used ended up serving the purpose of the album well. It was a fun experiment to re-contextualize familiar sounds I captured in places that I know well, inject them into the tracks, and after heavily manipulating them, see how it could translate into a meaningful and cohesive piece for someone else to enjoy.

On this album, we were also very intentional about using an analog mixing process and printing to tape. Matt Kidd (Slow Meadow) did a great job with taking our messy project files, sorting through the layers at hand to make sense of it all, and pushing the results to tape in Houston. The sound is a little denser, thicker, and grittier than what we could have done ourselves.

STEVEN: For me personally, I tried a lot of new techniques on “Context”. One thing in particular I did was create my own sample library of bowed guitar sounds. I had always wanted to try and do something like that and this seemed like a great opportunity. For every album or run of shows, it’s always my goal to raise the bar a little bit. Generally, I make a list of improvements that could be made to whatever I’m working on and those become the priorities when tackling a new project.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?

MICHAEL: I only need a distortion, delay, and reverb pedal. When we play live, Steven mixes everything on his laptop and we play through software amps.

ANDREW: We take great pride in having a compact, versatile, and mobile setup: our guitars and synths run into a Behringer XR18 mixer, are processed live in Ableton, and are fed to the house with an L and R output. It is extraordinarily simple and can be controlled wirelessly with an iPad. Setup only takes 15 minutes and we can fit our whole band, with gear, into a small car. We were intentionally trying to create the most compact arrangement possible so that we can take it anywhere and play in any space available to us. All we need is a PA to plug into. This setup was a direct result of the “Slow Spaces” tour series we launched with Lowercase Noises. The whole objective is to bring our music to living rooms, galleries, and other small and unconventional spaces. We are just as comfortable in a living room as we are in a cathedral and can replicate our music in either context. Sound techs love us!

STEVEN: Like Andrew said, we’ve tried to create the most minimal setup possible and I think we’ve achieved that well. It is very satisfying to walk into any space and have complete control over our sound. The brain of our setup is Ableton which all the audio, backing and visuals are controlled though. I use an APC 40 MKII to control it all and mix on the fly. We use Mainstage for Andrew’s synth patches and for visual cues for prominent sections in the tracks.

Outside of my guitar, cello bow and slide I have a lot of midi implementation on my pedalboard. I found the Disaster Area Designs to be a lifesaver in a live setting. Throughout our set, I am doing a lot of looping/overdubbing and I can use the MIDI controller to control my looper. It also allows me switch presets on a few different pedals with just a tap on one switch.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?

MICHAEL: I live in a studio apartment that’s a little less than 300 sq. ft. My music area is also my kitchen, my bedroom, and my living area. That changes the way I think about what I do musically in that it’s not separated in any way from my “normal” life. I’m the sort of person who’s easily overwhelmed, so being forced to keep things simple also keeps me sane. And not treating my recording space as some sort of sacred shrine keeps me from overthinking what I do there.

ANDREW: Great question. The physical makeup of a workspace is everything to me. As mentioned previously, I really need a clean and minimal space to do my best work, so having a spacious room free of clutter is important to me. At some point I might settle more permanently into a room I’m comfortable with, but when that happens, it will almost certainly need some degree of isolation from other noises in the house in order to maintain the “clean” feeling of the space.

STEVEN: Comfort is the most important environmental aspect to me. Not necessarily physical but mental comfort. Having a space where most of my stuff is setup and ready to go when an idea strikes is also important. Nothing kills an idea faster for me than having one then needing to setup equipment to try it, I like it all ready to go. Eventually I’d like to improve on sound-proofing and implement a “live room” of some sort but for now, my little bedroom space will have to do.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?

MICHAEL: My own ideas are born mostly by accident. The advantage of working with a group is that even if something sounds terrible to me, the other guys often hear things I can’t, or that I’ve just become numb to, and it takes on new life.

ANDREW: My personal process changes day-by-day, but most typically, my ideas are born out of observation. I typically see or hear something that either seems worth capturing or inspires an emotional response. I do my best to capture the essence of what that response is, whether it’s passing interest or fascination or some deeper emotional resonance. I typically take a photograph, a recording, or a note in my journal, and I make music that either reflects or accompanies that feeling… if that makes any sense! I’ll think about how the observation makes me feel, what kind of mood it gives off, what kind of instrument or effect might get me close to that feeling… I guess it is similar to soundtracking specific moments in my memory, but of course, there are always the happy accidents that Mike mentioned, in which I simply like the way a new patch or piece of gear sounds and I run with it.

No matter which one of us births the original idea or sketch, it almost always makes at least one loop through the whole band via file sharing and remote recording sessions before it’s reached refinement and consensus. The geographic distance between us is quite challenging sometimes, but it also adds a very impartial and objective quality to the edits and review each of us adds on a given track. We usually work relatively quickly. “Context,” for instance, was basically the product of a marathon week of very intense and rapid succession of recording, sharing, and editing, and we reached consensus quickly. It either sounds good or it doesn’t, and I don’t think we have ever been too attached to the pieces we write to be kept from making that decision quickly.

STEVEN: Generally I start with some sort of loop as a base then build on it. Most of the time that loop doesn’t make the final track but I need something to play off. With the geographic distance, it serves as something to interact with being separated from Michael and Andrew. Weaving textures and frequencies together is my favorite part of creating our sound. Typically everything I contribute to the tracks is just one take. There is something very special having that “in the moment” feeling to what I do. I try not to overthink what I’m doing and contribute what initially comes out. I’d say that out of both Andrew and Michael, I tend to focus more on the arrangement. Despite drone style music not having a conventional song structure, I still mentally like to pick out parts. “Intro, verse, build etc” Doing that helps me organize my thoughts and allows me to feel sections of the track are complete. I think “Context” is special to me because all of us have grown in our abilities so much and with the distance that is key. We all know our strengths and play off each other’s very well.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?

MICHAEL: I like to sit in the armchair by my window while I listen and just watch the city hum along. The key is a strong reaction in general. Each of us will hear things a little bit differently, but if there’s no intensity in our response to it, it’s not done.

