Editor’s note: I’m really excited to roll out this brand new column on Headphone Commute, dedicated to all of you, gear heads, DSP junkies and sonic geeks! In this special feature, each carefully selected artists will get an opportunity to talk about their current studio setup, working environment, favorite hardware, process of composition and much more! My very first guest of honor is Rafael Anton Irisarri, who I’m also crediting with inspiration behind this new feature! Enjoy! ~HC

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 very first piece of gear is how I got involved composing music in the first place. I bought a Boss DR-5 when I was a teen and a really crappy 4-track Tascam portastudio cassette recorder. The DR-5 was a drum machine that also included a sequencer and few sounds like piano, synths, etc. All very terrible, but it was all I could afford and a fun way to start composing my own music. Up to that point, I was playing in bands with others and well, didn’t have the freedom to create as I pleased. Having access to this technology was very liberating. I remember getting the DR-5, opening up the package and going thru that manual front-to-back and not going to sleep until I knew exactly EVERY single function on the machine. One of my fondest music nerdon moments.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
At least ten different ones – it’s all evolved so much over the years. From very complex setups – at one point once had a huge 32 channel mixboard and several synths – to very simple ones, like when I made “Glider” for Ghostly, it was a bedroom studio setup with just a few FX pedals and a small Mackie mixer. My current setup is a highly-functional one and thus far the one I’m the most satisfied. It’s been now years of acquiring knowledge and gear and learning how to obtain the best pieces for what I need in my mastering studio setup or for my own composer studio at the best price.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
It’s always changing. So many things I love. I’m obsessed with all my Moog pedals at this moment. Just finished patching everything to a 48 point patchbay and it’s been really fun to use them in a modular way. I’m also in love with this little box made by a small company out of Baltimore called KNAS. It’s called a “moisturizer” and it’s essentially a spring reverb with an LFO, Filter and CV added to it. So much fun! For more “serious” production gear, I never mix these days without my FATSO. Love the saturation and compressor for different applications. Lastly, the best piece of gear I’ve ever bought is my SSL summing mixer. I can’t really put to words all it does for my sound, but it’s a huge part of it.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I’m using Ableton Live almost exclusively, aside from third-party Universal Audio plug-ins. They are incredible at emulating high-end pieces of classic gear, though very expensive. I’ve probably spent more money on UAD plug-ins than I’ve spent on buying vinyl these past 10 years, it’s pretty mental!

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?
Oh, there’s a huge list, not just one! I’ve got a severe case of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). I even got a 42U rackmount sitting here waiting to be filled with new friends – anything from the Roland MKS-80 (rack version of a Jupiter 8 synth) to some serious mastering gear, like a Manley SLAM Mastering Limiter – price tag on that guy is over $7K, which is going to take several years saving and counting the pennies I make selling records I reckon!

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
My last touring live setups were a bit nuts, so I’ve started to scale back a bit again. During my last Europe tour in January this year, I messed up a lot of my Moog pedals, so Ive decided to start taking less expensive gear – things get trashed really bad when you are traveling overseas. Up to that point, I was carrying with me over 15 FX pedals, two synths, 65 cables, 8 midi controllers, and backlining a guitar, bow, amp and 24 channel mixboard. I used EVERY single piece of gear live. But yeah, I’ve started to scale back, so for example, I recently did a The Sight Below show here in Seattle and only took two synths, 6 FX pedals and 3 midi controllers with me. Funny thing is I still ended up using about 35 cables. My wife was helping me setup for the soundcheck that evening. It’s the first time she’s actually done this with me. We kept patching cables until we both ran out, and she said “so THAT’s why you are always buying so many cables!”

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Organization for me is the most important thing. I’m quite compulsive, everything HAS to be in a specific place, perfectly lined-up, patched and ready to be used. Otherwise, it doesn’t get used so often. I don’t have anything tucked away – if it’s in a closet, it won’t get used. Out of sight, out of mind. I’m also quite the germophobe, as you may know, so my studio is my clean sanctuary. I require people to wash their hands and sanitize before coming in and touching anything – even close friends think I’m totally nuts when it comes to that stuff. I have a whiteboard in my studio – it contains a detailed “to-do list” for each week – something I learned from Robin Rimbaud actually. Order and neatness is crucial to me. I cannot focus otherwise.

Improvements: this area never ends, it’ll never be perfect, so it’s more about learning to accept that fact and working with what you’ve got. Making limitations part of the creative process. Afterall, limitations are truly the mother of inventions. I strongly believe that’s the case.

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?
Composing is a very intimate process for me. I need to be isolated, withdrawn to get into it. That’s one of the toughest things of living in a cool city like Seattle: there is ALWAYS something great going on. So you have to really take a step back and recluse yourself. Some ideas come out of a sound, others out of a piece of gear, there’s really no exact science or rules. For example, one of the songs on the new ORCAS album was born out of me showing Tom a new polyphonic analog synth I received. It literally arrived just a few minutes before he got to my studio and I was opening the box when he got in. So, out of the box I plugged it in and was showing him what it does and how you can send MIDI to it via USB to play a sequence off Ableton. As I was doing that, I stumble across a great little bass sound and had a very cool nice line happening, so I patched it into my rig, ran it thru a few FX’s and recorded about seven or eight minutes of me improvising with it. Just like that: boom! new idea. I asked Tom to play guitar on top of my improv, also manipulating his sound as he played along to the track, recording everything. And before we knew it, we were adding vocals, lyrics, and structuring this sonic experiment, morphing it into an actual song. All within a few hours of me opening a box. It just happens like that sometimes.

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 love listening in different systems: my old trusty Genelec’s, my home stereo JBL’s, a shitty BOSE boombox, three different pairs of headphones (from high-end AKG 701’s to Sennheiser classic HD280 & HD-25). I also listen on my wife’s car sometimes. Mostly, when I’m listening I’m trying to get a similar-sounding mix across that multitude of systems. It obviously varies depending on the music, but overall, is a good thing to listen and compare on different systems and circumstances. Elements that for example are very present on headphones may not be so much in the living room, and even less on a car stereo. My goal is to find a good balance, even before I get to the mastering stage. Just the same way you cannot really fix a bad sound at the mix stage, mastering cannot fix a bad mix.

Earlier version of studio setup: Autumn, 2012

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I do, unfortunately. I try hard not to! Sometimes I get very overwhelmed and depressed and cannot function well. I find those times terrible for creativity – there’s good depression and bad depression. Good depression results in things like “Daydreaming” or “Glider.” Bad depression is just unproductive. Been an independent artist is such a struggle. A lot of energy is spent preoccupied with things like “where am I getting income next month?” – it’s a very unstable thing and trying to be creative when your mind is overtaxed with worries is tough. So, you really need some distractions. A lot of artists turn to drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately for me, drugs don’t really make me feel any better – we even have legalized marijuana here in Seattle – I can walk to the store and buy some premium quality organic weed that would make my 15 year old self very happy, but you know, when you reach a certain point, you just don’t do it. I dunno why, but I’ve just never been too inclined towards any of that lifestyle and indulge in any of those things.

And of course, when you make music for a living, music is not really a good distraction anymore. Instead, you get sidetracked by things like the internet, social media, etc. Over the years, I’ve tried to spend less time online, rather spending it doing something else, like watching a film or reading a book. There are of course, many guilty pleasures along the way – I’ve been very obsessed with George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” universe – from the books to HBO’s Game of Thrones. I even made a version of the ‘Rains of Castamere” last year, which I posted to my soundcloud page. It’s really silly and embarrassing, but I even got all giddy like a schoolgirl when “King Joefrey” re-twitted it after I posted it. Now THAT was a good high!

Be sure to also read Headphone Commute’s review of The Unintentional Sea

irisarri.org

Editor’s note: Welcome to the second installment of Headphone Commute’s “In the studio with…” column. Behind this door with the Hello Kitty “Welcome” sign (pictured above) lies the home in which Brock Van Wey (aka bvdub) composes his music… Be sure to check out Brock’s latest release on echospace [detroit] titled Home. Works really well in the background as you read this amazing and very personal narrative, if you ask me… Step right in, as we bring you closer to the world of your favorite artist! Enjoy! ~HC

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?

Actually I composed my very first piece of music when I think I was around 10 or 11, a piece for a trio of violin, viola, and cello. I was playing the violin since I was 5 (and later piano), and after some years found myself becoming bored with just playing things others had composed. It felt very constraining. Plus, although I guess I was supposedly a ‘classical’ musician, I didn’t actually like ‘classical’music as such, and even when I was playing pieces I was supposed to be playing, I was always kind of remixing them in my head, I guess you could say, into the way I thought they should be. So I guess it was natural for that to lead to me composing my own pieces from scratch. I composed several around that time, and throughout the following years a few more for both solo, trio, and quartet, along with a slew of solo piano pieces, as well as a few duets for violin and piano, up until around the time I quit both the violin and piano when I was around 15 or 16. In the last couple years or so from around 13 to 15, I attempted to compose an entire symphony, but never completed it. I was able to compose most of the string parts, but putting it all together with the rest, namely for instruments I had never played, was biting off more than I could chew. But hey, you’ll never know if you don’t try.

I think it was about 1993 or so when I composed my first ever electronic piece, a really weird kind of industrial techno/classical thing (it was supposed to be a melodic trance track, and ended up as some industrial-sounding thing, which was especially weird considering I had never listened to industrial music) with a program that required that you actually write the music out just as you would a physical score (notes and all). It was super taxing and honestly the track wasn’t that great, I remember it was full of weird bell noises and pitched-down bird sounds, but it was quite thrilling to be able to do something electronic on my own from scratch. With that I borrowed a sampler (can’t remember what kind, it was a really basic one), and had bought a Korg Wavestation off a classmate for some shockingly low price like a hundred bucks. Amazing what kind of deals you could get when everyone used drugs and just wanted money fast (haha).

I never really did any other music after that, as I found the whole experience too tiring and time consuming, and I was really frustrated that I couldn’t even come close to translating what was in my head. So I just stuck to DJing and throwing parties for those years. Way down the line I decided to come back to, and this time dedicate myself to, learning to do it properly, after months or even years of constant poking and prodding from one of my best friends, who also went on to spend months teaching me the ins and outs of a lot of hardware and software. My first official bvdub tracks were in 2006 (I had already been DJing under that name for 15 years or so by then), which formed the Strength In Solitude LP on 2600 (Night Drive). Those 6 tracks were the first I ever made (we won’t count that 1993 thing), in the order they were made. Although I still love a lot about those tracks for numerous reasons, you can definitely tell they were made by someone who was sorely ignorant about a shedload of things, especially sound design. They were compressed and limited to holy hell and sonically are about as crisp as a bowl of mashed potatoes someone left out in the rain. But it was really exhilarating to be able to put some of my own emotions to music. It was so liberating. No matter how those tracks ‘sounded,’I will never forget how thrilled I was making them, being able to have that kind of control and freedom, and hearing something be played back, just sitting there listening to little loops for what seemed like hours. I felt like a god. Well, a god who didn’t know what he was doing, but still a god (well, plenty of gods don’t know what they’re doing I guess haha). It was like discovering music all over again. But everything in music is a constant learning process, and I definitely learned a lot from those tracks that I still carry with me to this day.

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

It’s gone through several iterations during the years, especially between living in America and China. When I was living in San Francisco it was a lot more complicated and I was constantly trying out new configurations and combinations, but I streamlined it quite heavily when moving back to China. I originally brought with me what I could carry, and had quite a bit more shipped over, but I found that the new environment and ever-looming sense of non-permanency that comes from living in a country that makes you re-apply every 11 months to even be able to live here caused me to get rid of a lot of the clutter, and now it’s pretty perfectly streamlined to exactly how I need it. Actually my whole apartment is ‘streamlined’ I guess you could say, to the point that most people say it looks like no one’s ever lived in it. But I remember people saying that about my place in San Francisco too. Seems to be a pattern there that goes beyond ‘streamlining’ (haha).

Of course this is going to come off  as absurd in an ‘In the studio with…’ but personally I don’t think anyone’s specific studio iterations, setup, or gear is important. Not only am I, I guess, an old dinosaur in that I liked when music was all still a mystery and nobody cared what anyone used to make it, but I think it isn’t important for someone else to know what one person uses, because they would never use it the same way anyway.

Take my job as a professor for example. I have a very specific teaching style that I’ve created and fostered over the last 15 years, and made all the materials that go along with it from scratch. I never use a book, and never use any other materials but my own. And it works extremely well for me. Year after year, my students outperform every other class, and in my current school I’ve been ranked in the top 3 teachers, if not the top, out of 1300 in the entire university every semester for the last 5 years. I’m not trying to come off all full of myself, but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’ve worked unbelievably hard to make it happen. Anyhoo…

As a result, I get a lot of other teachers asking me if they can come to my class, ‘share’ ideas (i.e copy my ideas), or just outright ask me if they can have my materials. Of course I say no, but it’s not just because I’m a dick (I mean I am, but that’s not the only reason), or because I’ve spent 15 years of my life developing every inch of my own style and materials from scratch and I’m not about to just hand them over to someone else – it’s because it wouldn’t matter anyway. Because I could hand them a year’s worth of material and it would never work for them. It only works for me, because it’s developed around my personality, and my personal communication style. In the hands of someone else it would make absolutely no sense. Just like someone else’s materials in my hands would make no sense. I’ve seen other great teachers in my school have their class, and I also could never do it how they do it. Even if I took someone’s super successful class or materials and tried to pull it off myself, my students would look at me like I had lost my mind, and none of them would want to listen to or believe a word I said. Why? Because it doesn’t ring true. It’s obviously not ‘me,’and it doesn’t suit my personality, my vision for what I want to convey in the class, and what I want my students to take away from it. So others’ style, and their vision, should be left to them, and mine left to me.

I think it’s the same with equipment, studios, etc. Another artist can have his setup, but if I tried to use it, I would either produce nothing, something probably fucking horrible, or at the very least something that sounds absolutely nothing like what they make. So it doesn’t matter what they use. Because the end result is going to be completely different anyway. They’ve chosen what they’ve chosen because it works well for them. And just like a teacher will fail with someone else’s materials, so too will someone trying to use someone else’s setup. It’s crafted for them, and their vision. So we all have to do our own trial and error, find our way, enjoy the result, and don’t worry about the process. And get those damn kids off my lawn.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

My OCD-riddled brain.

And what about the software that you use for production?

Love. And Pain. And sometimes revenge fantasy plugins.

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

Personally I never think in that way. In music, as with all things, I just take it one day at a time, and I just make what I feel with what I have available to me. For me that’s what music is, it’s a snapshot of your life, mind, and times at the time you made it. And I think that includes whatever means you used to make it. Instead of some people who are always seeking to expand those parameters, I instead am always seeking to expand my ways of working within the parameters I have. To me that’s much more exciting, and can yield even more interesting results. Yes of course it’s exciting to have new tools at your disposal, but I think it’s even more exciting to be able to do something you’ve never been able to do before with tools you’ve had all along. Sometimes the fates decree that new tools will find their way into your hands. Sometimes they don’t. If so, awesome. If not, I can work with what I’ve got. If some piece of gear was meant for someone else, I’ll live – hopefully they at least make the most out of it.

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

I don’t do extensive tours. In fact I don’t play more than two shows at any time I travel, and usually only play one. On top of that, I don’t play more than a few shows a year. The reason for that is two-fold:

First, I need to make a very personal connection with the promoter or person who wants to bring me out. We have to have a lot of communication (some of them probably feel too much haha), and I have to feel their ideals and mine are on the same page. I have to get to know them personally before I agree to anything even remotely close to traveling halfway across the world to be a part of something they’re doing, and in turn, a part of their lives, if even for a few days or a night. I’m only interested in playing for people and events I am 100% behind with every fiber of my being. And such people and events don’t come along that often. If it’s not something I feel I can put all of myself into, and a person I feel is a true kindred soul, then I pass on it. I’m just as happy staying home and working on music. Making music isn’t my job, so I don’t ‘need’ to do anything related to any part of it. I only do what I want and what I love – which leaves me completely free when it comes to all choices, including shows, which is the only way I would ever want to do it. Sometimes I envy friends of mine who have made their music their living, but for me, just like in the 90’s when I had the chance to make DJing my ‘job’and didn’t, I could never do so with making music. It needs to stay my reason for living – not the means by which I live.

The other major reason is that for me, every show I play has to be completely unique from any others I play before or after it. I’ve never done the same things, or even performed two of the same tracks, or even parts thereof, in any two different shows. I think every show I play should be 100% unique to that time and place, and those of us who were there. I want it to be something special that will literally never be experienced again, by anyone there, from the audience, to even myself. To ensure that happens can be really a really weird mental maze I have to navigate, and is admittedly really exhausting as I impose 100x more work and weird rules than I need to on myself, but it’s really important to me, and it’s something I’m not willing to change. Therefore touring is not something that is really doable for me, as it’s really quite unimaginable to go play 10 shows in a couple-week span that are all literally 100% different and unique from each other in every way. I mean technically I have the catalog to do so (haha), but I just couldn’t do it mentally.

A show is an extremely emotional (and therefore emotionally draining) experience for me, and each one tells an entirely different story, and has an entirely different point. It’s one of the most amazing experiences in the world. But it leaves me really emptied out… that level of opening myself up to an audience in a public place is a really intense thing for me, and one that leaves me really in a weird state for up to several weeks afterward. I love it, but it’s very taxing. So it’s not something I take lightly, or something that I do more than a few times a year.

Anyone who has been to one of my shows knows I only use a laptop (and a big-ass mixing board, but I don’t bring that with me). When I first began playing shows I brought equipment with me, had a whole ‘setup’ and all that good stuff, but that lasted I think two times, until I played a show once and a problem with a cable on one piece of equipment triggered a chain of events that caused everything, including my laptop at the time, to crash. So it was nothing but complete silence for like 15 minutes while I had to get everything going again. It was a nightmare. And one I wasn’t gonna go through again. So after that I decided I needed to streamline (there’s that word again) everything down and make it as simple as possible, which is why I do it the way I do now. In fact, it gives a new meaning to the word. Not only do I have a dedicated machine that I only use for live shows, but living in China, and knowing the people that I do here, allowed me to go ridiculously far beyond that.

In typical (if you know me) random brand allegiance, I only use Asus computers (I currently have 5, 3 for music production, 1 for live shows, and 1 for everyday use). In the city I live in, the woman who runs the Asus store is a friend of mine, so she pulled a bunch of strings and allowed me to go to the Asus factory (it’s about an hour from where I live) and not only work with them to build custom laptops purely designed completely to my specifications (anyone who knows laptops knows that’s nearly impossible), complete with custom-made motherboards and nearly all custom-made hardware all built directly at the factory and specially designed to optimally sync with each other – but she then hired out her best tech guy to work solely for me, and who is a complete magician, to build me a custom version of Windows 7 from scratch (meaning he modeled it after Windows 7 but it’s completely custom-built and written from the ground up) that can only run what I use to play a show. It can’t get on the internet, it can’t run any other software, and it has zero other capabilities or functions… Hell, it can’t even type text outside of specifically designated parameters limited to what I use for the show. So it has literally zero things running in the background, and the CPU is always 100% dedicated to whatever I’m doing musically. My three music machines are set up the same way, but with those ones he adapted the system to be slightly more flexible, so I can add in new operations, software, hardware, and functions as needed. And I can type stuff in a few more situations, otherwise it’s kinda hard to keep track of finished tracks (haha). But the amount of unbridled power and unshakable focus those things can generate is frightening.