ANDREW: I am rather insistent about putting completed pieces through their paces on “average” consumer gear – it needs to be impactful and massive as can be expected even on iPod earbuds, car stereos, Bluetooth speakers around the house, etc… I am very realistic about the fact that our music might serve as a background to most listening settings. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I don’t think too many people sit down at their desk and sit perfectly positioned, intensely focused with undivided attention through professional reference monitors when listening to Hotel Neon. I’d almost prefer that people DON’T do that and that rather they take it with them outside, transport it to different scenes and settings and let it find a home in new contexts of their own doing. Of course, it’s important the material sound good through those high-end systems too, so that it has a chance to succeed in more settings… but there has to be a balance between hi-fi demands and consumer reality. I’d like the music to reach as many ears as possible.

STEVEN: I think with our music there is no defined context, setting or listening device that I’d say is the right vehicle for listening. Typically I’ll listen back in the car, in earbuds on a walk around my neighborhood or just through my monitors while working my day job. Sometimes I’ll have a few different versions of a mix for a track and listen to them in succession and determine the one that feels the best in a couple different listening mediums. If I’ve been working on a track for awhile I always like to give a 1-2 week buffer to listening to the output. I like to leave some time for the track to “breathe” a little bit and let my ears listen to it without the fatigue of over listening while creating it.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?

MICHAEL: Rarely, at least when it comes to music. If anything, I tend to rush the production process.

ANDREW: I wouldn’t call it “procrastination” as much as I would call it “hesitation.” Like most creative people I have intense bouts with self-doubt sometimes… “Is this piece any good, and is it worth continuing? Maybe it can wait until I have a better idea.” But typically, as mentioned before, I try to make those decisions quickly and move on with the process. I’m pretty prolific when it comes to writing new material and have multiple pieces ongoing and in development at any given time.

STEVEN: It is both exciting and daunting to begin something new but once I get rolling I tend to put all the time into the project that I can. Sometimes if I get too lost in my own head I tend to feel a little paralysis more than procrastination. If that happens I’ve found that if I step back and start a new track I can get momentum to revisit the previous one being worked on. Another thing that is helpful is waiting for Andrew or Michael to add a part to inspire me to keep plugging away.

What gets you inspired?

MICHAEL: Following my curiosity: learning about people/places that are different from me/my own. Movement: I run almost every day, just trying to listen to everything around me. I’m a different person by the time I finish any given run.

ANDREW: I’m very much inspired by new settings, new ideas, “newness” in general. I have a borderline anxiety that I need to be experiencing and learning *more* at any given time, so I’ll constantly be starting new books, researching new travel destinations, recording new sounds in the field, taking different routes to work, re-arranging studio setups and furniture… anything is fair game. I don’t like constants. I have a hard time sitting still and like to be thrown into unfamiliar settings. It’s why I’m a restless and undisciplined composer, I think.

STEVEN: Very much of why I create music is because I need a way to express myself. Being a more introverted person words don’t always come easily to me. Expressing myself through music I feel like is my true voice. Because of that, I’d say that what inspires me the most is life. It is a little cliche to say that but what my music is to me is an expression of myself and the environments/emotions that surround me on a daily basis.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?

MICHAEL: It’s easier than ever to find bad music and it’s easier than ever to find good music. I’m thankful to live in a time when it’s so easy to connect with the people who make all of it.

ANDREW: Good question. I am a pretty young guy in my mid 20s, but in my brief experience on Earth so far I would say I’ve already seen a trend towards artists and musicians in this space returning to the “classics” for inspiration – everything from using vintage equipment in modern DAWs to rediscovering the giants of the genre in new streaming services like curated Spotify playlists and Mixcloud sessions. Here in Philly, there is a great scene of older electronic and space music “veterans” who are sharing the knowledge with new audiences through radio shows like Echoes, Star’s End, Music with Space, etc. and concert series like Cosmic Crossings, The Gatherings, and more.

To Mike’s point, there is an enormous amount of new music out there and people are getting started creating it for all sorts of reasons, getting inspired from all sorts of sources… but in conversations I’ve had with fellow musicians and even people who listen to our music for the first time, there seems to be a lot of interest in figuring out where this all came from. What’s old is new again, I suppose.

STEVEN: I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the fact that it is easier nowadays to create music is a bad thing, that the market is saturated. It very much is saturated BUT the fact that young artists have an opportunity to be creative and express themselves through the art of music is pretty incredible. Hotel Neon would have probably never had the chance to be heard since we operate outside of the classic studio environments. Since electronic music as a whole is pretty diverse there is something in the genre for anyone to connect with. I’m excited with the direction electronic music seems to be evolving in. Everyone has a voice to be expressed and personally I hear those voices more clearly through the electronic genre of music.

hotelneonmusic.com

Hey Jason, let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

I started playing the drums back in junior school and around that time got heavily into electronic music. I then got into DJing and started programming my own music using Rebirth and FL on the family PC. After making a few tracks that I thought were somewhat decent, I put together a demo and sent it to a label. The A&R got back to me with a very encouraging letter and suggested I get hold of Reason. I managed to get a copy, then convinced my parents that I needed a midi keyboard for my 11th birthday. So I worked with Reason and that keyboard setup for the next few years and that produced my first releasable piece of music, which came out on that same label. My first serious piece of gear was a Clavia Nord Rack 2, which I bought second hand a few years later.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?

This current studio would be my second. The room I’m in now used to be a garage which was converted in 2012. I’ve collected quite a bit of gear over the years, but right now my main setup is down to a dustbin MacPro with a bunch of SSDs connected over Thunderbolt and a MacMini server over ethernet, a UA Apollo Quad interface, a Yamaha keyboard which I just use for MIDI, Genelec monitors, a modified Drawmer 1960, Neve and Great River preamps, a Juno 60 and my 1920’s Grotrian Steinweg upright. I’ll then bring in my other synths when needed. I’ve just hooked up the JX3P for something I’m about to start. I haven’t used it in quite some time so it’s been nice to go back to it.

Tell us about your favourite piece of hardware.

Instruments and computer related stuff aside, I love my Neve preamps. I have the 1073 DPA which my piano mics are permanently hooked up to.

And what about the software that you use for production?

I work in Cubase with a few plugins. I’m using mostly the UAD stuff, Fabfilter and Soundtoys for FX.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?

There’s an endless list! A CS-80 would be amazing. I’d really love to own a celeste. I’ve been trying to track one down locally for years, but no luck as of yet.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?

It’s an important part. Both sound and music I feel should always work together and each is just as important as the other. Creating that balance between both is something I always aim for.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?