That not only cost me about a years’ salary in technical development costs and burnt hardware, but it also took me spending quite a bit of time to learn about how the operating system itself works (finally my damn Master’s in Chinese paid off, as the entire system top to bottom is in Chinese) so the whole thing was quite laborious, but you gotta pay the cost to the boss (haha). If anyone else tried to use it but me and the guy who designed it, they’d feel like they were on acid. And some kind of acid that makes every word Chinese (haha). It’s really bizarrely designed, and makes no sense to anyone but him and me, really. But we’re the only ones it needs to make sense to. It took about a year total with all said and done for us to pull it off, and I’d say about 20-25 different sessions of trial and error between every kind of (computer) hardware and combination thereof imaginable (between the customized machines and the customized operating system), much of which we and the factory were really just stabbing at blind, and we ruined several machines in the process, but it was all worth it. Sometimes Chinese ingenuity really kicks ass. And combined with my rampant OCD and clinically insane need to take everything ten football lengths past overboard, well then it becomes a juggernaut.

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

Well having my four cats either literally piled on top of each other on my lap or attempting to simultaneously perch on four different parts of my body (including one who insists on literally bear-hugging my wrist the entire time I make music) during every second of the musical process is a pretty important environmental aspect I guess, and the wall-to-wall Hello Kitty beatdown most think I am joking about but am all too serious (among my numerous overboard obsessions, Hello Kitty ranks near the top), but overall, having a workspace in a Chinese house is already the most challenging thing. Anyone who has ever been in a Chinese house will know what I mean. Everything is hardwood floors, marble, tile, and brick walls, single-pane windows that don’t even shut all the way, no carpet and nothing even remotely soft or fuzzy within 100 miles, and Chinese don’t believe in insulation or anything in-between the floors or walls, so not only is it either insanely hot or insanely cold, with no middle ground, but acoustically it’s an absolute nightmare, not only because you can literally hear every word of a conversation 5 floors down, but also every minuscule sound anywhere within a one-mile radius. It’s basically just one big uncontrollable echo chamber (the house and the country itself haha)

Over the years I’ve learned to be able to translate extremely precisely what something sounds like in my studio into what it will sound like in the rest of the world, but it took a long time. I always say I wish I could have an environment that was really neutral and just sounded amazing, but really the adversity of the situation is actually beneficial. I can’t become spoiled by a great sounding environment or situation that makes music that doesn’t actually sound that great seem like it does, and I’ve had to learn to really understand every inch of what I make, and instead of hindering my sound, I think it’s only helped hone it and make it thrive. I’m so used to the environment now, it would feel weird to change it, even to a better one. And although I threaten to kick my cats out on the street on a daily basis, I can’t change that either. And we all know Hello Kitty ain’t goin’ anywhere. No matter what your studio is like, you’ll have to learn and compensate for how what you make will sound elsewhere when it’s unleashed on the world.. But overcoming the rough parts is half the fun.

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?

Ideas are born solely from emotion… I only know the emotion I want to express. I’ve mentioned before that every time I make a track, the title is written before I even imagine note one. It’s the emotion or story I need to tell, and the whole reason behind everything that has to do with the track. Without it, nothing else happens. From there, the track, and in turn the album (since mostly all I do nowadays is albums), composes itself, really, in that I don’t consciously make any decisions to steer it this way or that. It goes where it wants, and I follow it there. But obviously both my background in different facets of music composition, coupled with the life experiences my music is borne from, guides my hand, whether I notice or not. So in the end, my music takes on many different styles, tempos, etc, from beatless ambient to deep techno to 180+ breaks to deep and ambient house and everything in-between, because they all express very different things, and life is full of different experiences and emotions. I never sit down with a pre-determined notion of which way I’ll say what I want to say. But I think naturally, due to the nature of what I want to say, my subconscious, and my heart, lead it in a certain direction. You have to just go where it takes you.

It reminds me of back when I used to DJ, there was a guy who used to play at our parties, and one day I noticed he was taking the records out of his case one at a time, in order, and I quickly surmised (yes, I’m a genius) that not only had he obviously worked out every second of his DJ set days before the party, but it was the same set he had played before, even down to the exact points he mixed things in (yes, that’s how OCD I am). As a result, he was unable to adapt to anything that was going on in his environment, how the crowd was reacting, or even the mood of the day. How on earth could he know how people would all feel that day, not to mention himself? It just all came across painfully clear in the set, which was technically great, but just felt really off, and heartless, and the awkwardness resonated through everyone, from him, to the crowd. So being the asshole that I am, I snuck up when he wasn’t looking and mixed up the order of his records, and it sent him into a panic. I told him to just follow his heart, follow the feeling, and just go where it took him. No one would care if he ‘fucked up,’ and neither would I, but I’d rather he ‘fuck up’ for 90 minutes but feel the shit out of it than play a set perfectly that had nothing to do with anything. But he couldn’t do it, and I had to come on and play the rest of his slot. Not long after, he completely stopped DJing. He knew it wasn’t in his heart. I think the same is true with composition, making your own music, etc. You can’t sit down and already think of exactly how a piece is going to be, from beginning to end. At least I can’t. It’s going to take on a life of its own, as it reveals its own new stories it wants to add to the one you wanted to say. That’s the whole beauty of it all. And if you try to force things into a pre-determined mold, it will sound about as exciting and relevant as a DJ set you planned a week ago alone in your bedroom. When I DJed, every set told a story from my life… but I never knew how that story would manifest itself until I began to tell it, and every time, even I was surprised with how the story unfolded. Composing my own music is the same. Just on an infinitely more intense scale.

Like with everything, it’s all about trial and error, making mistakes and savoring small victories, and understanding not only your own voice and composition style, but also what works and what doesn’t in an actual sonic and sound design sense. My sound is very dirty and intense, and both are exactly how I like it. I’ve worked for years to be able to make work, and to bring out the vision and compositions that were always in my head and heart, and that came with years of both trial and error, and conscious learning. You can not know what you’re doing and mash just three things on top of each other and it will sound like complete shit… but know what you’re doing, and you can stack literally 120+ channels together, playing simultaneously, and it will still sound awesome. I say 120+ because I’ve done it before. A lot of my tracks have at least 70-80, most are well over 100, and more than a few are well over 120+. Again, those custom machines come into play (haha) viva la China. The best possible moment in my ‘career,’ as it were, was when I was finally able to make something sound exactly like I wanted it to, rather than just how I could within the limitations of what I knew how to do.

I can easily say “I like my sound like I like my women… dirty and intense,” because my girlfriend can’t read English well enough to read this (haha).

As far as it seeing the light, like most things with life and music, I take that as it comes. Sometimes I make something specifically on the request of someone or a label, and sometimes (more often than not) I just make it because it’s what I do – it’s my reason for living. I don’t really think about what will ‘happen’ with it later. But I will admit that once it’s done, I usually know what feels right as far as how it should finally see the light. Sometimes that comes to be, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I think all that happens for a reason. Every single thing that didn’t ‘go my way’ or not as expected ended up being a blessing in disguise. So everything happens for a reason, and I think your music will always end up where it’s truly meant to be. Just like with gear or anything else, I never worry about it. What’s meant to happen will happen.

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 a piece is complete, it spends weeks or months in every room of my house, on a lot of different combinations of speakers, from studio monitors, to Kef towers (my favorite speakers on the planet), to crappier home speakers, to complete piece of shit computer speakers, and most importantly on walks in the headphones. I know a lot of people who listen on different sources in order to make it sound the same across all platforms, but it’s not the way I approach it. I pretty much already know how it’s going to sound through most every possible speaker and setup. And I know it’s gonna sound different – and that’s fine. I think each gives it its own character, and can even add to or alter the story in its own way. I think that’s all part of the experience. It has a life of its own, and will live differently in different environments. Music is fluid, not static. It’s supposed to live and breathe in different ways at different times. Of course I want it to sound as good as possible on all fronts – but I don’t think it needs to sound ‘the same.’ Different isn’t always bad.

The placement of a track or album in the outside world, when I take long walks, is the real testing ground. If it all makes sense in that setting, and I really feel it to my core, and also throughout everything around me, I know it’s as it should be. I always seem to say ‘not to get all hippie-dippy,’ but it’s kind of one of these things where I can feel, hear, and see the music resonating in everything around me… every thing, every person… everything… they all seem to know exactly what I know, and hear what I hear. Once that happens, even within the first second, I know. And there is no doubt.

It’s always an amazing thing to hear my music on a big sound system, as I don’t have the opportunity to hear it very loud at all at any other point (I’m much more considerate of my neighbors than they are of me). I’ve had the fortune to play on some phenomenal and phenomenally loud systems, and it’s really astounding how something even you yourself made, and know every inch of, can come to life in such a new way, like you’re hearing it for the first time. Sometimes it’s really like the track is being born again before my very eyes (or ears), it really takes on a life it never had before. It’s an unbelievable feeling. After all, I don’t care what kind of electronic music you make, it’s all meant to be heard on a big system. Period.

One of the most surreal things is hearing one of your tracks in a completely unexpected setting or context, like being at an event and hearing a DJ play it, or hear it on the radio in someone’s car. It’s so surreal that there have been a few times it took quite some time for it to register that it was even my track, it seemed so bizarre to hear it out of the context of my house or studio. There have been times I had to sit and think about where I knew the track from (haha)… One time I was in a promoter’s car when he picked me up from the airport, and one of my songs came on the radio. It was pretty hilarious, I remember saying ‘Damn, this sounds familiar, but I can’t remember who this is. I think I used to play the shit out of this track back when I DJed. Damn, that shit’s gonna bug me now!’ before he just looked at me like I needed to be committed, awkwardly uttering, “Uhhhh, dude, that’s your album.” (haha) so yeah, context can be a powerful factor.

Audition-wise, no one but me ever hears anything I make before the label, and then the rest of the world. So when you buy the CD, you’re the only other person in the world besides me and the label to ever hear it. I don’t audition it through anyone or ask anyone’s opinion. If I love it, and it says what I want it to say, that’s all that matters to me. I’m super lucky to have a family of labels that agrees with my opinion more than not.

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

It happens sometimes, just like I think it happens to anyone. There are times when I work like a bat out of hell 24-hours a day for weeks or months at a time, and others when I can’t seem to get my shit together to save my life. Inspiration comes as an avalanche or nothing at all. Like everything in my life, there’s really no middle ground. A lot of the time I spend suspended in the most frustrating of places, with my mind wanting things to happen, but the rest of me just not being a team player. If 100% of me is not 100% invested in it, then I’d much rather make nothing at all. So all I can do is wait until all my planets align. More hippie-dippy shit, I know.

Like anyone on the planet I have my lazy spells where I really just don’t do something because I can’t muster up the jam for it, but more often than not it’s my chronic and sometimes manic depression that gets the better of me, and can take me out for days, weeks, or even months at a time. There are times when depression can be the best motivator and inspiration on the planet when it comes to music, it’s been responsible for some of my greatest and most well-known works. But it’s a fine line, and when that line is crossed, you just shut down. Nothing in the world means anything. I just go numb. I care about nothing, and no one, and I somehow get up in the morning and go to sleep at night, but I’m not alive. I’m lucky in that I am very clear what’s happening during these times, I know exactly what it is and that it will eventually pass, though I never really know when. All I can do is wait. I can’t make any real decisions in that state, because though I’m ‘rational’ in that I know what my state is, I don’t make rational decisions, and in the past I’ve completely deleted months and years of work because I thought it was all bullshit, only to severely regret it when I came back to ‘normal’ (in quotes because with me that’s a sliding scale). And my depression most often manifests itself in pretty intense rage, which is also not the best time for decision-making, especially concerning something you’ve spent months or years of your life on.

So during that time I can only stay far away from music for a second to make me realize how much I need it. Because especially in the throes of depression, you start to think there’s nothing in the world that you need, or that means anything. But that being said, you need a life outside of music sometimes either way, and I usually spend it lost in video games, the few TV shows I religiously follow (especially Sons of Anarchy and Justified), or simultaneously yelling at and fawning over my cats, which is always a good go-to.

Sometimes it becomes a vicious circle, where then I do actually fall into my own procrastinating that I can’t blame on depression or anything else (and what could be worse than shit you can’t blame on something or someone else?) because it becomes conscious, as I grow too used to putting things off, even though the original reason was out of my control. But there’s a reason for all that too, and I think the procrastination is your mind and body telling you to chill out and find some balance, just like in physical training when you overtrain, your body tells you really clearly in numerous ways to chill the fuck out and rest for a few days. And if you don’t listen, it will make you regret it. Over the years I’ve learned that for me, all I can do is wait it out and listen to my mind and body. Things will happen as they should happen.

I’m in this for life. A few days, weeks, or even months don’t matter. Not if you’re hopefully making something that at least someone in the world will remember forever. And that’s always the hope.

bvdub.org

Frank Bretschneider is a Berlin-based electronic musician working with sine waves, white noise, and other primitive signals as source material for his compositions. In 1995, along with Olaf Bender, Bretschneider founded the monumental Rastermusic label, which subsequently merged with Carsten Nicolai‘s offshoot to become what is known today as Raster-Noton. Bretschneider continues to release music, with his most recent album, Super.Trigger out on Raster-Noton in 2013.

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 took my first steps to make music in 1983 and my first instrument was my sister’s acoustic guitar. Since she never used it, I took it and turned it into an electric one by replacing the nylon strings with steel strings and mounting a single coil pick up. My sister was crying and had a breakdown. But actually I wanted to make electronic music and I was fascinated by the idea to use the studio as an instrument: Just to record the sounds and to sculpt the piece itself with the help of studio technology: mixing, EQing, tape manipulations, etc. I had a pretty good tape machine at this time, a german Uher SG 561 Royal with variable speed and three heads. So I used its various features to turn the guitar tracks into kind of electronic sounds: bouncing, cutting and looping, fasten or slowing down the speed, adding echoes and delays. Soon I bought some more gear, a second guitar, an electric harmonium, a small DJ mixing desk, a second tape machine and some microphones. And in 1985 I established a label called klangFarBe to publish my music via compact cassette tapes in a very limited edition.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
After that first kind of bedroom studio setup I had some better equipment eventually, my first synth for example, a Korg MS-20. In 1988 I switched to MIDI sequencing with running the C-Lab Supertrack software on a Commodore 64 home computer. My first MIDI synth was a Casio CZ-101 and a Yamaha FB-01 sound module then. And an multi-track recorder later on, the Tascam 238 Syncaset. It had 8 tracks on standard compact cassette tape and I used 7 tracks for recording analog sounds and microphones and one track for the MIDI clock signal, for synchronization with the computer. Finally in 1993 I was able to build up a more professional studio together with Olaf Bender. There we were starting our Rastermusic label in 1996. It served also as our office till I moved to Berlin in 2000. We were switching slowly from analog to digital, using still a lot of analog gear for the sound, but recording was digital to DAT and then transferring it back to HD with Digidesign Audiomedia sound card and Sounddesigner software for editing. By the time when I released my first Album “Saat” and Logic was only used for MIDI sequencing and controls. Since I live in Berlin I have just a small home recording place again, wouldn’t really call it a studio. But since I work mainly alone and for myself, it’s enough. And when it comes to mastering I prefer the help of a professional studio/engineer.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
It’s still my Clavia Nord Modular which I bought in 1998. It was love at first sight and I never would sell it. I spent days and nights in exploring its functions. I love the endless possibilities to generate any kind of sound because of its modular structure. Some of my earlier releases, “Rand” in 1999 as well as “Rausch” from 2000, were made entirely with the Modular. For the editor software I still have a Mac G4 running OS 9. It includes some nice sequencer features too, but I rather use the Elektron Octatrack step sequencer and arpeggiator, that’s a really nice pair. The Nord’s sound is generated in virtual analog, using DSP processors, so it might not reach the power of a real big analog modular system, but it’s a very versatile piece of gear and I used it heavily again for a new album.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use Live and Logic. The first for creating ideas and quick sketches and the latter for fine-tuning and arrangements. A few of plug-ins too, namely the Soundhack delay trio for weird delays, the Audio Damage Automaton to mangle sounds and the Korg Wavestation soft synth. I had the real one and used it heavily during the 90s and really like the sound and concept. But unfortunately I had to sell it and was more than happy to find finally the reincarnation in form of a software.

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?
A nice Buchla system or similar would be something I’d like to try, but I guess I will never possess one myself. Fortunately I have a residency at EMS studio in Stockholm in July this year, where I’m able to work with a Buchla as well as Serge modular system. So I hope it will help me to finish a piece of a more complex and abstract music I work on already for a while.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I had some trouble with missing or late arriving gear, as well as certain issues with customs and/or border check authorities in the past. So I prefer to travel only with hand luggage and my live setup is pretty minimal. I usually bring the Elektron Octatrack for the sound and a MacBook Pro running Modul8 for the visuals. It’s still pretty versatile: I can run prepared sound as well as playing and arranging live with the step sequencer and audio controls, and at the same time controlling the visuals via the MIDI section of the Octatrack.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
It’s highly functional and there is nothing what I wouldn’t use daily – or at least very often. It’s pretty tidy too, I cannot work in middle of a mess. Everything is connected and ready to use by switching the main switch. Unfortunately it is not really sound-proof at high volume levels, that’s something I have to improve.

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?
Ideas are born almost everywhere and always, that’s the easiest part. It might be a book/story I read, a movie, a concert, an exhibition I saw. It could arise from a dream, during travel or when I surf the internet. The tricky thing is to convert an idea into music. Quick results are always a bit suspicious for me. So it often takes ages from first sketches to the final piece, and is an occasionally painful process. And sometimes it turns out that the original idea isn’t so sustainable or important anymore. Then I bury the unfinished bits and pieces in my archive, maybe using them for another project one day again. If everything goes well and I’m able to finish enough songs worth to release an album, I will put them together and look for a label to publish.

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?
Usually I leave a track for a while after it is finished, to get a bit a distance. It sounds so different after a month or so. And then I prefer to play it to friends, at my place or theirs, at different spaces, using various sound systems. I always feel immediately what’s wrong or right with a piece when listening to it in the presence of another person.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
There are always moments I’m forced to make a break, it might be a decision of how to proceed further or just being tired from listening. I make me a coffee, something to eat, cleaning up the room or go out for a walk. There are interruptions from phone calls or messages, so sometimes I try to escape by working at night, but this also change the overall mood and the sound significantly. Actually I try to work on music each day and prefer to continue over longer periods, but there is always paperwork and software updates and agreements, requests, daily emails, maintaining website and social media. Concerts and openings, and friends to meet too. So actually I’d need a better time management, but I’m not good with, and sometimes I get a bit lost and it’s hard to focus again afterwards.