I tried to push the electronic side a bit more than I did on my previous album Attachment. So there was more synth recording and experimenting with that.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?

When I used to play clubs regularly, the last setup I was using for that was a MacBook with Ableton Live and an APC40. The APC was eventually replaced with an iPad running Lemur. I’d love to start performing this new stuff live. I’ll have to work out what exactly I’ll use for it, but it will probably consist of the MacBook and iPad setup together with a keyboard controller and maybe one or two synths. Hopefully, the venue will have a nice piano too.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?

I’d say having the separation between my living space and my workspace. That’s proven to be quite important. I’ve also put a lot of effort into the ergonomics and the lighting in here. Something I’d improve on, well, it would be great to have some windows. My studio is completely sealed up for acoustic reasons, so it looks the same in here at 10am as it does at 2am, which is nice, but having some natural light would be nice too.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?

It’s different from track to track. I’ll usually start with a melodic idea or an atmosphere or mood, but sometimes it can be a sound I’ve created using a synth or a plugin and I just go with it until the piece starts to take shape. I do a lot of sitting at the piano and improvising while recording. Same goes for synths. A fun process can be to then cut up the results and look for new ways to piece them together.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?

I listen on both monitor speakers and headphones while composing and mixing. I’ll sometimes upload an MP3 and listen on my iPhone if I need that extra reassurance. But usually, if it sounds good on my speakers and headphones then I’m happy. It’s always interesting to hear it back in a different setting. Taking something I’m working on, especially if I’m stuck with it, putting it on my phone and going out into the world with it can be quite inspiring. It’s almost like seeing the piece from a different angle, so new ideas start to form.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?

I do! Far too much for my liking. I’m a big film fan, so if I’m not working on music I’m usually watching something, or reading something film related.

What gets you inspired?

Everyday life. Books, art, film, other music. Being in nature really gets the creativity going.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?

It’s really thriving. There’s so much great stuff coming out these days. The genre walls are down and everything is fair game, not to mention the amount of quality gear that’s available and the explosion of modular synthesis. Plugins and samples sound amazing now too, so whatever type of music you want to make, you can, and you don’t need to break the bank to do it.

jasonvanwyk.com

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
I was about 13-14 years old when I first got into writing music. I was in high school soaking up the hardcore/breakbeat/rave scene that was in full bloom, so this was about 1992/1993. As a young kid, there was a lot of fun and amazing music out there. The further I got away from mainstream music, the more amazed I got by what I was hearing. I’d go to indie record stores on the weekends with my friend, Chris. We’d spend whatever money we’d been given by our parents on starting a record collection. It was a really exciting time of my life that I remember fondly, and the more I got involved with music, the more I knew that I had to start producing my own tracks. Fortunately, I already had a few pieces of gear that would get me up and running.

These first pieces were an Atari 1040 STE and a basic Casio keyboard with MIDI. I tried my hand at software like Cubase, Trax, Notator before realising I needed a sampler to write the music I was into at the time, due to the limitations of this keyboard and the price of buying myself a nice synthesizer. This obviously wasn’t really an option for a school kid with no income. Chris was very much into the idea of producing his own music too and introduced me to some freeware tracker software. He’d been putting tracks together by sampling using a plug-in cartridge for his Amiga 500 and a program called ProTracker. After a few initial lessons from Chris, I started to work it out for myself using the Atari equivalent, which was NoiseTracker. I then realised I could start to put music together the way I wanted to using the Atari and the cheap sampler. Thinking back I’m sure both of these trackers only had 4 channels available and had no effects built in. Very rudimentary creation tools for the time, but it was enough to get me hooked and plant the seed.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
Including my initial crude Atari setup, it’s changed and been added to year by year. I was pretty much all ‘in the box’ up until around about 2006. It’s also hard to say what my final setup looks like too, as my studio is constantly being changed, refined, moved, etc. I feel I finally have a good space which is acoustically treated, so the layout of it won’t change much these days, but the content might. The core of my studio probably will stay the same though. I’m using a PC with an i7 6700K (4.00Ghz) and 16gb DDR4 ram, which is fast enough for what I need. I only recently upgraded this PC, within the last few years actually, as I was making do with an outdated 1st generation i7 chip for a while, until it finally became a bit too slow for everyday use. A few other staples are the Focal CMS 65 and Sub setup, along with two RME HDSP Multiface audio interfaces, that connect to a Soundcraft Ghost 24 channel mixing desk and a Crane Song HEDD.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Every piece of gear I’ve bought has probably been a favorite at some point in time. Actually, perhaps not every piece… Right now, I’ve been really enjoying the Yamaha CS10, which Ena (Horo) was kind enough to ship to me from Tokyo for a fantastic deal. A few other favourites are my Yamaha DX200, Korg Wavestation A/D, Yamaha TG33 and Roland SH-101. There’s a lot of gear in here though, so it’s hard to narrow it down. I’ve also got a Yamaha SY22, which has seen better days, but I love it. It’s kind of redundant to own that and the TG33, as they are essentially the same synth, other than a few upgrades that the TG33 has. I picked this up for $60 on Craigslist many years ago, mainly due to the price and the fact I love my TG33. These all come to mind though, as I’ve been using them a lot for recent ambient projects. I recently got a DSI Pro 2, which has become one of my favourite synths ever. Instant inspiration every time I switch it on. Amazing!

And what about the software that you use for production?
I’ve been using a program called Renoise since around about 2002. I think it was version 1.2 or so that I started to use after becoming unsatisfied with Cubase and the PC version of Logic at the time. It’s obviously not because they were bad programs, but the tracker workflow had become second nature for me after working that way for so long. When Renoise came out, it gave me all the advantages of programs like Cubase but allowed me to retain the way of working I was so used to. I’ve stuck with that ever since. I also use Cockos Reaper, which I link to Renoise using Rewire, as I can sync up video for film scores and projects that rely on timecode.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
I used to lust after gear, especially rarities and high ticket items, but these days I’m really not as bothered. I can more than make do with everything I’ve got, plus it’s more about how the sounds are processed for me. Buying a vintage synth for $3-4k doesn’t make much sense to me these days, as it will essentially sound very similar to something else much cheaper, due to the processing I like to do to achieve my sounds. I think this is in part why I never took the plunge into modular synthesis. I’m sure I’d enjoy it a lot and get a lot of use from it, but it’s just not a wise investment of money for me right now, with my studio setup the way it is currently. Of course, the collector side of me throws all this common sense to one side every now and then and makes purchases! But in general, I try and keep it sensible and not too much of a financial drain anymore.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
Renoise is a fantastic tool for sound design in general. Over the years, I’ve created many effects chains using the Renoise native DSP effects and some VST FX. I’ve amassed a large collection of these that I can use as starting points when creating tracks, or when I’m trying to achieve a specific sound. Often times, I’ll get surprised at the results some of these can render for me, and other times I won’t even remember how or when I created a chain. I got into DIY pedals for a bit, but haven’t made anything other than a stompbox with a custom piezo mic, which has 4 adjustable violin strings mounted on the box. Running things like this through other effects units and experimenting often creates fantastic results. Every now and then I’ll spend a good amount of time doing things like this and just leave the record button on. I had a broken Orban spring reverb for a while too, that created really weird artifacts. That was fantastic for getting really unexpected amazing soundscapes from. Sadly, it eventually died, but I like to use noise from things like that to create beds of texture.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I’m constantly experimenting with device chains, doing things that you shouldn’t normally do, like placing a delay after a reverb in a wet signal. Usually, you’d want the reverb to effect what comes through the delay, but that’s just a specific example that springs to mind. I intentionally don’t write down or make too many notes of things that sound good together. I like this approach, as it means I’m not likely to rinse and repeat certain things. This is quite the opposite for VST/native DSP chains in Renoise, as I touched on in the previous question.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I don’t play live, exactly – more like a hybrid setup. I’ll play all of my own music via Traktor, using the NI Kontrol Z1 and X1 MkII, and then have 2 remix decks going, where I play stems of my tracks with the other decks using two Kontrol F1’s. It lends to a unique live experience for my music, without creating any panic and stress that might be caused by bringing more expensive studio equipment on the road with me.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Space and order. I have to clear everything, all desktops, the floor etc. from gear that’s laying about, including cables. I need that clean workspace before I sit down and create. It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time now, so it’s a habit I like to practice. I definitely tend to push things to the back of the queue and sometimes leave myself with a bigger workload than is necessary, so that’s something I could definitely improve on. My time management is something I’m usually good with in general, but it’s a bit haywire with music sometimes.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
The process of creating isn’t always the same for me. I’ve never had a specific way of going about creating a piece of music. Sometimes I’ll start with percussion, sometimes with a pad. Other times I’ll just be messing with FX units and create something that becomes a starting point. As for how an idea is born, it’s really a mixture of inspiration and simply experimenting. Inspiration comes from so many sources for me, so I often find myself with ideas forming in my mind.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I make music for myself, first and foremost, so my reactions always dictate whether or not a piece of music will eventually come out. If it’s still making me feel something after a month or two, then I’ll more likely consider it for a release, rather than something that I’ve gone off of, obviously. I usually listen back in the studio a lot, with and without the sub. Other place I’ll listen to would be on headphones when exercising, in the car, and on my hi-fi setup with standard speakers. Usually, I can hear if something needs changing or fixing in the mix on one of these ways of auditioning, so it’s a pretty reliable process for me. Hearing your music on a club PA is the ultimate test though, as if it doesn’t cut through there, then I feel like I never reached the potential that the track may have once held.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Often! It’s not so bad usually, but I can definitely let it interrupt work at times. If (or when) it happens, I’ll take a break from what I’m doing, then try come back to it refreshed at a later time. Sometimes it might be an hour later, sometimes it might be a week later. I usually don’t let it stress me too much if it happens. My attention span can dwindle quickly when I have a lot of projects on the go and I find I work better by not taking on too many things at once, so I can devote my full attention to where it’s needed at the time.

What gets you inspired?
Lots of things, but mainly sci-fi movies, video games and related themes in other forms of art. I think I’ve been eternally writing music that I’d love to see accompany visuals for some futuristic science fiction film or game. That’s usually my headspace.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I think it’s in a healthy state. There are a lot of fantastic musicians putting out some incredible music across many different genres. Lots of healthy little scenes all around the world, which in turn have spawned some amazing record labels too.

auxiliarymusic.com

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
Early in life and I never really thought much about music, say nothing of taking lessons or playing. It was at the age of 13 when some of my classmates started listening to rock and punk and played music on their guitars. I looked at them and thought “hmm, it looks fun!” and I asked my parents to buy me an electric guitar, the cheapest one possible. It was some kind of Stratocaster copy. I liked the whole idea of making sounds and pretty early I realized that I was more into noodling and trying to figure out “my own” harmonies and chords than just doing cover songs.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
It was always a really humble setup and it was always meant to be mobile. For a long time, the only hardware I had was an all-purpose Mac Mini, cheap MIDI keyboard, headphones (because of neighbors) and a guitar, it was at my parent’s house. By the time I moved to a country-house with my wife I had already got a few old synths (Juno, DX7, Korg MS20) and new studio monitors (Neumann KH 120), and I lived like that for few years until, coincidentally, we moved just a few days ago to a new place. Most of the pictures you see are made just a few minutes before I packed all the stuff away into the boxes, so it’s all history now.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Roland RE-301! As you could already notice, I work in-box almost exclusively and don’t rely on hardware gear, and the moment when I first heard the liveliness and authenticity of the real analogue tape echo was a revelation for me. You can put anything into it and it will start to be alive – how cool is that! But actually now I try not to overuse it, so it works as a bedside table now!