For more, read Headphone Commute’s Interview with Frank Bretschneider on Super.Trigger.

frankbretschneider.de

Among his many monikers, Robin Rimbaud is most known for his work as Scanner with releases dating back to the early 90s, and a vast discography on labels such as Ash International, Sub Rosa, and his very own imprint, Bette. What started as a focused fascination with radio waves, mobile phone signals, and police scanners, has evolved into a full-blown production and artistry of enormous proportions, the inner workings of which we are honored to share with you today.

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 used to play with a cheap 1970s plastic hand-held tape recorder we had at home when I was about 8-10 years, recording tv shows, family and playing in the garden with my Action Man soldiers. I still have the original tapes where I recorded Spiderman with me aged 9 reading all the credits as they rolled up on the cartoon on TV in around 1973! Then I had piano lessons aged about 10-11 but sadly my mum couldn’t afford the lessons as they were too expensive (50 pence a lesson) and we had to sell the upright piano we had at home shortly afterwards. Fortunately not before my music teacher at Secondary School played us the work of John Cage and aged 11 I hurried home to record my brother and I hammering away inside the piano, as our own very unformed experiments in sound!

Aged 14-15 my English teacher at school gave me his reel-to-reel Teac tape recorder and suddenly my creative world changed. Whereas the tape was a linear device and allowed me to play one sound AFTER another, collaging them together with the pause button, now I could ADD one sound on top of another, although the heads on the machine were out of alignment so nothing could ever be recorded in sync so much of my early tape experiments exhibited extremely odd time signatures or simply abandoned the idea of tempo and explored more textural ideas.

So in a sense the interests were always there and it was the access to such tools that enabled the creative process. I still own all these tapes in my archive back to around 1975. I absolutely knew what I wanted to do when ‘grown up’ when I was aged 16 years old and feel very fortunate that this actually worked out fine :-D

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
My first semi-professional recordings were made in my bedroom, like many musicians, then my first dedicated studio space took over part of my home office for ten years, but for the last fifteen years my studio has remained in the same location, but the equipment has constantly changed and developed. There’s no sense of a ‘final’ studio as I’m constantly rethinking the creative process as it should be. At present I’m working with different interface designers to explore non-linear, non screen, physical tools in the studio, ways of making work whilst standing and moving. Indeed I’ve been working at MIT in Cambridge USA over the last five months exchanging ideas of performance, streams of creativity and how the body relationship to sound is essential.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
I suppose this is a question that will be constantly rethought. At present my favourite hardware is my new modular system which I’ve been building over the last couple of months, to the point where it’s offering a new direction for my creative process. I blame musical friends like Benge and the film I Dream of Wires for sending me in this direction!

I’ve always been keen on using tools that disable habits, so that I don’t repeat myself. There’s something very encouraging about the network of creatives using and building such tools too as there’s a genuine sense of community and support. I’ve always remained an enthusiastic listener and creator of work so it’s a real joy to connect with a fresh world of creative minds and nimble fingers.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use sequencing and arrangement tools in the shape of Ableton Live and Logic Pro X and plenty of software plug ins. Most frequently I use the Arturia V Collection suite of soft synths with Mini V, Modular V, CS-80V, ARP2600 V, Prophet V & Prophet VS, Jupiter 8-V, Oberheim SEM V, Wurlitzer V and Spark Vintage, Native Instruments Komplete with Kontakt, Reaktor and so on, then many of the iZotope plugins like Iris and Breaktweaker.

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 already a lustful list of modular stuff that is intriguing me, especially items from Make Noise, Mutable Instruments and Intellijel Designs, but nothing beyond my budget. Tools are invaluable but I must lead the process, and don’t them to steer me too far from the creative process. I thankfully don’t have a list of impossibly expensive dream tools!

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
Firstly I don’t tour. I last toured as an artist over 14 years ago and have been retreating from live performance increasingly over the last couple of years, battling with personal questions of the value of electronic live performance and so on, a discussion much too deep to explore in this forum. Having said that I continue to play singular shows at certain events and festivals and travel with a very modest system. I will use my Mac Pro Laptop, a keyboard controller, Alesis and Eventide effects, a small mixer, a Pulsar controller and MIDI interface and whatever other tools lend themselves to the success of the show. At present I’m working on a project in France where I additionally play guitar so then travel with my Line 6 Variax guitar and additional pedals.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I had a desk to work at that was built so I don’t sit down all day working in the studio. It’s at a height when I can happily stand beside it and work which is better for posture and energy levels. It’s a very precise and tidy space and those that know me recognise my organisational skills and efficiency so the studio needs to mirror these qualities so I have everything to hand there and easily accessible. There are additional shelves built on each side of the desk and on the adjacent walls that carry manuals, other gear, items relating to projects I’ve worked on (like Punkt telephones and alarm clocks, Phillips Wake-Up Lights and so on). The acoustics could be improved on but at present I’m in the process of negotiating building an underground bunker studio in my basement in an amazing 1000 square foot (100 square metres) industrial space so will await the outcome of that until I work on the acoustics better.

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 extremely disciplined negotiating time and deadlines. I have never missed a deadline in my twenty year professional career. I wake early and work all day until 18.00 at the very latest, then close the door to the studio. I won’t work in the evenings, nor at the weekend. It’s important to value your private space and I know that my wife appreciates my commitment to her too ;-)

I will work on emails early in the day, then visit the studio before lunchtime and work the rest of the day after that. Even lunch takes place around the same time each day. Yes, I’m so un rock ’n roll :-D and yes, I DO go to bed early too. I recognise that it’s essential that you take care of yourself if you want to continue being content and creating work that inspires others too.

Composition is a fairly natural process. I’m frequently intimidated working on commissioned work but once I begin and add the first few notes to a work, be it a film score or a ballet soundtrack, then the process usually develops very instinctually. I have a massive archive of recordings though, certainly over 600 hours of unreleased material, much of which I have little recollection of in fact, and it’s only on rare occasions when I casually listen through to some old material do I realise the true value in holding on this all. As for this work seeing the light of day, perhaps not during my lifetime!

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?
A skill I’ve learned over the years is often to listen back the next day, then again from another room, to hear music through the walls of another space can be very telling about a mix. Listen on headphones, on different systems to gauge how it all works best.

I was working in Italy a couple of years ago and heard the DJ mixing some marvellous music and approached him regarding one of the tracks which I was finding especially appealing. On answering he held up the record sleeve only for me to recognise my own name. How incredibly embarrassing yet amusing since the context was so utterly outside of how I’m accustomed to ever hearing my work played. I just tried to act cool and walked away nonchalantly, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t have recognised me!! ;-)

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I actually see no issues with procrastinating in any way. It’s very easy to consider this a negative thing but often taking a break can be invaluable, offering up a new space to think, to rethink a process. For all of us it’s impossibly easy to distract ourselves with online activities, to answer an email, but life is about balance. I’m fortunate to be able to have an expansive library of music and books so can happily take a break to listen or read something inspirational or distracting, to take me away from the moment. Stopping work by 18.00 is also significant as it maintains a balance with my wife, my other friends, with dinner and attendance of concerts and cinema too, which are frequent ways of engaging with work yet from a distance.

scannerdot.com

As this new column continues to evolve, I intend on improving some of its aspects. For example, as of this installment, none of the images have been resized, and you can click on the photos for a larger view of the equipment. I plan on revising the previously published entries to include original photos as well. Drop me a line if you have any other suggestions! ~HC

Uwe Zahn has been recording under his Arovane moniker since the early days of City Centre Offices. In fact, Occer / Silicad was the first label pressing back in 1999. I was particularly swept away by the Arovane sound with his 2004 album, Lilies, in which Zahn has said “Good Bye Forever” to his fans on the very last track. For almost a decade Zahn has been quiet, and one indeed thought that he completely left the scene. But I suppose a real musician can’t ever stop composing, and in 2013 Arovane returned with Ve Palor on n5MD. Today we step into Zahn’s beautiful studio and geek out on his gear, in hopes to peak even deeper into the inner workings of his mind.

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 built my own instruments (zupfinstrumente) back in the early eighties and used cheap microphones and two cassette recorders to record my first sounds and compositions. I placed the microphones in different rooms of a basement to capture the acoustic characteristics. I took my cassette recorder and made field recordings and to record found objects and kitchen equipment. sounds inspired me to compose music. I remember a day back in 1974. I was sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio playing Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. I was totally fascinated by the car sound with ‘the Doppler Effect’. My parents bought me a Casio keyboard with bad sounding presets. I started some kind of circuit bending to edit the presets and to make it sound more interesting. My very first synthesizer was the Korg MS20 that I bought in 1984 with a cheap analogue delay. I composed tracks with ‘pingpong’ recording method, from one recorder to the other. I’ve manipulated the tapes speed, cut and spliced them and played tapes backwards. I was fascinated by minimal music and early electronic music at that time.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
It has taken a long time and numerous iterations to built up my studio. Everything changed in 1988 when I bought my first digital synth, an Ensoniq ESQ1. I’ve tested a Yamaha DX7 at the local electronic shop and I was blown away by the sonic possibilities. The ESQ was cheaper and it has a straight forward sequencer which I used the next years for composing my music. I moved to Hannover in 1988, bought a Hohner HS 1e, equivalent to the Casio FZ 10m sampler and a Casio VZ 8m iPD synthesizer. I moved to Munich in 1989 and joined SAM, Six and More. The concept was to improvise electronic music, live on stage. I remember a concert at the Kunstverladehalle in Frankfurt with 30 (!) musicians. In 1991 I moved to Berlin and my equipment grew with a Tascam m2600 24 channel, analogue mixing desk, a Waldorf Microwave and a four track recorder from Tascam. I was experimenting with breakbeats and shifting patterns at that time. The next step was a sampler from EMU, the e6400 and a Logic sequencer software from Emagic, running on a Performa Mac. I tried to write and record music with a computer but I was frustrated by a lot of Midi and timing issues. I decided to buy a hardware sequencer, the Yamaha QY700, a workhorse in my studio to date. the QY700 is running in parallel to Ableton Live9, controlling and sequencing an EMU e4 XT Ultra, a Waldorf Q and Microwave XT, an Access Virus Indigo2 and Virus TI, a Kawai K5000s, a Nord Modular G2 and Nord Rack2. I’ve bought the first Korg Wavedrum in 1994 and the Clavia Nord Modular in 1998 to expand the sonic possibilities in my studio. Later in the 2000’s I received the first version of Ableton’s Live from Christian Kleine to run on my Apple Powerbook Pismo.

In 2003 I’ve ordered a Kyma Capybara system from Symbolic Sound for my studio. I’ve created a bunch of spectrum waves for Axel Hartmann’s Hartmann Neuron Synthesizer. I added a Motorfader box, a CM Automation to control the parameters in the Kyma software and some more outboard equipment like the TC Electronic FireworX effect processor and Alesis’ Wedge, a pair of Genelec 1031a and started to experiment with software from Ableton and Native Instruments. I sold the Kyma system to buy a motorbike, a KTM LC4 Supermoto.

Today, basically, I’m running a hardware and software studio in parallel. Ableton’s Live9 Suite as the DAW in combination with a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 Audiointerface and the QY700 as a hardware sequencer. Live9 is hosting a bunch of software from Flux, GRM, Native Instruments, Madrona Labs, Izotope, FabFilter, Akai, Audio Spillage, Little Endian, SoundGuru; Steinberg, U-He, Sugar Bytes, you name it. I’m using Ableton’s Push Controller, Native Instrument’s Maschine, AkaI’s MPC Renaissance and Studio for creating beats and musical structures. All the software is running on an Apple iMac and Macbook pro, Core i7, retina display.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Hard to say. The hot, red Clavia Nord Modular G2 is my fave’ in the studio. It is a versatile piece of hardware. Very cool, because you can patch everything with the software, unplug the USB and go with the keyboard, the endless dials and displays on the hardware without the computer. Great concept. And it sounds amazing. I love the clean, punchy, analytical sound of that machine. It is a kind of a weapon in sound design in my opinion. I like to program patches where you can feed in audio, mangled by modules controlled with sequencers are synched to the midi clock or built up FM patches for percussion patterns tweaked with the endless dials of the hardware. I’ve built tons of patches over the time.

And what about the software that you use for production?
Do you mean, my fave software? Hummm, hard to say as well. I like to create sounds and music with all kinds of synthesis methods like, granular synthesis, FM, additive synthesis, resynthesis at example. I like to play with Native Instruments Absynth’s Granular OSC’s and Robert Henkes Granulator II, inspiring. It is quite interesting to use samples from field recordings in that software. It is like using a microscope, looking into the tonal, molecular structure of sounds and build something new out of those molecules. I like Little Endians Spectrumworx very much. It is a kind of a modular toolbox for spectral editing. You can add modules to pitch, filter, bend, delay, mangle the sound in a very special way. I love to use delays, FabFilter’s Timeless2 is a great piece of software as like U-He’s MFM2. Absolutely great would be a software version of the Technos Acxel Resynthesizer (http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2007/06/26/technos-acxel-resynthesizer/) I’ve been in contact Pierre Guilmette asking him for a new version of this fantastic instrument but I’m afraid that it will never happen, unfortunately.

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?
Oh well, yes. I’m planning to buy a Kyma system again, It is just a question of time.. The Pacarana it is now called. I would die to put my hands on the Acxel2 Resynthesizer.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I like to use a minimal setup that fits in one case, when I’m playing live. Apple’s Macbook pro running Live9 and Ableton’s Push is a very good team. Maybe a small Faderbox in addition to that.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
It is all about ergonomics. It is very important for me. I’ve placed all my equipment to have direct access to knobs and faders. I’ve placed the iMac and the mixing desk under ergonomic aspects. The studio is arranged in an octagon shape. The three sections, mixing desk, the racks and the keys are illuminated separately. For the future I will place some special acoustic elements in the room to improve the acoustic.

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?
Most of the times I start with improvised melodic structures, record into the Yamaha YQ700 or Live9. After I recorded the melodic structures, I build up the bass, percussion parts and the beat. Sometimes I have a very clear idea of a track or a whole album, like for ‘Tides’ and ‘Lilies’. The ‘Tides’ sound was inspired by field recordings I’ve made in France and the idea to use harpsichord sounds. Christian Kleine played his guitar to improvise to some early track ideas and the album was nearly done. I like to play with sounds. Sounds from field recordings I’ve made or synthesized sounds or a combination of both. It is a great inspiration to me. A single sound can be an inspiration for building up a whole track. A lot of tracks or sketches I’ve recorded over time are stored away on DAT’s. I play new tracks to my friends and ask them for their opinion but the most of the time I know which tracks will be released and which are not. I remember two tracks – ‘Amoe/Cane’ I recorded under my moniker ‘Nedjev’ right after I bought the QY700. I played it to Michael Zorn (he was starting his label Engelszorn together with Mark Engelhard). I was not planing to release it but Micha convinced me to. A lot of tracks I’ve made in the past are ‘stuck’ as drafts and are later used as source material for sound design or new tracks.

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 remember a a remix I’ did for Din and FatCat Records, the No.8 AMX. I’d gotten some basic, arrhythmical sound material for doing a rework and it was quite hard to start with. Right after I finished the remix I was so happy and I listened over and over to the track. Usually I listen to a new track a few days after recording in my studio to get an acoustic distance to the music and the mix. The last time I played my music live, like in Dresden at the Transmediale, Cynetart 2013 was very impressive, because of the high end PA in the ‘Große Festhalle’. A pure pleasure to hear that ‘big’ sound in full frequency range, very clear and precise.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Oh well, I do procrastinate sometimes, especially with ‘office work’, when I have to categorize hundreds of sounds for example. I found a very good piece of software, the ‘Audiofinder’ from Iced Audio, to help me. Usually I try to avoid procrastination and concentrate on my project/work. I switch off all devices like the Cellphone or my iPad and the Internet connection on my computers. It is a kind of isolation to concentrate on my work. I love to read, to garden, to cycle, to meet friends or to motorcycle after I finished a project.

For more check out this Interview with Arovane, his Headphone Commute Mix and our review of Ve Palor.

arovane.net

Scott Morgan is a Vancouver (Canada) based musician, deriving his alias from the “looping oscillator” function in Csound audio programming language. Yet loscil’s music is more than loops. Morgan’s slowly pulsating ambient textures cover the landscapes of frozen mountains and early morning plains in a blanket of sonic euphoria and aural bliss. Since 2001, loscil has been steadily releasing his works on Kranky, with an occasional EP on Gizeh, Ghostly, and a collaboration with bvdub on Glacial Movements. Today we peak into the source of Morgan’s sound in hopes of finding out more…

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?
Like many others, I got started in my teens in garage rock bands. My first instrument was technically a tenor saxophone but the adventure really began with the guitar and drums. My uncle gave me his Fender Super Reverb amp early in the 80’s and I bought a cheap telecaster copy off a friend. My junior high school music teacher used to let us come into the band room at lunch and after school to mess around with the drums and bass guitar and this was really the birth of my interest in making my own music. Here’s to the teachers!

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I’ve had the luxury of attending some well-equipped schools and working in some nice film and game studios over the years so my home set-up has always been quite simple. My first “home studio” was a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. I went through several of these in my early years. Once audio-capable computers became accessible and affordable in the 90’s, I bought one with a student loan while in my last year of university. It was a Power PC 7200/75. Ever since, I’ve been pretty much a computer musician. I went through a few outboard samplers and synth modules but essentially gave up on those when I got my first Powerbook in the early 2000’s. Early on I was into Max, Csound, Soundhack, etc. and would assemble things with Pro Tools or Deck. Currently, I have a MacBook Pro and a collection of controllers. I use very little outboard gear.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Well, as I just said, I don’t use a whole lot of outboard equipment, but because of this, AD and DA conversion is pretty important. I’ve been through quite a few boxes over the years, MOTU, Presonus, etc. but my current one – the Apogee Quartet, definitely sounds the nicest. I always try to keep my Sony PCM D-50 recorder handy. It’s been a great little portable recorder to have for “point and shoot” style location recording. An I love my Genelec 8020A monitors as well. I worked with these for years as a sound designer so I know their sound well. Of course, the real answer would be “the computer” but that’s kind of boring isn’t it.

And what about the software that you use for production?
For the longest time I was a die-hard Max/MSP user. I really loved the challenge of building my own sequencers, processors, etc. from scratch. Since Max for Live came along, I’ve switched to using Ableton Live for sequencing and ported most of my max patches into Max for Live devices. I still do quite a lot with Max and love the added flexibility of having this as a component of Live. I also use Steinberg’s Nuendo for mixing and editing. After years of working as a sound designer and composer for games, I became very comfortable with Nuendo so I still defer to it for the final stages of assembling tracks. I also love all the Audio Engineering stuff. I learned digital editing on Sound Designer II so when AE released Wave Editor I was quite thrilled to have a simple, decent, destructive editor in my tool box again.

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 currently eyeing the Livid controllers. The Ohm looks interesting as does the Elements custom controllers. I’ve been through many controllers over the years and still haven’t found the ideal candidate. Instrument-wise, I’ve longed to own a Cristal Baschet. Such a beautiful and haunting instrument. Perhaps one day.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
It’s always based around the laptop but the peripherals and instruments change. Over the last year, I’ve been working a lot with a table-top slide guitar, feeding stuff into the computer and processing it, then manipulating, grabbing loops, layers, etc. from there. Sometimes I will play with other live instruments and performers – piano, vibraphone, rhodes, guitar. I enjoy mixing that live element into the otherwise computer-centric set up. But when it’s not practical, it’s just me, my laptop and a controller – sometimes with integrated video.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Isolation and quiet are probably the most essential to me. I’ve recently moved into a new room in my house and I’m trying to treat the walls with sound absorption panels to dampen the reflections a bit. I’ve got 5 panels up so far but could probably use a couple more to remove the echo in my rather boxy old room. Of course, I’ve love to have a studio off in the woods somewhere but for now that’s not so practical.

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 was essentially educated as a sound recordist and designer. I think this approach has fundamentally shaped my process with regard to electronic music production. I really enjoy recording sounds and then manipulating them – almost building a library of sounds to work from first before entering into composition mode. Once I have some sounds I like, I begin rhythmically manipulating them and sculpting them into loops and phrases that appeal to me. I can often sit and listen to loops for hours – a weird meditative state of “composing” that I really enjoy. Then the editorial work begins – shaping these layers and loops into a final composition. Sometimes, similar to performing live, I just do this in a very improvisational way. Other times, I tackle it like post production on a film and surgically add or remove stuff until it sounds right.

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?
When I’m working on new material, I find it really important to take the works in progress out of the studio. I’ll bounce out temporary mixes, transfer them to my phone and go for a walk or ride my bike to a nearby park and sit and listen out of the usual context. This helps change my focus from being in that “editor” state of mind and being a listener. Beyond that, I hate listening to my own music after it’s completed. I enjoy altering a piece when it’s still “alive” but when it’s finished, inaccessible and out of my control, I feel quite uncomfortable hearing it. Hearing my music on bad sound systems can feel like a knife being slowly driven into my back. It’s painful.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I think I have two different procrastination styles. One, you might call productive procrastination, when I distract myself from a pertinent task with another unrelated task. This might mean working on something creatively different from music or it might mean doing the dishes. Either way, something positive comes out of the procrastination. The other, counter-productive form of procrastination occurs when I step away from working to do nothing at all. I think this is laziness really and probably unavoidable considering human nature. Or at least my nature. But perhaps we need these breaks and procrastination is just a method of our subconscious informing us to step away.

For more, check out Headphone Commute’s reviews of Sketches From New Brighton, Coast/ Range/ Arc, and Endless Falls as well as our past Interview with loscil and Conversations with Loscil.

loscil.ca

And we’re back with yet another entry in our new “In the studio with…” column. You guys seems to like these, noh? Today we’re featuring the working environment of Christopher Bissonnette, a Canadian sound artist with numerous releases on Kranky and a gorgeous piece with David Wenngren (of Library Tapes) on Home Normal. Bissonnette is also a founding member of Thinkbox, a media collective exploring sonic and visual art, from which eventually his solo work has spurred. His latest album on Kranky, Essays In Idleness, is a series of composition studies with focus on generative processes, textures, and fragments that modulate through a self-built analog synthesizer. I hope you will enjoy…

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 formative years in music began, as with most, in my early teens. I was an avid synth pop fan and I filled my ears with the likes of Depeche Mode, OMD and Pet Shop Boys amongst others. As I grew older, I branched out into more adventurous sounds that included industrial and experimental music. The warehouse scene was at its peak in Detroit at this time and I immersed myself in hardcore techno as well. All of these influences fueled my interest to compose. While in art school I began to experiment with audio as part of the multi-media program I was enrolled in. As my understanding of audio art evolved, I began to concentrate more and more on the sound component of my work. It was an accessible medium at the time and the results were immediate compared to working with video. I purchased my first piece of gear, a Yamaha TG-33, which I still own today. It was a fairly innovative synth for it’s time and it enabled me to produce much of my early experimentation. I quickly added a mixer, a drum machine and a couple of vintage analog keyboards, which were cheaper and readily available at the time.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
My studio has changed at least six or seven times over the course of twenty or so years. But in truth it seems to continually evolve through a process of expansion and contraction. I’m currently in a state of expansion as hardware has made a return into my process. My Macbook Pro is still the center of my studio set up, but it’s been getting less attention as of late as I spend more of my time building patches with the modular. In addition to the modular synth I have a handful of external processors and sound generators. Even though hardware has made a welcome return in my setup, it’s still important for me not to collect too many devices and disturb the simplicity of my studio. Too many choices can become paralyzing, for me anyway.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
My favourite piece of hardware has changed over time. A few years ago I bought a Jomox T-Resonator on an impulse. I had been listening to a lot of noise as well as older post-industrial work from the nineties. The T-Res seemed to satisfy my need for a more aggressive sound and to work with hardware again. I found a way to incorporate the unit in much of my work. It was a purchase that inspired spontaneity and introduced an element of risk I’d not found with my previous process. At present, I’m trying to integrate a new module into my modular system. It’s a random controlled voltage generator called the Turing Machine. I have an affinity for random sequence and note generation and this appeared to differ from a few of the other random modules I currently utilize.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I am a long time Audiomulch and Reaktor user. Those two programs, in addition to a handful of plug-ins, were the main source of production for me for quite a few years. I also use Logic for final composition and mix downs and Ableton Live 9 for performance. Over time I decided I wanted to focus on just a few flexible pieces of software. I’ve always toyed with the idea of getting into Max/MSP but ultimately I’m not really interested in that level of detail it offers. I prefer to have working tools and not spend too much time building from scratch. There are people who far better at it than I anyway and I feel my time is best spent creating sound.

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 is always something I feel like I want/need but I have to say that Kyma systems really intrigue me. I’ve worked in modular style software for years, so I feel like I could adapt to its way of operating fairly easily. Kyma systems tend to be expensive and there is almost always something I need for the studio or a more accessible piece of gear to attain. It feels like quite a commitment but I won’t rule out investing in one in the future.

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

I’ve never been on an extensive tour. I play live events from time to time but I’m rather inconsistent. My basic live set up consists of a laptop, controller, a small compact mixer, a few contact mic’d instruments and an external effects unit. I’ve considered constructing a small modular unit for performance but I haven’t reached that point just yet. Live patching feels a little too risky for me right now. So I can appreciate those who do perform with a modular system.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I have always attempted to create a studio space that reflects simplicity. It’s not an easy task. Audio cables, patch cords, MIDI cables and gear can easily create clutter. I try to keep it down to the essentials. I don’t work well in a disorderly environment. Strangely, I would like to have a smaller workspace than I’m currently working in. I feel I could control the acoustics and immerse myself in the work if I was well isolated.

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?
Many of my compositions are born from open-minded experimentation. I begin with a very loose idea. If I attempt to predict the results, it’s less likely that I will be satisfied with the final product. I tend to build tracks with one or two simple elements and expand on them. I often create a palette of sounds and ideas and then work them into a composition, trying not to dictate specifically how they interact. The element of chance plays an important role in my work. It keeps me engaged by discovering serendipitous moments when combining sounds 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?
It’s always difficult to recognize when a piece is complete. I may go back and reorganize, replace or eliminate elements of a track once I’ve listened to it in a different context. This means taking it in the car, listening on my phone or on a sound system other than in my studio. In studio I’m too in the moment, conscious of all the tactical decisions I’ve made to produce the track. It’s important for me to remove myself from that environment.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I’m not sure I procrastinate as much as I find myself distracted. There are far too many things I take interest in and very little time to visit them all. Balancing family, career and art is a complex endeavor, so it’s important for me to prioritize. If I do procrastinate it’s usually with the final step of a track’s production that involves a detailed mix and finalizing EQ. It’s an essential step but not as gratifying as the emergence of an idea.

For more, check out Headphone Commute review of In Between Words and a 2009 entry of Two and a Half Questions with Christopher Bissonnette. More to come!

christopherbissonnette.ca

Luke Howard was on of my great 2013 discoveries. This Australian musician appeared on the scene via his self-released debut, titled Sun, Cloud, and immediately captured my heart, and a deserved spot on Headphone Commute’s Best of 2013 list, Music For Watching The Snow Slowly Fall In The Moonlight, along the likes of Eluvium, Lubomyr Melnyk, Nils Frahm, Fabrizio Paterlini, Ludovico Einaudi, and many other gorgeous modern classical works. Today we take a look at this pianist’s studio setup, to discover more about the process and the tools. Enjoy!

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’ve been playing the piano since I was quite young and I started writing music around that time too, although my first composition (whilst unintentionally bitonal) wouldn’t pass much muster now. At school I played in various bands and musicals, then did the jazz course at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. I spent a lot of time obsessed with Bud Powell, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau before deciding my interests lay (mostly) elsewhere. I was quite fortunate that my high school had an electronic music program, which was quite forward thinking for the time. They would lend me their Ensoniq ESQ-1, Roland D-5, Atari 1040ST and four track over the school holidays, so I suppose I had an early introduction there.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
It’s gone through a few iterations, but pretty much it has always been based around a Mac running Pro Tools. Pro Tools is not the most intuitive or creative environment but it’s the one I’m most familiar with. If I was starting now I guess I would just use Ableton or maybe Logic because they probably make more sense for composition. Pro Tools’ ubiquity is useful, though, as the last records have been made in several different studios, and session portability saves a bit of time. I have a bunch of Crane Song and Dave Hill gear which I love, some Coles and Schoeps microphones, a couple of hardware reverbs, a Space Echo, and a few other bits and pieces. I tend to subscribe to the “buy cheap, buy twice” school of thought, so I try not to buy anything unless I plan to keep it for a long time. Having said that, I’m mostly in the box and I spend more time at the piano or with Sibelius (music notation software) than in the audio world.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Well, aside from my piano, it would probably be the Bricasti M7. My youthful ECM obsession has manifested itself in reverb lust (surely there is a compound German word for that). I’ve been fortunate to work with Jan Erik Kongshaug a few times and I’m always trying to steal his reverb settings! Anyway, the Bricasti is the reverb that doesn’t sound like reverb, it just sounds like a room. Ironically it is sometimes too transparent. It is a magical bit of hardware. I’m also very fond of the old Digidesign ProControl, it feels so much better built than the stuff Avid make now, and they’re quite cheap on the second hand market. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) it is no longer supported by Pro Tools.

And what about the software that you use for production?
Because most of my music is to be played by humans, I use Sibelius (and paper!) a lot. In the production world, there are many plugins I love: all of the SoundToys stuff (particularly EchoBoy and Decapitator), GRM Tools, Steven Massey’s inexpensive but great Pro Tools plugins, Crane Song Phoenix, and Relab’s LX480 reverb. The latter is by far my favourite plugin reverb and actually the only one I use. I think SoundToys Decapitator was on the master buss of all of “Sun, Cloud”. Michael Norris’ plugins are quite special, as are some of the Universal Audio ones. Having said all of that, I try to restrict myself to a small number of tools (to avoid choice paralysis), and also most of my records are mixed by Hadyn Buxton and usually the first thing he does it clear my settings!

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?
Of course I go through periods of wanting this or that but honestly, I suspect I’ve already more than I need – particularly given I’m often travelling anyway. Being at home is comfortable and it’s great to have everything at hand, but when away the laptop more than suffices, which probably says something. I’m not sure I’ve found quite the perfect set of monitors yet: I have these Spiral Groove Studio Ones (not shown), which sound very accurate, but I miss the low end. And a better piano would be nice but, as with the speakers, these investments would first require a bigger room.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I haven’t yet done an “extensive” tour, unless you’re counting the long flight from Australia as the extensive bit! Anyway, it will come as no surprise that I use Ableton Live. I have a Monome to trigger the clips and the smaller Akai controllers for knob twiddling and playing. I am curious about the Livid Code, it looks as if it could replace a bunch of things. Most of the stuff I trigger I just bounce out of the original session (without reverb, so I can adjust to the room), but there are a few more involved chains. Back home my friend Mike Katz handles laptop duties, which is great as I can focus on the piano and engaging with the audience, rather than looking like I am checking my e-mail (which I probably am doing anyway).

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
The best aspect of my current workspace is that it’s in its own room (actually, my bedroom; I sleep in the living room) and so there is some separation; when I go in there, it’s to make music. Pretty much everything else about it is far from ideal: it’s really difficult to work in during the Australian summer because it gets so hot, and it’s quite unergonomic and cluttered. Unfortunately Melbourne is not Berlin and finding studio spaces that are affordable, roomy and central is quite difficult. One day I would love to create an environment that captures the calm of my favourite studios, Greenhouse (in Reykajvík) and Rainbow (in Oslo). Those places remind me how much on an impact one’s environment has on mood and productivity. My ideal place would be a really big, treated room, with the absolute minimum of gear in it!

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 a few approaches and I’m always keen to find more so I’m not endlessly rewriting the same piece! A lot of music, say, on “Sun, Cloud” started as piano improvisations that I recorded sketches of and then transcribed and orchestrated. I have this sort of strange faith in improvisation and the subconscious: I will often leave these pieces unedited. “Portrait Gallery” was an improvisation I recorded one night with my Mbox, it wasn’t intended for release. Another approach, which I used for a piece I’m finishing at the moment, is to improvise for say half an hour or an hour, chop and rearrange it, and then transcribe the good bits. I generally do the transcription by ear and not from MIDI as otherwise I spend more time cleaning it up and in transcribing I tend to process the ideas a bit too. Then I will spend a lot of time editing it further in Sibelius, trying to place things without destroying the original idea. Other times, it’s just at the piano with some manuscript; I keep a notebook and also a bunch of crappy phone recordings of unfinished ideas for future mining. I often think of ideas at sound checks when I’m in front of a piano but otherwise distracted, so being able to record into the phone is really useful. A lot of my music is social in the sense that I like to write for my friends, often to get them to collaborate in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t. The electronic textures, I’m just generally mucking around, it is not particularly informed although I am starting to find things I like. In the future I would like to compose more music that hangs on some external narrative, be it a book or a poem or a film, even if this is not disclosed to the listener; I think that would help break some habits.

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’s always interesting to hear music you’ve worked on in a different context but it doesn’t happen all too often, maybe because I don’t drive! Mostly it’s home or laptop speakers. I don’t really like hearing my music as background music, I’d rather not listen to it that way (although I’m less concerned if others do).

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I am a terrible procrastinator, or should I say, I am easily distracted. I don’t have a television but the internet easily takes its place. The problem is always overcoming the inertia of starting a project or a piece, once started usually the momentum carries you most of the way. Often I go to the library to work, being in the company of others helps a bit, as does having a routine. But yes, like most of us self-employed folk with flexible deadlines, it is a constant battle. Please keep asking this question as the answers are always enlightening!

Be sure to check out Headphone Commute’s review of Sun, Cloud

lukehoward.com

Benn Jordan is a Chicago based musician, who somehow manages to stay out of the spotlight, no matter how much I want to shine it on him. You see, when it comes to intelligent electronic music, lush atmospheric ambiance and astute witty IDM with just a perfect dose of organics and DSP, Benn Jordan is at the very top. Every few years, I impatiently await for his latest work as The Flashbulb, and then proceed on consuming it for months on heavy rotation. Every track, an entire universe within itself, full of ideas, prowess and soul. Today, I’m proud of bringing you the opportunity to take a peak into his studio. Enjoy!

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 started with playing guitar and various keyboards. I suppose it depends what you define as “gear” these days. As a kid, I had a Casio SK-1 and a bigger Casio keyboard that isn’t notable enough to remember much about. I had a couple of pedals for the guitar. My first programmable piece of equipment would be the Boss DR-660 which I got as a Xmas gift in 1993 or so. A year later I somehow managed to shoplift a Roland MS-1 and talked a friend into indefinitely letting me borrow his family’s Karaoke machine. So between the drum machine, sampler, guitar, I could swap tapes back and forth and layer tracks. It was probably the most ghetto studio ever.

(2004 – click to zoom in)

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
That setup mentioned above grew and grew, eventually spiraling into chaos. In 2005 or so, I had temporarily taken over payments on my mother’s tiny duplex house. It was kind of like an invasive plant just growing around a different one. For years I slept on the floor with my head in a kick drum (the pillow inside helped the thump when playing). There was old Roland gear wired up around pictures of Jesus Christ and doilies preventing rack gear from scratching decorative tables. In the yard I had made giant wind harps and chimes that sounded like tubular church bells. My neighbors rejoiced in 2007 when I moved to a 2 story condo in Wicker Park. The studio in Wicker Park was a polar opposite. I had a recording room, a mixing room, and a vocal booth/guitar room. Everything was organized, clean, and proper. I realized that my output actually slowed down from it. I was used to working in chaos, and really just felt uncomfortable the entire time I was there. So I moved to Bridgeport, and my studio here is as chaotic as the neighborhood is. For 6 months I experimented with having a studio in a spot down the block, but I’m too attached to making music to put it at the same level as “going into work”. So all my gear came back here. I’m moving again at the end of the year, hopefully to find a good balance between organization and what I have now. But more importantly, a more peaceful and secluded environment that is closer to nature.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
There’s stuff that I will always love because I’m so comfortable with it, like the JX-305 or TB-303. Then there’s stuff that I’m playing with currently and am fascinated with, like the VP-770 or my disklavier (MIDI controllable piano). So it’s hard to pick one thing.

(2004 – click to zoom in)

And what about the software that you use for production?
I’ll never allow myself to settle down with one DAW because I’m scared it’ll stifle my diversity, but I like FL Studio the most. Once you get used to the interface, it’s insanely powerful. Everything is controllable by anything. Other than that, Reaper is a sturdy platform and I have a Mac just so I can run Metasynth. I still use Reaktor a lot as well. It’s outdated, but I’m very comfortable with its brand of node-based programming. I’m also actively learning to code, so hopefully I’ll be making my own tools sometime soon.

What do you use for field recordings or when you want to just capture external sounds?
Most people would debate this, but field recording to me is quantity over quality. If I can capture a decent recording of 30 different locations or sounds in the time it would take me to capture one amazing quality recording, I’ll choose the 30. So I have a couple of H4N’s with the poofy kitten (or whatever it’s called) windscreen filters. That being said, if there’s one thing I want to very specifically capture, or if it’s a reverb impulse, then I’ll use the H4N capturing a pair of Rode mics from an Alesis preamp.

(2008 – click to zoom in)

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 feel like we’ve finally reached a place in technology where it’s possible to turn the ideas in your head into audio without much more than a computer. But using hardware inspires me and generates some good ideas. I’d love to get my hands on a Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder or a number of old Soviet synths. I probably wouldn’t be able to justify spending the money on them though. Even though they’re unpopular to most enthusiasts, I really like modern workstations like the Roland FA-08. I love the idea of one keyboard being able to produce an entire track. But I can’t justify spending thousands of dollars for that experience unless I need it.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
It’s hard to explain with words (which is why I’m a musician, I suppose). When I write music with atmospheric sound design, it feels a bit like sleeping with your window open as opposed to sleeping in a stuffy room. There’s a living chaos going on. Something that thousands, if not millions of different lifeforms, machines, or natural elements helped create, and they’ll never create it exactly the same again. It’s also often subconsciously nostalgic, which kind of ties into what people feel when experiencing ASMR. When I hear a train in the distance, in the back of my head I’m associating it to my childhood. Someone else might be annoyed or distracted by it. I find the sound of a babbling brook really stressful while a lot of people are relaxed by it. I guess I just really like how it helps tell a story that is different to every person who hears it.