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use Logic Pro X as my DAW and my primary source for sounds are sample libraries, lots and lots of them.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
I wish I had a proper-sized studio in which I could put a real piano with a couple of good mics and a DSI Prophet. But at this point in my musical journey, a much more valuable achievement would be having access to a real orchestra and an ability to record it.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
Since my day job is doing music and sound design for video games and I have finished a sound designer higher education course, the answer will be too long! But when I work on my personal music I think the main idea that I follow is that you can imagine a music as merely just a noise with a set of accentuated frequencies, therefore treat it as a noise with some tonal information that is only by chance is interpreted in our brain as something that has a semantic layer. And by doing so you automatically start to think the other way around: all sounds have musical properties to one extent or another and you start to respect them as a legitimate part of your tooling. The idea is not new for sure, it just brings diversity to a musical palette. 100% Money-Back Guaranteed.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
I tried to be as honest as possible and to put as much skill and detail as I could: I deprived myself of using sample instruments and recorded a real string quartet, two pianos, a clarinet and solo cello instead. And I tried not to use any overdubs or layering for these recordings; to focus more on the composing and orchestration rather than sound production.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
It’s a painful question for me as I don’t play live for many reasons one of which is my inability to deliver a convincing full sound with the limited resources that I have. One of the workarounds during my few live shows was using background playback, and in some compositions, this was just a mixed audio file with the exception of couple tracks and the only thing we did was just playing a bass and piano line on top of that stuff. It felt really, really wrong.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I think that the most important thing is that it should be at home, with lots of natural light.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
Since my day job is connected with an ability to compose any music at any given moment, with as little compromise as possible and as fast as possible, I simply have no time to think about how my ideas mature and see the light. When working on a bespoke piece I usually start with just a chord progression without a melody and then I start to arrange it with different instruments, like the way you arrange a Christmas tree. Somewhere in the midway, I find the melody, right instruments and “attention grabbers” — something that will make the composition different from just another mediocre piece in the same genre. Mixing and mastering also get done somewhere between the previous steps. I audition it, send it to the client and then… the piece gets rejected and I start everything from scratch! My personal music is a bit more relaxed, but the only real difference is that I am a composer AND a client.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
I have a pair of speakers I trust and a pair of headphones for some minuscule details (accidental sample cuts for example), but I am not the kind of guy who listens to the result on every piece of equipment possible. I think the main reason for that is that I am more worried about some kind of harmonic fatigue, not sonic fatigue, i.e. I quickly stop to hear the freshness of melody, chord changes and can’t make right decisions after that. What helps me is exporting my work-in-progress (somehow listening to the audio as a .wav file on a computer gives a different experience as opposed to playing back the project in DAW) and just pitch shifting the whole file 1 semitone up or down. I know it doesn’t work for everyone but for me, it’s like listening to the composition for the first time harmony-wise.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Oh yes. No matter how easy the job is there is always a slight fear of blank paper and procrastination comes into the place at these moments. But sometimes there are moments when there is no work to do and I just can live without doing, playing or even listening to music for several weeks in a row. I don’t know if that still qualifies as a procrastination but if so it’s a massive one!

What gets you inspired?
I don’t rely on inspiration and taught myself to never rely on such things as they ruin the productivity in the long run.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
Maybe because I grew in the internet era I perceive any style/genre merely as a cataloging thing, and I believe that any definitions and descriptions of music will get more and more blurred in the future. I think it’s a good thing.

130701.com

How were you introduced to music? When did you start creating your own?

I’ve always felt a natural pull towards creating music since I was very young. I wasn’t immediately drawn to the piano – I started making music with computers and music software. It started with “trackers”, where you plot in the music note by note. Later I moved on to sequencers and MIDI keyboards – and that is where I started learning to play the keys.

I learned a lot from this. Recording bass-lines, drums, string chords and so on via MIDI to build my compositions. I tried piano lessons just a couple of times, but that really wasn’t anything for me – I wanted to explore the instrument on my own terms. It’s a slower process for sure, but I believe I developed my own characteristic going that path. The transition from working with computers, synths, and sequencers to focusing more and more on the piano, has happened gradually over the years. These days, I mainly just play the piano.

You’ve previously explained how you have different approaches to composing, could you elaborate on that for me?

It is very hard for me to explain how a new composition is born because it is very coincidental, different and almost never planned. When I sit down to play the piano, I never have any intention other than “I feel like playing the piano right now”. Sometimes I’m in “rehearsal mode” and other times I’m in “exploration mode”. Honestly, from there, things arise. Some pieces are formed as part of an improvisation, others from a specific new playing technique I try out or a set of chords I like. But then suddenly I get obsessed with a new idea or melody, and that often ends up being a new composition.

As an example: On ‘the Lost’, one of the compositions I spent a lot of time on is ‘Greiner’. I already had the melody I play with my right hand; I don’t remember when I first made that because it came to me effortlessly. I decided that I wanted to create a melody for my left hand that complimented it, and that was the hard part. I built it note by note, spending many days working on it. Then I spent equally long learning to play them together. ‘Greiner’ was hard work to compose and to learn to play – other compositions like ‘Fox’ came suddenly and effortlessly.

Has this approach changed over time?

My approach hasn’t changed, though I did learn a lot making ‘Pinô’, and that experience made me more determined and focused composing and preparing for ‘the Lost’. As a result, there isn’t as much improvised material on ‘the Lost’. That may be the main difference between the two.

What or who is your biggest inspiration when composing? Do you do anything, in particular, to get in the right mood for composing?

I don’t have any particular routine. It’s like working out at the gym. You go in feeling tired and not in the mood for training; but when you start, you are surprised at the amount of energy you have that day – and vice versa. It’s this weird unpredictable thing. I have days I feel down and depressed, but then wonderful things happen playing the piano. Then I have periods where I’m very productive and periods where I can’t create anything. But one thing I’m sure of, it really motivates me to have a goal. As of right now, I don’t have any plans on doing a third piano album, so I’m not as productive.

What can you tell me about The Lost?

The feedback I received after releasing ‘Pinô’ was so incredibly warm and loving. People understood and felt exactly what I wanted to express. I felt connected to them and their appreciation was so authentic.

After Pinô’s release, I didn’t plan on doing a follow-up. But when Nils told me he was willing to do another album with me, I knew I wanted that to happen as well. I spent the next one and a half years composing and preparing for the recording of ‘the Lost’. I didn’t want it to be just more of the same, but still similar to ‘Pinô’. We used three days recording and three days mixing and mastering ‘Pinô’. ‘the Lost’ was recorded in two days and mixed and mastered in one; half the time. I was better prepared this time, though. Still, it’s such an emotional experience. I didn’t touch a piano for weeks after that… it’s strange. I came out of it very satisfied but also completely creatively drained. I do believe other artists have similar experiences as me, when creating an album.

Were there any other differences to creating The Lost as opposed to Pinô?

The process of creating them was very similar. Both were made with Nils Frahm as the producer in his Durton Studio (now moved to Funkhaus, Studio 3) in Berlin. Going in recording ‘Pinô’, I wasn’t prepared for what an emotional experience it would be. How different it is playing for an actual recording, compared to sitting alone at home playing the same piece. I had a more determined attitude the second time. ‘The Lost’ was played on a different piano and with different recording equipment. The process was exactly the same as well as releasing it on Monique’s Sonic Pieces. It’s a true follow-up in every way.