(2008 – click to zoom in)

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
There wasn’t too many new things on a technical level. It was really hard work. I wanted it to be personalized to the point where I didn’t work with other musicians. I usually have a violinist or cellist in to play on sessions. In this album I didn’t write something I couldn’t perform myself. I thought about all of the times I recorded a session player and just didn’t “feel it”, and wanted my own emotions driving the intensity or vibrato of the performance. Earlier this year I realized that I had accumulated about 40 songs, and it was time to shave them down and put the album together.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you go on a tour?
It’s always different. This year I’ll likely be doing half of a set of released songs, and the other half improvised stuff with my MIDI guitar and some drum machines. I try to limit myself to what I can fit into a big coffin case and a rack case. I also haven’t used a laptop live for many years now, so that makes everything a little bit more challenging (but a LOT more stable).

(2013 – click to zoom in)

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Distractions. They’re killing my productivity here. If it isn’t someone knocking on my door asking about a fuse box in the other building or something, it’s gangbangers fighting or just screaming incoherently outside my window. This is happening live right now as I type this, haha. I need to try living and working in a more rural environment, and plan on doing so soon.

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’ve always come up with technical ideas while doing something more mindless and physical. In the past few years I’ve been really physically active, so the start of my day is usually spent at a training camp/gym where I’m free to brainstorm while zoning out on a speed bag or something. They mature once I try to bring them to reality. A lot of times an idea or melody in my head sounds unflattering when it actually becomes a sound. As for actually getting mastered and released, I’d say that 5% of ideas and 30% of finished songs get there. There are a lot of tracks that I’m really proud of that just don’t fit into an album or release.

(2013 – click to zoom in)

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 used to immediately pop it in my car or on my headphones and analyze it in every way. But now I just have a pool of songs in a folder, and I’ll listen to them a few days or weeks later once the melody is out of my head. I think my car is the best place to decide if something needs to be re-engineered because it’s absolutely merciless with bass and treble handling. Despite it being a rather good sound system for an automobile, it’s very easy for something to sound terrible in my Kia Soul. I think it’s really important to remember that 90% of the people who listen to music don’t have studio monitors or $300+ headphones. Sometimes I have to make compromises to make it sound appealing in both settings.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Yes and no. I procrastinate things like responding to emails or shipping a package, but I don’t think I’ve really experienced boredom since I was a kid. If I’m not inspired to write music, then I’ll work on photography, programming, martial arts, etc. If I were to go on a vacation to a peaceful, deserted beach, I would probably invent a project to do there that would ensure that I’d sleep 4 hours a night and be stressed out the entire time. I think I just get anxious when I’m bored.

You seem to have a lot of great ideas in almost every piece — all very good I must say! How and where do you find the inspiration for you work?
Thanks, from you that means a lot to me! It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. In the past couple of years I tried to make it a point to not take inspiration literally from other music I’m listening to, mostly because I feel like the end result is more gratifying and all around a better use of my time. This isn’t frequently the case, but sometimes I hear music far off in the distance or in a car driving by, and since I can only make out 10% of what I’m hearing and can’t identify the music, my brain seems to fill in the blanks. That’s a fun way to start a composition.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I’m actually pretty isolated from it, so I don’t think about it much, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m not a fan of genres or scenes, even if they’re broad categories. The only divide I really subscribe to is “fun music” and “emotional music”. The former being created as a service to listeners to enjoy, and the latter being created as a form of expression, whether it is literal or abstract. I find value in both types. I think rules of genre should always take a backseat to ideas, and that’s happening more and more now.

Be sure to pick up Jordan’s latest, Nothing Is Real available on theflashbulb.bandcamp.com

theflashbulb.net

Perhaps Taylor Deupree does not need introduction. Having made an imprint on the electronic music scene in the mid 90s, Deupree went on to create his very own form of ambiance: meditative, minimal, and very much organic. As an owner and the curator of the world renown 12k label, Deupree is responsible for the output of an incredible catalog of globally spanning abstract, experimental and ambient material, from artist such as Kenneth Kirschner, Frank Bretschneider, Lawrence English, Stephan Mathieu,  and too many others to name here. His own collaborations include the celebrated works with Marcus Fischer, Christopher Willits, and of course, Ryuichi Sakamoto. As a mastering engineer, Deupree is credited for much of today’s electronic and experimental music. This interview has been a long time in the making, and we are both proud to finally present you with the result. Enjoy!

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?

If we disregard the (orange) drum set I had when I was 12 and 13 (which I now wish I still had), my first piece of equipment, after I had decided I wanted to be a musician as a career, was a Juno 106 synthesizer, in 1985, when I was 14. Being naive back then and not knowing much about synthesizers, I was convinced that this would be the only synth I would ever need as I assumed that a “synthesizer” could “synthesize” any possible sound. Of course, I quickly learned this wasn’t the case, and thus started the never ending acquisition of equipment.

My formative teen years were spent listening to a lot of 80’s electronic music and the idea of the one (or two) man band was really appealing. I quickly realized that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and it seemed electronic music was a great way to express myself. I realize now I could have picked up an acoustic guitar, learned to sing and become a one-man band, but at the time it was all about electronics.

I made a friend in high school who was also going down the same path and we got together and wrote music every weekend for years. We learned and grew together, and experimented a lot. We recorded everything to cassette. Hundreds and hundreds of compositions from 1985-1990. I still have every single tape, each song labelled with the date it was made.

From that first year (I was 15) onward it’s just been a constant learning experience. Exploring, teaching myself, reading what I can and learning by trial and error. I’ve never taken class on electronic music or studio techniques. I’ve always been determined to be self-taught, I think it’s really important for personal expression, finding your own voice.

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

During those early years I had two rooms at home. One was the main bedroom and my equipment moved around in there but eventually I moved the gear to the second room as I acquired more. This became my first “studio” I suppose. I had a few synths, drum machines, a 4-track and a couple cheap effect boxes. I used this until I went to college where, again, I set up in the dorm room or apartment until graduating and setting up again in other apartments and spare bedrooms.

I suppose I’ve had 7 or 8 locations that could be counted as studios or music rooms, various extra bedrooms and such. But now, after all of these years, I have my first studio that’s outside the house. A purpose-built, beautiful room that sounds great and is really inspirational. It’s funny to look at this room, and the equipment and say.. “wow, after 25 years, this is all there is…” Not that it’s not wonderful and amazing, but I’ve bought and sold so much gear over the years. It’s been distilled down to a real core of deep, varied equipment. I know what I like now and know what I need and don’t need.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

Sometimes I think that could be a difficult question to answer, because not only does equipment go in and out of interest for me at times but also it’s difficult to say an equalizer is “better” than a synthesizer…. or that any one piece is my favorite.

Probably the most *important* piece of equipment in the studio are my monitors. After using a few great ones over the years I’ve settled on these Barefoot MM27s which I find to be a wonderful speaker for both mixing and mastering, which is vitally important to what I do every day. I have this sort of hybrid studio and hybrid career where I need to blend the mastering business and my own songwriting into one setup, the Barefoots perform amazingly and are incredibly unforgiving speakers. Bad mixes sound really bad and good mixes sound spot on. They are not “pleasant” monitors, they are simply true.

That being said, it’s probably safe to say my favorite piece of sound-creating hardware is my Roland Jupiter-8 synth. Not only does it have a family history (it was given to me by my uncle, who bought it in the early 80’s) but I love its sound and find that it fits so easily into any production when I use it. I have a strong bond with the instrument and it has a wonderful soul and story.

Speaking of soul, I realized a couple of years ago that this is what really bothers me about software synthesizers, software in general I suppose; I’d argue that it has no soul. Soul, to me, is made, formed, bruised, earned… from history, from stories. Moving from place to place, battle scars, interactions. A physical object can have a soul, a history of being touched, used, owned, by various people. Physically worn from use. Software, to me, just doesn’t have that. Yes, it has a personality, that of the designer, who has likely done brilliant work in the coding, but beyond that I find it difficult to see anything beyond the surface. There are no ghosts, no dust.

And what about the software that you use for production?

For almost 25 years now I’ve used Mark of the Unicorn’s Performer software for all of my composition (introduced to me by Kenneth Kirschner in 1990), it became Digital Performer a bunch of years ago when DAWs started coming on the market and I never saw a reason to switch away from the program that I know so well to something like Pro Tools or Logic. Ableton Live feels far too trendy for me and I don’t really relate to their marketing, though I know it’s a very powerful program. I’m not so interested in crazy DSP effects anymore like we used so much 10 years ago. Now, I like to view the computer simply as a recording device, a multitrack machine.

I use some, but very little, software synthesizers from time to time. I do quite like the software from Madrona Labs, Aalto and Kaivo. These are really interesting and different sounding synthesizers and they bring something to my palette that I don’t have in hardware (well, Kaivo, mostly). They both have a very organic sound quality to them, I think that’s why I’m drawn to them.

I do all of my mixing in DP, EQ and track-related mixing tasks. Production plugins sound so good now and the convenience of it on top of the sound is hard to beat, soul or not! I’ve got a hybrid setup with a lot of hardware and software, I find it’s the best of both worlds. Convenience and sound quality.

view from studio

What equipment do you use for field recordings?

I don’t take field recording too seriously, in terms of fidelity. I’m more interested in capturing a mood than pristine reality. My main recorder is the one I always have on me: my iPhone, equipped with a Zoom m/s microphone. It makes a great little recorder. Just like they say about cameras, the best one is the one that you have with you, so you don’t miss a photograph. I also have an older Tascam field recorder, but really, the iPhone is much better so I just use that and it works great for what I need it to do.

Tell us about some of the “found objects” that often make into your music, and any manipulations that you apply that make these sounds not so obvious.

A lot of times when I’m working on a collaboration with someone we’ll get out of the studio, take walks, talk, visit somewhere inspiring. It’s nice on these occasions to pick up something from the environment to use as an instrument. When Marcus Fischer was here recording “In A Place Of Such Graceful Shapes” we found some fantastic dried reeds and seed pods in the park we were photographing. These made it into the recording, probably with little manipulation. I think its important, much of the time, to keep these found objects sounding true and real, as an homage to the discovery, place and time.

In our recent trip to Japan, myself, Stephan Mathieu, Federico Durand and Illuha spent a couple of days in a beautiful spot by the forest and sea. We made un-plugged recordings during an all-day session and hike that involved many plants and stones from the area.

I find it fun, too, if I can, to buy a small piece of equipment or instrument from a place I’m visiting. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s nice to be back home in the studio and look at a guitar pedal, or a bell that I bought overseas and have it remind me of the trip I took and the time spent with friends. Instruments should have stories. When they do it comes across in the music.

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 always is, really… whether it’s a new synth module or some vintage effects processor. But the holy grail, of synthesizers anyway, for me, that’s out of reach… is the Waldorf Wave. I’m a big fan of the Waldorf Microwave and the Wave is an incredible, hands-on version of that with even more possibilities. Sadly they’ve been selling for over 10,000 euros lately. At that price, I don’t find it makes sense.

I’d like to pick up a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder, I think it’s called the 238. That’s on my short list. 8 tracks crammed onto a cassette. It’s got to be lovely!

I honestly feel like the best music is created with the most meager of equipment. That the less you have the more creative you are. But being so constantly fascinated by all of this recording and music making technology makes it pretty difficult for me to keep a tiny setup. However, this is really where rules and collaborations come into importance, which we talk about below. Restrictions and concepts help narrow the tools for a particular project, thus push the creativity a bit more.

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

My live set always seems to be changing, but I’m always trying to make it as live as possible with as little pre-recorded material as possible. I happily dropped the laptop many years ago for gigs, which was a huge burden off of my shoulders. I came up in the gigging world of the mid-90s with very live, analog instruments, and using the laptop live for a few years after that was really depressing to me. It always seemed too safe and sterile.

The latest incarnation of my live rig is a flight case of eurorack modular synthesizer, along with an OP-1 synthesizer and a couple of guitar pedals, usually a looper and an eventide H9 and/or a Strymon El Capistan. That forms the electronic core of my sets and I’ll usually add to that some found objects, acoustic instruments, cassette players, or anything to give a more physical, tactile sound. It seems to be a compact system that’s capable of traveling well (so important!) and giving me a lot to do, manually, while I try to search for an (im)perfect repeating loop to lull listeners into a sleepy state.

I have been making plans for an even more stripped-down a focused system. I have a couple of different ideas that would be conceptual performances in themselves. Perhaps something I will present on the road at some point as being a little different than what I usually do.

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

When I built my new studio one of the most important decisions I made was to try to strike a balance between proper acoustics and comfortable vibe. I wanted a space that not only sounded good, and accurate, but was also relaxing and didn’t feel too much like a “studio.” The more I use my space, and it’s only been a few short months, the better I realize it is. It not only sounds really good in there, all around the room, but it’s so comfortable and inspiring to be in. The vibe comes from the modern, yet warm, design. Wood on the floors, back wall and ceiling, a nice big window in front of me while I work and a skylight that opens up that acts as passive cooling and a beautiful source of light. The studio is off the back deck of the house and opens up to giant faces of rock and forests. It’s so connected with nature.

Inside I’ve tried to make it as ergonomic as possible. I keep it very tidy and have incorporated some smart storage tricks. The gear is easy to access and there’s plenty of space to move around. I’m always trying to perfect the cabling or interconnections between gear. It’s not perfect everywhere but my setup and wiring is really complex. A mastering setup is hooked up really differently than your typical writing/mixing setup and I’m trying to do both. Sometimes there’s a piece of gear that I wish was connected to a different part of the studio. I’d like to have better routing of computer audio tracks out to my hardware effects processors. Right now my hardware effects are used solely while recording. It’s a pain to change the cabling to use them when mixing from the computer. I know how to set it up but it will mean sacrificing another connection.

from outside

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?

My work comes about in many different ways. An idea could be born from a single sound I made… recently, or months ago (I keep an archive of sounds I work on), or just hooking up a microphone and noodling around on a guitar or a lot of times not even in the studio. I’ll get ideas for songs by looking at visual art, or taking a hike in the woods, or talking to a friend, or on travels. These sparks are so important, and also the most difficult to come by. When they hit, those inspirational moments, I know it’s time to grab the moment and start writing. From there the composition is a process that usually involves building out from the center. The beginning and ends I’ll do last and are often only there because they have to be. I usually view my music horizontally. It may be a concept from Eno. My music is less about a start and end, less about linear time, as just existing in time and space as if the listener is set down in the middle of the sonic world and simply exists.

At some point enough layers are built up that the composition process takes on a subtractive role. carving, shaping, taking out what’s not needed to make the most of what I’m trying to say with the least I need to say it with.

One bit of trivia: I can’t ever start a solo album until I know its title first. I always come up with the album title before I start working. It helps me focus. However, I’m extremely picky when it comes to titles and often don’t actively think of them. I’ll wait for them to come to me, serendipitously. Which is one reason I take so long between solo albums. I sit and wait for the title to appear.

Talk about the overall difference between composing a solo album and collaborating with other musicians when creating music.

For me composing solo albums is very difficult, not in a hard sort of way, but in that I really have to be in the right mental space. It takes a lot of mental energy to conceive of and feel comfortable with a process of writing to make an album. I’m also quite critical of my own work and fall into a sort of isolationist mentality where I’m sensitive about every aspect. It ends up taking me months to write an album, which on its own isn’t necessarily that long, but there is always a couple of years of mental preparation that leads up to the initial writing. Solo albums are often deeply personal, but at the same time allow me the freedom to do whatever comes naturally in the studio, to grab whatever instrument is piquing my interest at that moment and just go for it.

Collaborative albums are pretty much the polar opposite of my solo works. They’re often created more quickly, with less stress and can be a lot more playful. Having another person right there to bounce ideas off of takes away a lot of the self-doubt and makes the writing process a bit more carefree. Additionally, most of my collaborations are fairly conceptual when it comes to process, instruments and approach. This helps when time is short, helps us to focus on a set of instruments or rules to get the job done.

Probably the most important, and exciting, thing to me about collaborating is how much of a learning process it is. Watching someone use some instrument that’s been in my studio for years in a totally new way. We get caught up in habits, good or bad, and to have a fresh pair of eyes, ears and hands in the studio really sparks new life.

In collaborating I also tend to take more risks. Perhaps I’m working with someone whose music is a bit different than mine. Or perhaps we’ll decide to do something really different. I strongly believe that collaborative efforts should follow the 1+1=3 rule. The best ones are when two people get together and create not a simple sum of the parts, but something new and unexpected. This can’t be forced, and isn’t always successful, but when it happens it’s great.

All this isn’t to say I enjoy collaborating more than I enjoy solo work. My solo work is the most important thing to me. It comes from deep inside and defines me. While I start with a “no rules” approach to my studio I always hone the concept and try to push myself in new directions. If I’m not learning something, or making mistakes, then there is no point.

xylophone & tape

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 “finish” a piece (I rarely consider my work ever finished) I will let it sit for weeks or months. I’ll keep writing through the album to gather what I feel is enough material. After songs sit for a few weeks I can approach them again with fresher ears and see if they held up and are good enough for the album. I’ll hone things this way until I have a rough track order for the album.

A really important aspect of the end of the process, which I’m not sure I’ve talked about music, is that I’ll almost always send the rough album to Kenneth Kirschner to hear. Ken and I go back a long way and really understand each other’s music. He has always given me totally honest feedback that I know is a pure critique with no false compliments added. I think part of the reason this works so well, besides Ken and I having known each other for almost 20 years, is that our music is really quite different from each other. He listens differently than I do and expects different things. I feel like this perspective is really important, more so than if I just sent the tracks to someone whose process and sound were really similar to mine.

Ken and I are really open when it comes to critiquing each other’s music. It goes both ways and neither of really feel confident about our end results unless the other has made some significant suggestion/change to the album. But we also are completely free to ignore each others commentary, too! Ken expects that of me for sure. He knows my music tends to be “pretty” which is something he completely tries to avoid in his own music.

I think if Ken is happy with my album, then it makes me feel more confident about it, to let it go into the world.

Once all that is out of the way I will let the album sit for a few weeks again before I master it. It’s such a golden rule of mastering to never master one’s own music. But my day job is a mastering engineer and I’m such a control freak (not to mention I don’t charge myself anything) that I just do it myself. And I love my analogue mastering chain and know it well. It’s really important to step away from it for a long time first, to approach it with fresh ears, that’s how I justify it.

At some point it’s time to let the album go out into the world. It’s almost like seeing a child leave the house. It’s out there, on its own, and is received and judged on its own merits. Everything that came before, that lead up to that final day, is now in the past and the music must speak for itself. At that point I have no control over it, so it’s really scary to me.

I also can’t listen to my own music for at least two years after the release date. I’m too critical, so all I’ll hear are mistakes or things I wish I did differently. In order to enjoy it again I need to step away from it for so long that I’ve forgotten how I made it

jupiter 8

I know that besides being a musician, you’re also an avid photographer. Tell us about the process and the equipment you use to take photos.

My interest in music and photography developed around the same time, when I was a young teenager. They’ve always been my two halves and I’ve so often thought of them as these joined things. With photography, however, I’m far (far!) more relaxed and confident than I am with music. In fact, I think I’m a pretty good photographer most of the time. I tend to be less self-critical and enjoy my photography more than my own music.

There are a couple of reasons for this I think. For one, photography isn’t as important to me as music, so I don’t worry about it nearly as much. It’s also “easier” in that I can capture a good photograph in a day… or in a 60th of a second, where a good song may take me weeks. There’s a bit more luck to photography I find. Being at the right place at the right time. It’s really a different form of expression, so different, it compliments the music really well.

But also, I don’t spend much time learning about other photographers the same way I do other music/musicians. I’m not immersed in the world of photography like I am the music world. As a result I’m not constantly comparing myself to others or feeling like something is sub par, nearly so often. I’m sort of in my own photographic world and enjoying what I do quite a bit. It’s a nice place to be, but definitely consumes less of my life than music does.

I shoot with two main cameras, a Fuji X-Pro one digital and a Polaroid SX-70. Although, I have a few other cameras I use but usually for a specific concept or project, like a Holga with a Polaroid back, or a hand-build plastic Recesky which was 100% responsible for all of the photography on my album Faint.

I’ll always post-process my images in Photoshop. This is quite an important part of my process. I don’t use digital manipulation to alter subject matter or composition as much as I do to augment it or create a mood. It pretty much comes down to color processing and shifting spectrums or general “photographic” types of processes. I like to have my photographs appear to be one step removed from reality, in some way. To exist in this slightly dreamy place.

I won’t even start, or consider an image worth keeping unless the subject matter or composition are there. I was trained as a film photographer in darkrooms but also I was never good at making “perfect” exposures or these textbook, technically great images. In photography school I was always interested in alternative processes and making something out of what’s at hand (quite like my music, really). I have this streak of traditionalism in my photography, at least to the point where I really don’t like over processed or really fake looking images very much. You must be able to strip away all of the processing and still be left with a good image at the core.

How does the music making and the photo taking interweave with each other. What are the similarities in your approach and what are the unique differences that compliment each of the individual art works?

On some level my music and photography are about the same thing. Isolation, time, stillness… with an inherent silence, and quiet. They are both influenced heavily by nature and minimalism. I enjoy a hybrid approach in both photography and music; the blending of the digital and the analogue. The past and the future.

My photographs are almost always void of people and with that I like to comment on humanity’s impact on the natural world. I’m not sure there is quite the equivalent of this in the music.

What’s so great about the two art forms is that they rely on different senses so it’s a wonderful way to explore the world. I’m always looking at things from a photographic eye and always listening to the world as a sound artist. I think it’s quite a natural fit, to be interested in both of these things, to exercise multiple senses in this way.

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

I feel like I procrastinate all the time, but it’s usually to go do something else that’s one of my jobs… like, procrastinating a mastering job so I can go fill 12k mail orders or something like that. I juggle quite a number of different roles in my professional career from running the label, to being a musician, a mastering engineer, a graphic designer, a photographer… so there’s always something creative to do when I’m burned out of something.

When it comes to truly procrastinating I’ll grab the iPad or a computer and play a game or run household errands or clean the house. And on the weekends, unless I’m out of town or alone, I will rarely do work related to any of my careers (although I tend to photograph a lot on the weekends). I do have everyday life to manage and an amazing family to spend time with. Somehow I’ve managed to balance everything…. such an important concept in life…. balance.

taylordeupree.com | 12k.com | 12kmastering.com

Richard Devine is an electronic musician releasing on Warp, Schematic, Sublight and Detroit Underground among the many labels. As a sound designer, he’s created patches for Korg, Native Instruments, Clavia, and most recently film, video games and many other hardware devices. In August of 2013 he released The Electronic Music Manuscript: A Richard Devine Collection – a construction kit for Sony’s Sound Series. Devine is a sought out artisan and wizard of modular and DSP sound design, so it is a true honor to take a peak into his impressive studio, and share his thoughts on the process, working environment, and more! Enjoy!

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 got into composing electronic music back in high school. I was 16th years old when I first started building up a studio. I was buying a lot of records during this time. I was doing lots of DJ sets, with early Warp and Rephlex records. It was the music of Richard D. James that started it all for me. I got the “Mindstream” EP, of Meat Beat Manifesto, which had an Aphex Twin remix on it. I was completely blown away by that track. I began the search to find more tracks by him and other artists in this style, getting the Analog Bubble Bath Vol-3 and early Caustic Window records. I knew at this point that I wanted to make this type of music. My first piece of gear was Akai S3200 sampler. I had my heart on getting a sampler first so I could learn the basics about how to manipulate sound. It had lots of interesting features, key-groups, envelopes, basic digital synthesis, filters, various waveforms, plus on board sample editing capabilities etc. It was a great choice in terms of learning the basics about sound and also taught me to listen for things that could be used in a composition. I also got a few analogue mono synths like the SH-101, Arp Odyssey, and then got the Arp-2600 which was a bit turning point for me in learning about sound shaping and design.

How would you describe your music today to someone who thinks they listen to everything, but in fact only follow the latest pop trends?

Its funny I often have been asked that question recently, and I usually tell people that my music is a hybrid between Acousmatic electro acoustic music, and rhythmically structured sound effects. My wife had the best description of my music: “it sounds like giant alien insects gnawing on metal”.

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

I went through 3 different major studio iterations, before I got to the setup I am using now. I tried to figure out with each build what things worked and what didn’t work. Trying out different speakers, convertors, pre-amps, sound proofing materials, and lighting. With my current setup I tried to find just the right balance of vibe and functionality, which proved to be the biggest challenge.

My current setup is really refined; I tried to simplify the signal chain down to just a few key pieces. I actually sold a bunch of gear over the past year, and just stripped down to my favorite pieces of gear that I know really well. Almost everything I have now, is because I worked doing patch design or programming for. So I know these pieces inside and out, and can get any sound I need out of them very quickly, for my projects.

The main setup is centered on a Yamaha DM2000VCM mixer, which isn’t what I mix down with but is basically a 56 input mixer that hooks up all my synths and drum machines. I then have two ADAT light pipe cards that connect to a separate computer (Mac Pro) that runs this with a RME UFX sound card. I can then route anything to anything with the matrix routing capabilities and at the same time use some of my favorite digital outboard effects processors like the Eventide H8000FW, and Lexicon PCM92. I will often use the mixer like a modular synth sending signals, and doing feedback chains coming up with all sorts of new sounds. The main use is to have a interface to track all my keyboards and synths into one source that is up and running all the time. Nothing to unplug, or plug its always up, and I can recall instant settings at the touch of a button.

The mix down setup is very simple, which consists of Universal Audio Apollo 16 that is connected to a Dangerous Music 2Bus LT analog summing box. I analog sum 16 channels going directly out into the 2Bus then take the stereo output into a Avalon VT-747-SP for the final warm glue and finalized EQ touch up. The final mix then gets run back into my computer. I am doing most of my stuff on an iPad and Macbook Pro I love the Universal Audio plug-ins, and use a big chunk of them for a lot of my final mixes and design projects. My main monitors are the Genelec 8250’s with 7270A DSP sub. I also have a smaller set Genelec 6010’s with 5040A sub that I start my mixes out on. I then level check things on a pair of Avantone MixCubes, to hear if any thing is popping up in the mix more of a reality check in many ways, as most people will be listening to stuff on smaller systems. Then I do a final check in my car and on the sound bar to hear how the mixes translate on more conventional high-fi systems.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

I would probably say my favorite piece of hardware lately has been my Eurorack modular system. I have found it to bring endless amounts of inspiration, in that you can create entirely new sounds, and new approaches to sequencing. It’s such an open-ended platform in that you can constantly change/update various modules to accommodate your creative needs.

And what about the software that you use for production?

As for software I use lots of different stuff, but mainly use Logic Audio X, and Nuendo for sound design and music composition. I also have a Protools system here but only when a client request delivery in this format. I work mainly doing sound design stuff for most of the year, and use the new Pacarana Kyma system for a lot of stuff. I love Native Instruments Reaktor and Cycling 74’s latest Max/MSP 6.1.8 with Gen has been really awesome. I am looking forward to version 7.0 that will be released in the fall. I use Max a lot for just situational type stuff here at the studio. I also love Max For Live and was doing a lot of my shows with this and my Elektron Machine Drum/Monomachine setup. Some other favorites are Composer’s Desktop Project, Metasynth 5.4, AudioMulch, Plogue Bidule, Bitwig Studio, Crusher-X, GRM-Tools, and Spectrumworx.

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 there is a few key pieces that I would love to have but not sure I will ever have is the EMS synthi-100 or the Waldorf Wave. I have played with both of these synths and I must say there is still nothing else out there that can do what they do. Maybe one day but it will just be a dream for now.

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

Well my sound design work takes up most of what I do now. I work with many advertising agencies and technology based companies where I design sounds for hardware devices, software environments, TV/Film and video games. Some other projects have been designing sounds for GPS navigation system for a car, or a set of UI sounds for an iOS application. The video game market has been a recent cool area for me lately. I worked on three games last year. I have also been doing lots of film trailer work lately as well. I am hoping to get more into doing more film stuff later this year.

Any particular new techniques that you have recently discovered?

I have been playing around a lot lately with impulse responses. More in the way of using non-traditional sound sources as impulses rather then rooms and spaces. I will use objects, like cymbals, mallets, rhythmic pulses, or granular textures and then use the impulse file to impose the amplitude and frequency of that sound and convole it to the incoming audio. I have discovered so many interesting sounds with this process. I also have been playing around a lot lately with IZotope’s RX3 advance software. I love the spectral repair function in this. One thing I have been doing lately is taking tons of unrelated field recordings into a single audio file, then taking the audio before then after it and doing a spectral repair process. What is interesting is that it tries to analyze the audio before the file then after it. If you use two sources that are completely unrelated it will try to correct the sounds and give you the sum of them and add them into the beginning and the end. It’s also interesting using this same function but then inserting silence into an audio file then repairing the parts that have silence in which it will try to spectrally repair and glue those sections back together.

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

Well recently I have been using an Enclave 12U modular case as I have moved over to doing complete solo modular performances. I also bring out a few guitar pedals, which include a Strymon BigSky, Eventide Space, Red Panda Particle, and M.A.S.F granular pedal called “Possessed”. I have purposely not wanted to bring out the computer as I wanted to explore what all could be done with the latest set of eurorack modules.

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

In my current space I wanted to make sure I designed the room to have lots of space, and not feel too cluttered. This was the main problem in my old studio, I just had too much equipment in there. I found it too cramped and claustrophobic to work in at times. I wanted to make sure the new space felt more open and clean. I tend to work better when I am using only a few pieces of kit at a time. So I wanted to minimize my setup and keep things simpler. I love everything about my current setup especially the new monitoring situation and the lighting. Being able to change the LED’s lights to any color or mood is really important. I feel that I want to work in darker lighting conditions later at night, and work in almost complete daylight like settings during the early mornings. I have a big Samsung TV that I project my mix sessions but when not in use I will put images of outdoor forests, and mountain streams to bring a more outside organic feel to the room as I have no windows down here.

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?

My processes change all the time. It might start out with a collection of field recordings, or some sound that I synthesize in the computer. Lately I have been creating lots of patches on the modular and then recording alternate takes of the same patch. An idea might start out as me thinking of a certain sound then trying to create it on my system. The interesting parts for me are all the stuff that happens along the way. Something might accidentally happen while your patching and take you to an entirely different place, that wasn’t intended but is equally cool and inspiring. I will then record the patch in a series of performances, and pick out my favorites. This is quite different then what I do with computer music pieces, where I work more with specific events on a timeline. I will use a mixture of different plug-ins and instruments with automation to achieve a certain sound or mood. I tend to work on computer music pieces longer and sometimes spend months and months on one piece. Which I believe isn’t necessarily a good thing, in that you can recall a session from the past and rework things till they are perfect. I often find my self not getting much done, but re-doing sections that I feel could be better. I think this is why working on the modular lately has been better for me, in that I can’t hold on to anything for too long, as you can’t save anything, you just have to record it as is, and do everything in the moment with your current state of mind.

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 often audition the tracks, on a wide array of different speakers, in stereo and mono configurations. I will test on my laptop first, then iPad/iPhone for reference. I like to also play my tracks out on large PA systems to hear how well things translate. I also mix a lot of my stuff for the headphones, in that I will do a lot of stereo panning etc. People tend to hear the constant shifting of timbres sounds moving around between the stereo fields. This is something that I love doing, in that it seems to have a better overall affect for they type of material that I create.

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

I do procrastinate from time to time, sometimes it happens If have a deadline coming up. I find that I work much better under pressure. I also try to spend a lot of my free time researching new technologies and instruments. I will get involved doing smaller sound design projects where I can work with new people, new tools, and software instruments. I find that doing some of these projects inspires me to do new things, and pushes me out of rut.

What gets you inspired?

Everything from nature, art, and photography, to architecture inspires me. I find inspiration in everything, which could be an art installation, musical software computer patches, or other musical works. Another source of inspiration like I said above comes from designing sounds for new hardware and software. I am constantly looking for new tools and instruments to generate new sounds, and a lot of times these new tools that I design sounds for inspire me to do things that I never thought would be possible. I also love working with other sound designers on projects, which open your eyes to different techniques and approaches that you can learn from.

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

Well, I think there is a lot more electronic music today then there ever has been, and now it’s taking the mainstream spotlight. I think now things get super popular very quickly and saturate the market for a year, then are out the next. So people’s attention spans are much shorter these days. The technology is partly responsible for this because everything can be downloaded or streamed immediately to your phone. I think people spend less time listening to full albums of music these days. I tend to have more of an old school approach. I still buy vinyl and listen to albums on my turntables to get the full effect. As for creatively I think a lot of newer electronic producers are just jumping on the current bandwagon instead of trying to do something new and different. Sometimes its cool to go against the grain and make something that you can call your own genre.

devinesound.net | soundcloud.com/richarddevine | vimeo.com/richarddevine

Jeff McIlwain has been on my radar for 15 years now, ever since I heard his bass-dropping IDM cut-up beats on Isophlux back in 1999. McIlwain released four full-lengths on Ghostly International as Lusine, two records on Hymen under his Lusine Icl moniker (where the “Icl” stands for “intercontinental”) and nearly 20 EPs altogether. The 2007 Language Barrier is still a very special album in my collection. Most recently McIlwain put out an Arterial EP on Ghostly under his L’usine alias. Today we get a chance to take a peak inside Jeff’s studio, and talk about his process, environment and more. Enjoy!

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 had been making tapes of various DJ mixes off the radio in Dallas in the early 90’s and was interested in figuring out how this music was made, so I started out buying a Yamaha RY30 drum machine, just starting with the beats.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
A lot. In the first few years, it started out as mostly hardware. A drum machine, work station, analog synth, effects unit, sampler. Then I got a computer in the mid 90’s and my first laptop around 2000. I didn’t even get proper monitor speakers until about 2001.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
I got a Mark 3 Arp Odyssey back in ’96 for $300 bucks. It’s been my go to synth ever since, and it’s still by far my favorite of everything I own.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I use FL Studio and Cubase for my main sequencing and editing. Lots of plugins, and a couple random things I still use often like NI’s Kontakt and even Cool Edit for quick editing. I use Ableton Live for my live setup and some of the Max for Live tools as well.

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 really. For me, I’m pretty careful about buying stuff. I honestly feel like continually buying gear actually slows you down. I still have major gearlust, but I usually end up getting stuff I actually need. Lately, it’s been a lot of acoustic instruments, like the cello, and random hand percussion stuff. My friend Rafael gave me his Glockenspiel, which I’m looking forward to putting to good use. I am kind of interested in going back and buying one of the smaller Akai MPC’s because I used to program on an MPC 2000 for a couple projects around 2000 and I really liked it. It would be a nice thing to get out of the studio with, where you don’t HAVE to rely on the computer for making sampled sequences.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
My sound design is mostly sample based. I use synthesis as sort of a starting point, but I usually end up manipulating various samples, which may include some stuff I’ve recorded in with synths. I like stuff that’s got a lot of transients, so a lot of times field recordings play a part. But, usually the “sound design” I do is tied to a more musical project, so I hardly ever make sounds just for sounds-sake.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your last album?
For my last album, I was really interested in all sorts of ideas revolving around arpeggiations, and sequencing multiple mono synths together to make sound-scapey, busy sounding, but a bit more “live” sounding music. Also, I recorded a drummer in a proper studio for a couple tracks as well, which was quite nice.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I have a laptop running Live, two midi controllers (launchpad and UC-33, although I JUST switched over to the Launch Control XL), a little mixer, and a DSI Tetra.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I like it to be not too “dead”, but with decent acoustics. It’s also important that it’s in a cooler area of the house, because we don’t have A/C. When it’s hot in the rest of the house, it’s not so hot in the studio, which is nice. I get a nice little view of my backyard, so it’s not like being totally closed off from the rest of the world as well. And it’s far enough away from our bedroom and living room that I can leave the studio and it actually feels like I’m leaving the 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 think I kind of jump into a track with rhythm and melody at the same time. I use a lot of samples, so I might start with a synth line, but it quickly starts involving various textures to give me an idea of what the feel of the track will be. I don’t like just starting with a melody or beat, because it doesn’t really tell me much about the track as a whole. So, once I have a short, but layered pattern going, I can branch out from there.

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’ll bring it into our family room, where I have a bigger system set up. I usually have to tweak the bass, it’s probably the one thing I have to mess with. But, usually they’re pretty minor tweaks. I have gotten used to mixing on the monitors I have, so I’m pretty confident in how it will sound these days. It used to be a lot more arduous.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Who doesn’t? I think a lot of times I’ll pretend I’m going to buy something for the studio, and get all into the research to pass the time, but end up not doing it. I think it can take me a day or so to dive into a new project, but I’m pretty good at taking small steps towards something new, and letting myself be a little lazy in the process, maybe listen to some other music or jump on Facebook or something. I’ve been doing this a long time, so those uninspired times don’t bother me as much. It really is a part of the process.

What gets you inspired?
I get really inspired by watching films and seeing some piece of music work really well for a scene. I also tend to get inspired when I’m out seeing someone perform or DJ and I’ll hear something new and just really want to figure out how to get “that sound.” What I end up doing with it is usually totally different, but it’s always a good jumping off point.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
Oh, you know, good and bad. I prefer the times when electronic music is not very popular. I think it’s nice to be on the outside and focusing on music, maybe being inspired by indie rock or something. It gets a little hectic in my head when there’s all this hype about electronic music, but I honestly feel like I’ve ALWAYS been pretty left field of whatever’s going on, so it ends up not really affecting my productivity all that much. I think a lot of what people talk about being “electronic music” isn’t really electronic music. It’s more like top 40, or generic sounding party music or something, that happens to be electronic. So, it just seems so separate from what I’ve always cared about, which is music that might run with a particular style, but does it in a completely different, and more interesting way than you were expecting.

lusineweb.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?