Read Headphone Commute review of The Lost

sonicpieces.com

Interview by Amanda Nordqvist for Piano & Coffee
Photography © Roger NBH
Repubilshed with permission.

Let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?
Back to the very beginning, I’d say I was hooked on music after the very second I started listening to J.S.Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’. I was about 10 and I still keep that tape from my father’s collection. After that, I started taking organ lessons, as I was totally fascinated by the character and peculiarity of this instrument. I’d say my first pieces of gear were two. The first one was the electronic organ in the hall of my parents’ house. Then in 1983, I received as a gift my first MSX home computer and I started programming sequences and rhythms in MSX Basic. It was fun, with that language you could program up to three simultaneous parts, for each of them you could even choose the type of wave (saw, square, sine) and other interesting parameters as well. So I started to play the organ along with some programmed stuff on my MSX and by doing that I was, unconsciously, producing my first compositions. Then, after about four years, I got an MSX2 computer with a keyboard and a sound module that even featured a little sampler. By then I was already lost in ambient music, thanks to the second part of David Sylvian’s ‘Gone to Earth’ album. I still have those demos I did back then. They are not the most interesting stuff around, but there was a lot of passion for sure.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
During my life, I’ve been into electronic music at different levels of involvement. I remember, during the ’90s, having my Korg 01W/FD hooked to some modules and a sampler. I had this little project of mine, strictly electronic stuff, called Kre:8 (I know, this is a cheesy moniker, back then I thought it was cool). I even got in touch with Andy Barlow of Lamb, who really liked my first demo and invited me to reach his band in a Rome date in 1999, during their ‘Fear of fours’ promotional tour. So, basically, it was all hardware stuff that converged into the main mixer (a 16 channels Behringer model, when this brand was still manufactured in Europe). This kind of set up kept existing until my Waves on Canvas period (my last project heavily oriented in electronic music and songs), when I still had a lot of modules (a Waldorf Microwave XT, a Roland JP8080, a Vermona DRM MkIII, an Akai S5000 and an AKAI S3200XL among others) and all of them were hooked to Logic. Then one day I decided that I had to go exclusively acoustical. I had something to still deal with, I felt incomplete because something was really missing inside of me, as I just wanted to do what I’d always thought was impossible: to write my music for piano and strings, real ones, not libraries. It happened that I found the right people to play with (what basically still nowadays is my Ensemble), so I told myself it was the right time to sell everything and just keep my piano and my computer, nothing else, because I had to completely focus on something else for a while. That was my studio set up until a few years ago, when I then decided that I could embrace again electronic music, but with a different consciousness and approach. Nowadays I’ve got reel-to-reel tapes, a Waldorf Blofeld, an Arturia MiniBrute, a Roland JP8000, a hundred years old Dutch harmonium, a Korg KP-3, and a lot of acoustic instruments. Anyway, I tend to produce my sounds from acoustic sources, before processing and tweaking them in different ways.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
This is a tricky question. Anyway, I must say, if this has to be the instrument I had to bring with me in a faraway and distant island (given that there would be some electricity), I’d say my Roland JP8000. Its warmth is something I love finding peace and shelter. That instrument is capable of very lovely and imperfect pads. I usually hook it into my mixing board (a Yamaha MG20XU) and also add some ‘dust’ to it with my Korg KP-3. But, anyway, if for ‘piece of hardware’ you mean whatever instrument, then I’d say my beloved piano.

And what about the software that you use for production?
After using Cubase in the ’90 for a lot of years, I switched to Pro Tools LE in 2005 back when I purchased my first Mac Book Pro (I remember selling my entire video games collection in order to afford it, something I will forever regret, but I had to do it, I had no choice). It was bundled with the firewire version of the Digidesign M-Box Pro 2 I had. But I remember having a lot of problems with my DAW, the most notable ones being sudden and random crashes. Not what you were willing to happen after hours of work. So I switched to Logic 7 and I remember how happy I was receiving that big box full of manuals and guides, it was heaven. From then onwards, I never switched to any other DAW. I still work with Logic 9 and haven’t changed for the latest version because I simply don’t have the need. The ninth version of Logic is, anyway, very stable. I know Logic a lot, but there are still a lot of things and procedures to be learned. Also, I don’t like the choice of Avid, to make people pay an amount of money per month in order to work with Pro Tools, I mean, it’s a sort of rent. I am more in the old school way where, if I buy something, it is definitely mine.

Is there a particular piece of gear that you’re just dying to get your hands on and do you think one day you’ll have it?
Well, I’d say there are two instruments I would really love to put my hands on and make mine. The first one is an acoustical one, and it is a celesta. I love that sound, it’s organic and shiny and deep at the same time. I have a lovely collection of glockenspiels and metallophones, but even if you change the kind of sticks and hammers while playing them, the sound won’t be like the one of a celesta, which is not cheap and sounds very wonderful. I’ve seen celestas are not so rare in Germany, so one day I will do my best to buy one and ship it safely to Sardinia, considering the long road it has to do. The second one is a dream, and I would really love to have enough space where I could keep and play a liturgical organ. There are also small models, the aunt of my viola player owns one at her house because she is an organ player. You don’t have to own a space like a Church to host an instrument like that. Who knows, maybe one day it will happen.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
What I usually like to do is what they taught me at the Conservatory where I graduated in Electronic Music, and it’s related to the fact that every sound in nature has a tonal center, mainly due to a redundant or most present frequency range. So, when I can, and when it’s aesthetically pertinent, I love transforming sound objects to proper sounds or notes, in order to characterize or sustain a certain part of a composition. This could be taken as a given and very common thing, but every time I apply this approach, it brings interesting results and unexpected surprises. Of course, I am not (and will never be) a preset guy, even if in the past I was obsessed with a few ones (the Korg MS2000 ‘Pan Tran’ being on top of the list), so every time I start a new work I usually take my time to make some new sounds that I like, when of course I am not going to use the ones I’ve already done. Most of them are on my JP8000 anyway.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
Lately, I am having this habit of basically mixing and already mastering while I am writing a new track. I set up the compressor (I usually use the PSP Vintage Warmer II) on the master channel, and I start from there. When I’ve finished the track I keep mixing the last bits and then I start the mastering process, but most of the work is already done, also because I know very well my studio monitors (a pair of Yamaha MSP5 I purchased a lot of time ago).

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
It depends, I tend to do mostly acoustic sets. But when I play concerts that feature parts of electronic sounds, I just bring with me my Mac Book Pro running Ableton, my Edirol FA101 sound card (with 8 separate outputs, so I can send all the metronomic clicks to each player) and that’s it. At times I also bring with me my Line 6 FBV Express MkII, which I use as an expression pedal hooked to an FX send on the piano channel in Ableton.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I love my studio because it’s a small and warm place, stuffed with everything I really need. In the past, I thought I vitally needed the day’s light and a big window to work properly, which is not. I prefer an intimate environment with soft and warm lights. Maybe I’d need more space, maybe in the next house if we’ll ever move elsewhere. But honestly, I have nothing to complain, I truly love where I work. I have everything I need.

What can you tell us about your overall process of composition? How are the ideas born, where do they mature, and when do they finally see the light?
I usually sit at the piano and start playing until something that I feel is valuable and worth my attention starts to appear. So when it happens, and I have enough time, I start working on it and develop a more structured idea. If I am in a rush, I just record the musical embryo on my iPhone or iPad, or I write down some notes about it. This can even happen at 3:00 am and that’s the bonus of having your studio in your house. Anyway, the most interesting cases are when I dream about music. I tend to dream about themes, at times even completely arranged pieces, so when I wake up I work immediately on what’s left in my memory. There are some of my compositions which are based on things I’ve dreamed. I think there is a true connection between our creative output and our inner feelings and thoughts, which in the end are just concepts that transcend the spoken and written language, like music indeed. That connection is for me a sort of straight line from my unconscious to my consciousness. I hope it gives the idea.

After the piece is complete, how do you audition the results? What are your reactions to hearing your music in a different context, setting, or a sound system?
That’s a very important aspect of the creative process, and I think we never have to underestimate what comes after we say to ourselves: ‘Ok, I’ve finished this track’. Then comes the moment where we can clearly see if the track works also on its own and not just in the studio or in the environment where we were totally focused on it. For instance, I record it on a MiniDisc, and from time to time I listen to it in my living room, where I’ve got another MiniDisc deck. Other times the help of my wife is totally needed and, indeed, essential. When I think I’ve completed something, I ask her to give a listen, because she’s the first listener who I totally trust. I could even change a composition in its entirety if she suggests me to do it because she knows me very well, she knows my limits, and she perfectly knows the traps I tend to fall in.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
It can happen, and when it does it’s just because my mind is asking me for a break. Usually, I am a very prolific writer, needless to say, my hero is Wim Mertens who released tons of albums, so I write a lot, also because in my head I have a lot of ideas about projects and concepts for releases. In the end, writing music has become for me my main way of truly expressing myself. But at times I have to stop and do other things or just relax. I usually read a book or watch some YouTube’s videos about recording studios or recording techniques. Other times the nerd inside of me knocks wildly because he needs to come out and express himself, so I tend to play a video game, usually a JRPG, watch and read some nerdy reviews about retro games and consoles (only Nintendo stuff, please). I am also a follower of some YouTube channels like The Eight Bit Guy, Christian Henson Music, and Techmoan.

What gets you inspired?
Life. What happens in my life, spiritually and on a more concrete level, is my main inspiration. For instance, these past years have been heavily inspired by the illness and the subsequent death of my father, who passed away this past March. Also, I live in Sardinia, an island in the center of the Mediterranean sea, so I am surrounded by waves. This has an important impact as well on my creative output. The same goes for nature which, here in this land, is quite generous.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I am not a huge listener of electronic music. Surely I was a lot into it in the past, but with the years passing by I unconsciously lived a subtractive process that led me, in the end, to listen mostly to classical music or silence. Also because, being this my main job, working with music all the time, at the end of the day I don’t tend to listen to some other people’s music. Anyway, replying to your question, I’ve seen things have changed a lot. There is more knowledge around, a lot of tutorials on the web, so if someone decides to write and produce electronic music, he has got all the tools at hand for free. Styles are constantly mixing each other and some aesthetic styles return cyclically, so things are naturally following their historical loop. The thing that has changed is that nowadays in order to start working with a sampler you don’t have to spend a fortune like you had to do in the nineties, you just need a cheap PC and start do your own stuff with some freeware as well. Not bad I’d say. So, yes, in the end, I think the state of ‘electronic music’ is quite glowing and prolific. I just hope this won’t bring electronic artists to a state where all things sound the same. But we’ll have time to witness all this.

stefanoguzzetti.com

For this interview, I catch up with Tom Hodge of Piano Interrupted to ask him questions on his collaborative score with Franz Kirmann for McMafia, which has premiered on BBC One in January of 2018. The soundtrack is released and available on Mercury KX. In the US, the show is being broadcast on AMC.

I’ve heard TV schedules are often extremely tight. Was that the case for McMafia?

Yes, the music production schedule might come as a surprise. As viewers switched on for the transmission of Episode 1 of McMafia on New Year’s Day on BBC1, Franz Kirmann and I were still very much involved with three episodes in three different ways; we were finalising the mix of Episode 6, seeking feedback from the director and preparing for a recording session on Episode 7, and deep in the midst of writing the music for Episode 8. With hindsight, it seems quite odd to think that 4 million people were watching and listening to the music to the first episode when the music to the final episode was still being written!

Just before our final recording session at Air Studios, I bumped into composer David Arnold (who has five James Bond films and countless other titles under his belt) and he assured me that TV schedules are always thus. Sherlock apparently involves delivering an episode every two weeks with up to 70 minutes of music each time, and 3 episodes in total. I attempted to gazump him with my wild claims (all entirely true) about delivering one episode per week with 30 minutes of music each one, and 8 in total! It is a workload I have never experienced before – 130 cues with 4 hours of music over the course of the series.

You and Franz have made a fair bit of music together in the past of course. Presumably, this was very helpful?

Franz and I were well-prepared, at least conceptually, for the challenge ahead! Our eight-year-long collaborative relationship began when I invited him to do some bits and pieces of media work with me (I was writing music for a lot of commercials back then). We later transitioned into making records and playing concerts, continuing to explore an evolving shared sound world under the moniker Piano Interrupted, before finally transitioning back to scoring work. Over these many years and various experiences, we have created a dialogue which underpins the sound of McMafia.