There’s a lot of music and art in the background of my family. There was always a different kind of inspiration from everyone – whether musically from my mother and grandmother who played the piano, my uncle who played the organ, or visually from my father as a photographer, and my grandfather as a cartoonist and amateur filmmaker. When I was a child they always encouraged my imagination and creativity.

Growing up in the 1980’s was also very important. Cassettes were common, and some of my early toys between the ages of 5-10 were cassette voice recorders, like the red-and-white Daylin or the brown Fisher-Price models. They had a built-in mic, and the quality was terrible. Whatever you recorded sounded like it was in a rainstorm, clunky, or drenched in internal noise. I remember not being tall enough to reach the VCR, so I’d use the cassette recorder to tape my favorite parts of movies I liked. I would do the same with music, whether it was by Henry Mancini, The Carpenters, or Bach. I’d find a particular place in the song that I liked, something that gave me a good feeling, and I’d record that same part over and over onto the tape. I remember going back and listening to some of them later, particularly the movie samples, and I remember not being sure where they even came from. Somehow, I think that was an early, unintentional experience that surely influenced my interests later on.

There was really a huge space between this time and when I started actually composing music. Even that was started without any expectations. I was going to university, studying literature, film, and writing. I always liked film scores, and I had discovered Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, and was listening to a lot of music by people like The Hafler Trio, Stockhausen, and Oval. At some point I decided to start trying it on my own. The first keyboard I ever got was a Bontempi air pump organ. Incredibly cheap. I think it was less than $5, or free. It sounded horrible. Some of the keys stuck down, but just pumping air through it would keep it going. The first reel-to-reel player I got and started trying to make loops with was a National. Just a cheap, portable 5-inch reel machine. I used it for the first few years, and early albums like Sunlir, Ceylon, and Sadha were all made with this.

How did the move to Japan impact your setup, production, and the overall flow?

When I moved to Japan I left behind at my family home or got rid of all of my equipment. The only thing I brought with me was my father’s Sony Tapecorder 262 reel-to-reel. Everything else I have I’ve acquired since I’ve been living in Japan. My friend Terre Thaemlitz (who lives a few stations away) even gave me a stack of unused reels to use for tape. I didn’t have anything at all, just a good reel-to-reel and the rest of my possessions packed into one suitcase.

I think my experience in organizing and choosing the right equipment definitely got better after moving to Japan. In the US it didn’t ever feel as hands-on to me. Living in a rural place there’s almost no access to instruments or equipment other than through the internet. Being able to see more instruments and options and get a feel for what is right and more importantly what isn’t has been one of the best things about living Tokyo. The way things are now, after 10 years I feel the most comfortable that I’ve been. For now, it’s the best environment for making music for me.

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

Honestly, I’ve never really had a studio, exactly. The studios that I’ve been in have never really felt like comfortable environments to me. It doesn’t feel inspiring to me being in a dark room surrounded by instruments, cables, and computer screens. Even in a nice room, sometimes it feels overwhelming, and misleading. For me that disconnects the reason for making the music in the first place. That being said, the place itself is important, but not in the way of acoustics, or anything directly related to the music itself. The space where I like to make music changes, so I like to keep limitations as small as possible. In my family home back in the United States, I would keep instruments in different places through the house. Some days it felt right to make something in the dining room on the wood floor. Other days, maybe with a view of the morning sun by the bay windows in the back bedroom.

For several years I was traveling and living in places for short times, and I only had really basic equipment. Maybe only a tape machine or cassette players, a few effectors, a laptop, and sometimes a keyboard – all these things rotated, and usually existed for only that one place.

Now things have slowed down, and I’m not moving around much anymore. Now I almost always keep things put up; in closets, leaned against a wall, or on a shelf. I admit it’s somewhat inconvenient having to pick up what you want, carry it to a different place, and plug it in every time – but it also keeps more possibilities open. I think moving to Japan was the best inspiration for creating the proper studio environment for me. For example, in Japan, if people sleep on a futon in room with tatami mats, usually after they wake up they fold the futons and put them in the wall closet. Then the room is empty, except for what furniture or shelves remain. For some reason, if I keep instruments set up in a certain way or in a certain place, it feels like I’m keeping the same idea stuck in my head. When you can take them out and arrange them in a new way based on your ideas, following the feeling you have, or in response to your surrounding, then it makes something different possible. Starting with a clean view helps keep the directions free.

At the moment, though I have a compact setup, it’s spread throughout 3 rooms. We have a lot of open space, but it feels more like a home. Creating music in this kind of environment feels really comfortable.

In our main living room, Miko and I share a desktop computer for Oh, Yoko and our own projects, and I use a laptop. We have a mixer, a record player, monitors, and a small rack with an audio interface and reverb. Recently this is also our 7-month old daughter’s studio for banging her shakers, tambourine, and other percussion instruments.

In other rooms I have reel-to-reel players and related-equipment, a couple of keyboards, cassette players, tapes, and other things spread out, along with Miko’s guitars and keyboards. It feels sparse and simple, but when you get the right balance, there’s no reason to change anything.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

It would have to be the Sony Tapecorder 262 that I brought from the US. My father actually bought it in Japan in the 1960’s, and my uncle kept it until about 5 years ago, when I took it and started to use it, finally bringing it with me here. It’s not a particularly special reel-to-reel, and it only has the basic options, but it does everything I need, and it’s strong and reliable. If I’ve used tape or tape loops in the last 5 or 6 years for production, I’ve used this.

And what about the software that you use for production?

For the most part, I only use software for mixing, mastering, and recording from tape, instruments, or other sources. I really only use Logic on our main desktop computer and my laptop, and before I starting using this program about 4 years ago I only used the free software Audacity. I’m not really interested in plugins, and a graphic equalizer is really the only thing I use at all, though it’s also one of my most important tools.

A white macbook is my normal computer, and I use it for some basic music production with an older edition of Logic, but mostly for editing photos, writing, and online work. There’s some nice free music software like AU Lab that is sometimes useful, and I have max/msp, but I haven’t used it for much over the years, if ever for anything recorded. Just a few live shows, like on the tour with Machinefabriek in the Netherlands and Belgium. In addition, older computers can also be useful tools. In a way they can be like an instrument that has different features per edition or age. Sometimes I use an old powerbook g4, and this really has some of my favorite music programs that I’ve ever used. It was so different from current software, more technical, or openly functional. It seems like it doesn’t guide you. It’s just a tool. Almost all of them are unavailable and unknown now, and for some reason, they were all incredibly powerful. It was the second laptop I owned, and I still go back to it sometimes, if I want to put something extra into the music. It taught me a lot about feedback and time stretching.

What equipment do you use for field recordings?

I use a simple Roland R-05 and a cassette walkman. I don’t use external microphones, and I prefer if it’s a more natural, somewhat raw result. When everything is too still or staged, it doesn’t seem true anymore. It just seems like nothing is happening, or whatever you’re waiting to happen is waiting for you to press stop so it can continue. It’s like taking a photo. Sometimes if you wait too long trying to catch the right moment, it will have already passed. Even though most of my field recordings aren’t special or are ordinary, they’re just memories. Not every memory is special, but it still has a place in your experience, and you remember more about that moment when you can hear what it sounded like, even if it doesn’t sound extraordinary.

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’d have to say my Uncle’s Wurlitzer Theater Organ from the 1920’s. My Uncle bought it and took about 15 years to restore it. It’s really incredible. At his home in Mississippi, he lives in a house from the late 1800’s, that has several small buildings connected to the house. One of them was the library or ‘study’, and it was modified to include the organ, with all its pipes and instruments. It’s really incredible seeing and playing an organ with ‘effects’ that are real instruments, such as a piano, drums, cymbals, castanets, car horns, and sleigh bells. Looking under the pipes and seeing all these instruments sitting there makes pre-recorded samples seem stupid.

Do I think one day I’ll have it? I seriously doubt that. Besides, I’d have to live in my hometown to use it.

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

I like it to be as hands-on as possible. I guess that’s one reason why I like working with tape more. The process of recording pieces of music and sounds, cutting with scissors or a razor blade, pasting with tape while sitting at a wooden table or on the wood or tatami floor is nice. It feels more like carpentry, sometimes. I remember my grandfather in his basement workshop, making chairs, bookshelves, and furniture. It was always dark in the back, with some light coming through the side windows, and the morning mist rolled outside the open doors, blowing a cool breeze inside. I remember how he looked when he’d look closely and make pencil marks for cutting lines, and I’m always reminded of that when I’m working on something.

It’s really the same when I’m working with a synthesizer. Even though many people find it tedious, I really enjoy shifting through buttons and patches on the DX7, to be really specific about the type of sound you can generate. I prefer that to more knob-based synthesizers. I prefer it than having to look through endless folders or cycle through plugins and unlimited options, staring at a computer screen. Having limitations is important. For some reason that pinky-finger LCD screen makes it much more simple, and let’s you visualize it more in your head. It may be missing a lot of options, but it has enough, and I’ve used it for creating a lot of different things.

Any particular new techniques that you’re currently experimenting with on your latest work?

Lately I haven’t been experimenting with too much. I’m in a comfortable place, and most of all I’m trying to refine and do what I’ve learned over the last 10 years in the best way I can. In a way it’s a technique too, because just the working method of spending a longer time working on music and making shorter pieces instead of album-sized single tracks changes many aspects of the music process.

As far as new things, right now I’m interested in using the tatebue (or recorder) for source sounds of tape loops. It’s a Japanese flute that most school students have, so it’s very simple. However it sounds nice on tape, slowed down, layered with synthesized harp (for instance), and hall reverb.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you on a tour?

I used to play shows only with a laptop, because I wasn’t very confident using other instruments, or didn’t have the right equipment. But it never really felt right – laptops were not even representative of my music or the way I make my music, it was just a convenient way to perform. It just felt unsatisfying, and unreliable. When I moved to Japan, I made a rule for myself to abandon using laptops and to use cassette or reel-to-reel tape instead.

Over the last 4 years I’ve gone through a lot of changes with managing my gear, and in the last two years I think I’ve been able to determine what works the best, and what is most manageable to carry. I try to keep it very simple. For the reel-to-reel machine, I use the Uher Report Series. It’s the most compact and reliable 5-inch reel system that I’ve found. It doesn’t have as many features as the Nagra, but it’s lighter and more inexpensive. It’s more important to use things that have what you need.

When I use cassettes I use the Panasonic RQ series (which is still manufactured) and Walkmans. Usually I won’t have any effects except an Electro Harmonix Graphic Equalizer, and otherwise only a mixer. Though I’m using pre-recorded tapes, I try to never repeat the same music twice, and most of it hasn’t even been released before. I don’t play live very often, so it makes it more special and challenging.

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

Aside from having an open space in the comfort of our home where music can be a part of its atmosphere, the surroundings of the location makes a lot of difference. For the last 2 and a half years we lived in West Tokyo on a hillside. It was really special to be able to sit at the table or on the floor, and look out the windows and see rooftops below in the distance. If you looked west you could see Mt. Fuji, and to the east, at night Tokyo Tower would glow in the distance. Recently we moved further south to Yokohama close to the border of Tokyo, and we live across the street from a park. It’s different from where we lived last, but looking out our windows and seeing green (or now, the fall colors are appearing) is a new and calming surrounding. I’m sure it will have a new and fresh contribution to music, and I feel like it already has.

I can’t really think of any way to improve what we already have. I wouldn’t change anything. At first crows were a problem. They came and sat by the edge of the park at about 4 a.m. everyday, but after I gave my owl hooter toy to my daughter, they’ve disappeared completely. I’d recommend it if you have a crow problem.

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?

Everything is fueled by some kind of inspiration, whether it’s a memory, a recent experience, the day itself, or a mixture of them all together. It seems like it just comes naturally, and I don’t plan it too much. Usually since I’m using a limited amount of equipment with few options, the sound direction stays largely focused in the same direction, and strays from there. I don’t try to build pieces too often that have too many different types of sounds, or things that were made at different times overlapping simultaneously – usually what is together was all made around the same time, in one sitting.

It’s not improvisation, because to me improvisation seems more random, or directionless. Though it’s similar, I get the melody (or something like it) stuck in my head, and even if what comes out is different, the inspiration or feeling stays about the same. Then, there’s a lot you can do with looping, eq, some effects, or changing the speed. I’ll try things until I can get something close to what I like, and then record it.

Later I’ll go back and mix them further, edit them individually, and shape it into more of a piece, to then be something on their own, or stringed-together in more of a collage form, but they almost always have simple, straightforward beginnings.

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?

When I’m working on things, I’ll listen to it in different places and different ways, but I think that the two most important ways are with headphones at home (where it’s quiet), and with really cheap headphones on the train (where it’s noisy). At home I only listen to music from a CD/cassette stereo, and the record player, so hearing it there would wait until a test pressing or the final version arrived. Hearing it in these different situations, at home and on the train lets me hear it the way I usually listen to music.

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

I procrastinate a lot, for a lot of different things. Though sometimes, making music is usually something I do when I’m putting off doing something else. It’s a creative relief and has many purposes, but I’ve never thought of it exactly as work. The release process is a completely different thing; that’s definitely work. But regarding music, I produce far more than I can possibly release, and if I procrastinate any part of it, it’s likely the part where I take time to work on it for a long period of time, or try to get it released, which is the least-fun part of the process.

I like to keep the music fresh, and it’s much more difficult for me to make it and work on it slowly. It feels like suppression in many ways, but I think taking longer with each piece helps the end result. Spontaneity is still existent and important, but it’s only a part of the process.

What gets you inspired?

Being with my family, in our neighborhood, our city, on trips, and all the memories that come from it and everyday life.

Celer‘s new album Sky Limits is released on LP from Two Acorns and CD from Baskaru in November.

celer.jp | twoacorns.jp | baskaru.com

Can you tell us how you got involved in composing, and what was your very first piece of gear?

We are three in the band, so we all have different beginnings. All of us have played in rock bands in the late 1980’s, early 90’s. Thomas in the town of Esbjerg and Keld and Mads in Tønder. We started the classic garage way. The ususal guitars, bass, singing. Probably quite hideous, but loads of fun. Mads even played trumpet and saxophone in a band, and sang. So, there is, or was, this immense social capital associated with playing in a band at that time, which was probably why we did it. All the wrong reasons. Mads’ parents used to have a lot of musicians staying at their big house in southern Jutland. Some of them brought some synths along (probably a JX-8P or one of the old Roland Juno 60 or 106), and he sat down with a pair of headphones. When you can’t play the piano, you tend to sort of go for those pad sounds, the Brian Eno stuff where you don’t have to know chords. So that’s one story. When he was small, Keld actually started playing after he found a guitar floating in the water. He put strings on it, and started playing. Thomas chose the bass over the guitar because he thought it was easier.

More officially, Keld and Mads were in another band and the drummer sort of left, and we decided to get a sampler (AKAI S3000) – very expensive stuff at the time. Keld had a Macintosh 7300 which could do a bit of audio stuff in Studio Vision. Keld and Mads sort of started playing around with that, recording many mini discs along the way. Then Thomas, whom Mads knew from childhood, joined us with his Gibson Thunderbird bass on a demo we made back in 2000. He also got himself a small Moog Satellite – a not so impressive single oscillator Moog, but it´s sort of too bad that he sold it. But it felt natural to include the electric bass on all our tracks and the rest is history: we were a band.

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

Many different places and setups. In the late 90’s, early 00’s we were mainly working at a console (the Behringer Eurorack – we even had the software that would save the settings for volume, eq, pans, sends etc running on a cheap PC). The Macintosh was still the main piece, and we started using Emagic (now Apple) Logic a lot. Also, we had the then new Novation Supernova, the AKAI S3000, the Clavia Micromodular (used a lot for filtering and lo-fi bit crushing) a Roland SH-2000 and a lot of MIDI wires. This was in a crap studio that we built ourselves. At some point around 2003-4 we were offered to be in a fairly fancy downtown studio. We hooked up with another guy who’s a ‘real’ producer (as in ‘does all the tricky mic setups for a full band’) and thus inherited a lot of gear. We got rid of the Eurorack and a lot of stuff. Also, we had moved to laptops (the Macintosh Wall street and later the iBook) after we had a break in in the studio and had our samplers stolen.

Right now the studio is in a bit of turmoil because we are trying to break some habits with the gear. For Hildur, a lot of the stuff was made on individual laptops – sometimes running Ableton Live, sometimes Max/MSP. We often record stuff in the studio on a stationary Mac connected to a Universal Audio Apollo 16 (which is close to the best you can buy at the moment) – guitars and bass are recorded through a Tube Tech MP-1A and a CL-1B. They sound great, as they should at that price. Acoustic guitar and acoustic bass are recorded with an AKG C414 and we go to some really nice Schoeps matched pair for more ambient recording, bells, marimba, the Fender Rhodes (eg. on the track “Geopold” on Hildur which features the Schoeps mikes catching the hammers and the pedal on the Fender Rhodes) and stuff. We rarely record guitar and bass in our sound proof box. When we recorded at Hotell Hildur in Sweden, we opted to just record in the room, catching whatever ambience was there.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

Mads: Mine is currently the Roland SP-404 “table top” sampler. It’s a very limited, fairly slow sampler, but it’s nice and gritty, and you can do lots of silly stuff on it. Being limited is really nice when you are running Live on the side, as it allows you to concentrate on doing one thing well. You can hear the SP-404 all over the new album, mainly used as a tool to make things a bit less unpredictable. It plays a bit part on the track “Lares” on Hildur. Also, I recently just got the Elektron Analog 4, but I haven’t had time to go that deep with it yet.

Keld: A guitar – something that I could never imagine not having around somehow. Other than that, my ever growing modular synth.

Thomas: My Gibson Thunderbird bass

And what about the software that you use for production?

There is no doubt that Ableton Live is a great piece of software. We’ve been using it since about version 3, and it tends to become better and better. We are probably not terribly original in saying that it’s just great for improvising. We mainly use session mode. After having put some loops (often quite long ones), these then go into Logic for arrangement. It’s a question of taste – and maybe sound quality too – it seems to us that Logic sounds a bit clearer, a bit more relaxed than Live. So we currently mix in the box – often in Logic. There is something very tempting about mixing on a desk again, but arguably with the Push controller for Live and a set of faders, you can come up with some great versions.