What sounds and instruments were important in the writing of the McMafia score? Tell us a little more about the process.

One of the greatest influences on the score has been an extremely fruitful collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra. I first started working with Hugh Brunt and Rob Ames, the principal conductors at the LCO, five years ago when I wrote the music for Carolina Herrera’s New York runway show, and I’ve been looking for a really meaty project to work with them on ever since. Scoring to picture often takes a familiar route: demos are prepared using samples, and then when everything is approved, those samples are replaced with real musicians. There is of course nothing wrong with this per se, but for the McMafia soundtrack I was searching for something different that I hoped would provide a richer and more inspirational sound world in the long run, and which would take advantage of the processes that Franz and I had developed during the painstaking process of making records. I was determined to embed the process of live recording deep within the writing process.

So without any cues approved, including even the theme tune, we embarked on an orchestral recording session with the LCO (and also a separate largely improvised piano session where I responded immediately to the string recordings). Fortunately for us, the producers went along with this maverick approach. (Let’s just say I didn’t explain it quite so starkly as I have written here — it can be our secret). Thankfully the material we got was everything we could have hoped for and more, and we returned to these initial experimental sessions again and again throughout the writing process. We were able to process all of this material with the same depth and multi-layering approach we would use to make an album (where we might spend six months on thirty minutes of material instead of one week) and because of our head start we were able to allow some space in each subsequent recording session for more speculative exploration, in an effort to sort of stay ahead of the curve.

The vital side effect of this approach was that in many cases the initial demos had already been at least partly recorded with a live orchestra, and what can be an extremely challenging process of approving music cue by cue was actually made somewhat easier and I hope, more inspiring for everyone. It was certainly massively inspiring for me.

tomhodge.com | mercurykx.com

Editor’s Note: The following interview took place on March 19th, conducted on Twitter (with some participation from the public) between @H_C and @BlackKnoll. The following is a [slightly edited] transcript of this live exchange.

Hey Rafael, and welcome to the first Headphone Commute TwitterAMA… So where are you at this moment and how is the weather over there?
Thanks so much for the invite! I’m in my studio in NY mastering a film score. It’s cold and sunny here. Nice little sun rays for a change! How’s London tonight?
We had a storm they called The Beast From The East 2.0, but I don’t think that England understands the definition of a “storm” – lol… Now, of course, I want to know what score you’re mastering… any chance you can tell us, or is it a secret?
Ha! We have another Nor’easter coming this week. Meh. Score: it’s an indie film with music by @_MichaelMuller from @BalmorheaMusic. Really lovely!

I’m currently playing The Unintentional Sea on my monitors — one of my favourite albums… OK, I lie, I’m still in love with Daydreaming!
Oh, that old thing… hoping to re-release it one day. Of course, I’d have to re-record the entire thing from scratch since I don’t have any files for it. Maybe not a bad thing. Start it from scratch!
I also still have Hopes And Past Desires from that night in Chicago when I met you for the first time, and you handed it to me on 7″ vinyl…
Oh boy, that tour… The Vicodin tour. I had spent the night prior to that show at the ER in excruciating pain from a rotted tooth. They gave me a Vicodin supply and antibiotics for the two weeks, I wasn’t going to be able to see a dentist. Show must go on!

What music do you listen to when you are not mastering or composing? Is it something drastically different? I imagine you walking out of your studio after 48 hours of drone and putting on breakcore – lol ;)
You’d be surprised. I’ve been on a Phil Collins kick all of last week after watching that 808 documentary. 80’s soft rock & pop. Things I heard as a child without realizing it had gear I love.
Oh yeah, you’re talking about @808TheMovie – a very dangerous film, because I think it cost me a pretty dollar after I watched it (hehe).
Yeah, it’s amazing. I loved that story about Marvin Gaye’s 808 that Soulwax was telling. So cool!

Can you talk a bit about Midnight Colours? Was this indeed your first cassette release?
Yeah, actually! Dunno why I hadn’t done one before. Wayyyyyy simpler than cutting a vinyl record. It was a pretty seamless process. Hoping to do more in the future.
Were you specifically targeting the medium when you were working on the album or did it come around later?
I didn’t for Midnight Colours, BUT actually did for Sirimiri (on @UmorRex) We plotted so the cassette plays in a loop (when you use autoplay function on a tape deck). Same content on both sides sequenced with that in mind.
Ah, sweet! I was going to ask about the Umor Rex release! Now I gotta find the right tape deck, hah! What’s next? Individual loops?
I’d definitely like to do more cassettes, for sure. Looking into continuous tapes, though they are prohibitively expensive to make a release viable atm.
Speaking of “expensive” what are your thoughts on your music being resold on sites like Discogs at such a high premium?
I’m really annoyed at the ppl who buy something with the sole intent to flip it on Discogs! We don’t make LTD editions cause we’re trying to profit. Quite the contrary: there is no profit, so in order to lose less money, LTD editions it is. […] Making records is VERY expensive (particularly when you are competing for pressing plants against a 15k pressings of Guardians of The Galaxy Vol.2 vinyl pressing).

I know you told me that you were one of the lucky enough to attend that @AlvaNoto & @RyuichiSakamoto concert at “The Glass House”… Seriously, how was it?
Yeah, I engineered it! One of those flukes in life. I’m a massive Ryuichi fan, so that was quite special to not just see it, but also be part of it in a minuscule way. Such a beautiful evening. So thankful for that experience.
Yes, but what about that @Ghostly night at New York’s @lprnyc and you saw Ryuichi Sakamoto in the audience before your performance!!! How magic (and nerve wrecking) was that???
Oh man, that was brutal… I remember he had just flown in from Germany and was exhausted. I remember he was nodding off a bit and I was like… OMG. I’ve bored one of my heroes with my shitty music. That was fun. My legs were shaking onstage!
I honestly don’t know how you guys do it… how you perform that is, in front of an audience… you know that I’m sitting in there, peeling apart every tiny f-up, lol… just kidding, of course – no one ever notices anything except the performer themselves!!! :)
Well, you know I’m usually totally pissed, right? I need like a bottle of Rioja before I go on. ***I’m joking mum****

One last question. I have to ask about The Sight Below… you think he’s ever coming back?
Funny you asked. I was earlier today going through some of the material I had written for @MUTEK_MX show. Hopefully, I can get it together!

blackknollstudio.com