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 is lots of stuff, but whether it would actually improve anything. As gearheads, we’re committed to wanting stuff all the time, but at the same time it’s great to squeeze out every single possibility from one piece of gear. That’s what we did with the AKAI sampler many years ago. Some of this “dying to get” gear, tends to become somewhat cliché over time. This of course is the bank talking. If money was not an issue, what about an ARP-2600 or another supersynth of some kind? The Jupiter 8 maybe? A Buchla? They are probably pretty hyped, but why not? Dying to have changes all the time. Currently we are working a lot in the synth domain, and Keld is building a good sized modular synth. Which is great, because often what you want is something that has never been built. With all the small modular producers coming out (Intellijel, Make Noise, Mutable Instruments, Pitsburgh, etc. etc.) the result is that you can literally build the synth of your dreams, not being limited to those great dinosaurs like the ARPs, Moogs, or Roland monsters. A Tube Tech SMC 2BM Multiband Mastering Opto Compressor would be neat. There’s something that we will probably never be able to afford or prioritize – it’s around $5000)

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

We often have a lot of different layered tracks when we start out mixing a song in Logic – so there are two ways to avoid clogging the new song with stuff: Delete track or EQ track. We are maybe a bit protective to begin with, so the first trick to get a track to sit in the mix is EQ (mainly a handful of different Waves plugins, sometimes the Logic EQ) – you know, remove the 200 Hz, maybe around 1000Hz (where the guitar seems to sit better), maybe cut at 50-60Hz. That sort of thing. When that doesn’t work, delete it. Also, reverb: as high quality as you can afford. It does make a difference. Lastly, noisy guitars? hum or interference in the bass pick-ups? Bad tape recording or an initially annoying Roland filter? Leave it in. Noise is good. Once we did a session for a CD and we were listening to a reference track by Rhythm & Sound, and the producer went: ‘They should lose that noise – it would be so easy to EQ it out”…and we were like, nonono, that’s the whole point of the track, you know. Warm noise.

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

We did a lot of recordings of bass and guitars for the new album. More than on the previous albums where recording live playing seemed more like a gesture. Such recordings provide the backdrop for most of the tracks on the album. Also, we have two tracks with a bit of singing. That is definitely something that we will be working more with.

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

So, we don’t do extensive tours, but our live setup is Mads running Live on his laptop, using a M-Audio trigger finger for controlling clips, sends, effects. Live has a send out to the Roland SP-404 that also runs through an old Ibanez bucket brigade delay. Very gritty. The whole thing is run over to Keld’s mixer that sends to a Line 6 delay and a TC Hall of Fame reverb. Also, Keld sends to a small box with a small selection of Eurorack modular modules like a sampler, a filter etc. Keld plays the guitar through a Pigtronix looper pedal synced to midi from Mads. Thomas plays the bass through a small preamp that also goes to Keld’s mixer. It is very much a compromise of size/portability and flexibility. The great thing is that the setup feels very loose. There are a ton of music ideas that can go wrong with the setup, and it forces us to be on our toes all the time. Being challenged in terms of communicating/improvising along the way makes for a more exciting and musical set.

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

More space in the studio, more permanent setup for recording “live” impro sessions, less patchbay – less recording booth. One big room with some movable sound ‘stations’ for each of us would be great.

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?

Often the sequence is something like this: Mads plays around with a small idea in Live at home (a snippet of a melody, a loop, a rhythm, brings it to studio, Thomas and Keld turn it in a completely different direction when they add bass and guitar. Then they tend to lie around on the stationary Mac in the studio for a while. Often, during that time, Keld does a lot of the editing and, the arrangement and Thomas comes with input to that process.

One of the things that we are trying to accomplish, sound wise, is to make the composition seem as natural as possible – i.e. it’s not supposed to sound as though you just threw some guitar and bass on top of a loop. That takes a lot of time, to strike the right balance between acoustic elements and electronics. But when the balance is there, and when there is enough stuff in the mix to catch your attention, without it seeming crowded, – then the track is good to go to mastering. Listen to “Palinode” on Hildur, there is clearly a lot of electronic stuff going on, but the guitar and bass play a natural role in that space. By the way, does it remind you a bit of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”? It was not intentional!

Another example is Four Colours where the scape, the electric guitar, the bass (with a chorus pedal), the cymbals and the drum machine through a spring reverb melt into something meaningful.

What gets you inspired?

Inspiration probably starts somehow from the instruments themselves. It is hard to explain, and it would be easier to say “nature” or “city life”, but in reality the challenge of working with complex instruments and the accidents that occur along the way are very inspiring. After having experimented with the technology – the bass, guitar, the plug-in, the synth – for a while, other sources of inspiration begin surface. Sometimes a sound reminds you of something or gets you in a certain mood. There is this constant push and pull between the technology, your experiences of nostalgia, landscape memories, and the immediate context – having other people around you in the studio and so on. But it probably starts with the instruments themselves.

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

Wow. One of the impulses when we started making music with samplers and stuff was to produce the kind of music that we liked. Because we were not completely convinced that there was that much to like when we started. Maybe, to an extent it was an artifact of not having access to that much music really. Not compared to today anyway. So, the technologies of distribution as well as the technologies of production have most certainly changed the past 10 years, and there is so much fantastic music out there for people to listen to.

In a sense there is at the same time a sort of counter reaction in the way that people are also finding a way back to “the old ways” like using modular synths and analogue recording, releasing vinyl (or cassette tapes) or at least incorporating a lot of those elements. It seems people actually make an effort in that way. The risk, of course, is that you simply re-run ideas. VHS-wave or whatever is great, but when you think about it, it can also feel a bit nostalgic on the verge of being sentimental.

Another thing that is quite frustrating when you talk about “electronic music” (which is probably why you put it in quotation marks) is that we need to qualify that term much better. More and more, we don’t consider ourselves “electronic music” artists, but simply as musicians. It is relatively banal, but the reality is that most music that you hear today can somehow be classified as “electronic music”. The term makes a lot less sense these days. When we started out, it was not unusual for people to say that they did not like “electronic music” or found the idea of making music like we did somehow offputting. The way we do things is far more accepted today, and that is certainly a good thing. But it makes it harder to classify.

Lastly, a development that is often lamented is the decline of the album as a form. Nothing to do with electronic music as such, even if single releases and quick turn around times for artists is maybe more pronounced with the bedroom producers. We, as a band, grew up with the album, and we have a hard time giving that up. Talk about nostalgic, but we just like the idea of the album as a form. What to do?

skyphone.dk

Kiasmos appeared on the scene back in 2009, on an Erased Tapes split EP with Rival Consoles. A few years later, and this somewhat elusive duo were still teasing us with only a few tracks here and there, testing our patience for all things to come. At last, the self-titled full-length is here, released on October 27th, featuring eight full pieces, showcasing unique blend of progressive minimal techno with modern classical composition. Oh, and if you recognize the faces in the above photo, it’s because Kiasmos is Janus Rasmussen and Ólafur Arnalds! 

Can you tell us how you got involved in composing together (and individually), and what was your very first piece of gear?
Ólafur: We met in 2009 when I was working as a sound engineer and I toured with Janus’ band Bloodgroup as their engineer. We discovered a common love for techno and soon started experimenting together.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
Ólafur: We work in two different studios actually, but they are in the same building. We produced the Kiasmos album in my room which is a rather large Pro Tools based control room with all the instruments in the same room – grand piano and a bunch of synths. The room is kind of built with film scoring in mind so music can be produced from start to finish with some ease.
Janus: My studio is mostly based around a lot of analog synths and drum machines. I record a lot of vocals, so the lovely U47 clone made by my friend is always in use.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Janus: Think it is the RE-201 Space Echo. We use it on everything. It’s very heavily used on the Kiasmos album, I think we tried sending almost every track trough it at some point. The grittiness and randomness of the tape is almost always a welcome addition to a stale sound. I don’t even use it for echo most times. Send your pads to the tape without any repeat two times, pan them out and listen to that weird wobbly massive pad sound.
Ólafur: Yeah I’ve used it so much for stereo effect that I got tired of always having to run everything through it twice… So now I’ve added two RE-555 and just keep them ready on a stereo send for whenever I need that!

And what about the software that you use for production?
Janus: Started using Ableton in 2006. It’s not perfect, but I feel like it’s more like an instrument than a DAW that’s trying to do everything. Most work with Kiasmos was recorded and produced in Pro Tools, which is a lovely program, it’s perfect for mixing and editing.
Ólafur: My thinking is very engineer orientated, even when composing or arranging. So Pro-Tools has always been my DAW of choice.

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?
Ólafur: I spend half of my free-time exploring eBay for rare vintage finds. But my interests change from month to month. Right now i’m really into tape delays and actually I’m trying to find this Philips EL6911 tape echo.
Janus: Really want new studio monitors, Focal SM9 look very exciting.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
Ólafur: We did a lot of re-amping via tape and other analog gear. As most of the beats were programmed in the DAW we felt like we needed to give them some life.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
Ólafur: Our live setup actually evolves largely around the visual aspect – live projections and light programming. But we use Ableton Live to run the music. Supported by a few midi controllers, MS-10, MiniBrute and KaossPads.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
Ólafur: I’ve been thinking a lot about adding a recording room to my studio but I keep backing out from that idea. I realised I really love having everything in the same room, even if it means that often you have to work with headphones on rather than the speakers. It just gives you a much more creative workflow.
Janus: Would love to work a little more on the acoustics of the room. I need to build some bass traps whenever I have the time. It’s very important to have a really clean sub range when making electronic music.

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?
Ólafur: Ideas are usually born through improvisation. But they evolve through organisation and logistics. This to me is a very interesting side of composing – the fact that it’s not all some kind of creative spark. A lot of it is simple logistics and technical knowledge.
Janus: I like to try out new things whenever I can, don’t like making the same thing over and over. So I’ll start any where from making a beat, playing the guitar or just making some obscure sound out of a sample with a thousand plugins just to spark an idea. It usually gets me somewhere.

How do you collaborate on the same piece of music together?
Ólafur: We usually create some kind of a base together, often a beat. And then we just each head onto an instrument of choice and jam over that base idea until we find some elements that we want to work with. Then we take that into the organisation part of the process.

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?
Ólafur: It’s great to take it into a space where you are used to listening to other people’s music, such as your car. In the studio I mostly listen to my own music so the perspective can be a bit strange.
Janus: Love to listen to mixes in a car with good speakers. It’s a good idea to take a break from the song, most times when you hear it again after a day or two you’ll know if it’s working or not.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times? Do you have to nudge each other to keep moving forward?
Ólafur: I believe that when I procrastinate I do it for a reason. It often comes from a need for a break or some inspiration. Then I listen to other music or read articles until my head is calm enough for me to get creative again.
Janus: Meditation works for me. Or just taking some time off to do something completely different. Go meet some friends and do some random stuff. Having a good routine is definitely the best way get things done, but sometimes you have to ditch it to get inspired again.

What gets you inspired?
Ólafur: Anything really. Books, videos, music… But mostly you just need to feel calm and have a head clear enough to create.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
Ólafur: There are a lot of interesting things happening. Both in the underground and mainstream. It’s easy to dispose mainstream music as crap but people often fail to realize that behind those songs are some of the world’s greatest songwriters and those songs reach millions of people. There must be something good going on even though it doesn’t always suit to my personal taste.
Janus: I’m really diggin’ the electronic scene right now. Everything is so open, all genres are blending into each other and becoming something new. I feel like I can’t keep up with all the exciting music that is coming out these days, it’s a luxury problem though.

erasedtapes.com/Kiasmos

You can listen to something a million times by yourself but the second you’re sharing it with someone else you hear things in a new way…

I’ve been a fan of Benjamin Wynn’s music ever since his very first release, Pushing Air, on Neo Ouija in 2003. Back then I was mesmerized by the deep bass dropping glitchy IDM beats (well, I still am), and Deru was always in my rotations along with the entire Merck catalog, which I celebrate till this day. Besides being an electronic musician, Wynn co-owns a Los Angeles based sound design company, The Track Team, where along with Jeremy Zuckerman, the two have composed music for Nickelodeon’s televisions shows, including Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, for which they won a 2012 Emmy Award. These days Wynn still produces as Deru, with his last album, 1979, released by Friends Of Friends in 2014 ending up on Headphone Commute’s Best of the Year lists.

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 started making music in high school. I played trumpet and piano in grade school but never got very passionate about them. It was when I got into hip-hop around age 13 that I became obsessed with music. When I was a freshman I bought a crappy pair of Gemini belt-drive turntables and a mixer off of a friend, which I quickly outgrew and replaced with two Technics and a Rane. Then I got an Akai MPC2000 around my junior year or something, which could be considered my first piece of “gear” I suppose. A year or two after that I got an early version of Cubase and started making music with my computer… The rest is history I guess.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
There’s never really a “final” studio setup, as it’s always changing, but I haven’t had that many different locations in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been in my current spot for around a decade now, which is in a detached room in my house. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a soundproofed studio and it makes a huge difference. I can make all kinds of noise at any hour, and conversely I can block out any street noise. I love my studio. I spend my life there basically.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Other than my computer it would be the Cwejman S1MkII analog synth. It sounds incredible. It can be precise but also fat and warm, and it always seems to fit in mixes without much effort. I’d trade my whole modular for it if I had to, because while I love the unexpected sounds that can come out of the modular, I love getting quick results more. The way the Cwejman is set up (it’s a semi-modular that’s pre-patched into a standard signal flow) it’s immediate in a way that the modular can never be, and lots of times I just want a nice analog bass or something simple.

And what about the software that you use for production?
My main sequencer is Nuendo. I find it to be really flexible and customizable. But I’m kind of a software whore. I’m always trying out new things. I use all the standard plugins, as well as Max/MSP, Reaktor, Live, Logic, Soundhack, CDP, etc.

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’d like a polyphonic analog. A poly Oberheim SEM would be amazing. Tom Oberheim has been teasing rereleasing a new version of the 4 voice, which would be insane. If he actually does it I think it’ll be hard for me to resist (though I have no room for it). The new Prophet 6 looks tempting as well, though I’d like to hear it in person. All that being said I recently bought Diva from U-He (which has been out forever btw) and damn it sounds good. It’s mitigating a my lust for an actual poly for the moment at least. 

I’d also love an acoustic MIDI piano, like a Disklavier or a retrofitted PianoDisc system. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and I will eventually. Buying a piano is a ton of research though, driving out to play them, phone calls to set things up, finding a tech, etc. It’s daunting but I’ll do it one of these days for sure.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
I view sound design and my music as two parts to the same thing. Most of what I do involves designing sounds in some way or another. I love texture. I love noise. So I often enhance or add noise and grit to sounds. I like things to breath and sound organic.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your last album?
Tapes! I bounced every song from “1979” straight onto an old Marantz tape recorder. It has a pitch warble that it imparts on everything but it sounds great if that’s what you’re going for. I also did the old studio trick of recording the songs with Dolby turned on and then turning it off during playback. It brings up the highs in a great, hyper compressed way.

I’m getting into mixes with character. Distortion, saturation, noise. The things that make a recording sound alive vs the ones that make it ‘correct’ are often not the same thing so I’m staring to take more risks with my mixes. Taking the 2-track and doing some crazy shit to it is probably not something I would’ve done 5 years ago.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
My live setup for “1979” is quite a bit different and more involved than for my beat sets. For “1979” I bring a laptop, modular synth, the Akai APC40 mkII, and an iPad running Lemur.

In my modular case I’ve got a granular sampler, digital oscillator, and an analog radio all running through a delay, looper, and reverb by Make Noise. The Erbe Verb is the last module in the chain and it’s been really incredible to use live. It’s a reverb that you can really tweak out and play in real time. I use the modular for a series of interludes in the show, which are improvised using the effects chain for dynamics and transitions.

The “1979” show is also synced up to a pretty elaborate visual setup from EFFIXX, whom I travel with for it. We project onto a large scrim which we’re behind, and a circular surface that we’re in front of. EFFIXX also controls a series of LED lights that get activated in various ways throughout the show.

My beat set is more paired down, consisting of my laptop and the APC40 mkII. I love the Akai, as I’ve gotten to know it really well. My beat set is based around playing loops and effects, and it’s great now because I rarely need to look at my screen.

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 the soundproofing is probably the most important aspect to my studio. It’s invaluable. There’s no need for me to worry about what I’m doing or my neighbors.

I do wish my studio was a bit bigger, and I’d love some windows that opened. A nice breeze in there would be great sometimes. I can definitely feel the hermit vibes from time to time, but I’m so blessed to have it in the first place so who cares.

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?
This is a broad question, as ideas can come from so many different places, but generally for me they start with experimentation around production techniques. That experimentation often leads me to figuring out where the sounds or song want to go on their own. I tend to be an intuitive composer versus a conceptual one, at least at the start of process. So while I tend to have some idea of how I want the final song to sound, the concepts for pieces often come to me while working.

I’m not the kind of person that is constantly working on tracks. I’m always tinkering with sounds, synths, and processes, but I often don’t apply them until I feel like I have enough of these ideas laying around in my head to form something bigger. And I tend to write albums, not songs if that makes sense. I start albums when I feel like I have something new to say and it’s ready to be said.

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?
Playing a song for a friend while sitting in the room next to them is huge. It instantly makes me hear it in a different way. I studied for a bit with Morton Subotnick when I was at CalArts and he told me he used to ask strangers off the street in New York to come up to his studio to listen to whatever he was working on. He’d ask them to not speak a word, to just to sit there and listen, and then leave. He said that simply having someone sit there makes you hear your music through their ears, and I find it to be totally true. You can listen to something a million times by yourself but the second you’re sharing it with someone else you hear things in a new way.

In terms of when I think something is done it’s generally an intuitive decision. It’s when I feel like I’ve improved it as much as I can, and tinkering with it anymore might make it worse. At some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and I’d be better off applying whatever I learned to the next song. For “1979” for instance, many of those songs came to me in the matter of hours, and often when I tried going back to them I’d find that I only made them worse. There’s a delicate line between finessing something and not losing the essence of whatever was there originally… The magic if you will.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Oh hell yes. I’m a professional. But it depends on what I’m doing. If I’m working on scoring or sound design projects I tend to procrastinate more than Deru projects. My recipe is: 1) Make a cappuccino, or go drive to get one. This is crucial. It’s my ritual before I do anything that I don’t particularly want to do. 2) Hit the internet like a mother f-er. Facebook, twitter, feedly, instagram. Take all of these and swirl them all around for a while. It’s really, really terrible. It’s definitely a goal to filter this stuff out more, though I will say that I do need to work up to starting something creative. It’s hard for me to just turn it on sometimes, so procrastination, no matter how bad it can feel sometimes, does serve some sort of particle role.

What gets you inspired?
Wanting to communicate ideas, feelings. Wanting to say something. Music, and it’s ability to communicate at a level below words. Photography and it’s way of modifying reality based upon the photographers eye. Movies. Art. Self-expression in general.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
It’s amazing how electronic music is cool now, it’s “relevant”. In the early 2000’s nobody had any idea what it was, and it was all considered “techno”. So I think in a way it’s nice that people don’t look at you crazy when you say you make electronic music anymore, but the term “electronic music” is so vast that it’s still hard to explain exactly the kind of music I make. I will say that I’m glad audiences are in to slower tempos now. That didn’t used to be the case so I’m happy.

deru.la

I like the notion that everything cycles, everything flows with a kind of asynchronous togetherness.

Lawrence English is an Australian composer, media artist, and a curator. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. His very own Room40 label is responsible for introducing our ears to the sounds of Tomasz Bednarczyk, Oren Ambarchi, Taylor Deupree, Christopher Willits, Ben Frost, Janek Schaefer, Chihei Hatakeyama, Pimmon, Rafael Anton Irisarri, and many, many others… English’s own work has appeared numerous times on Headphone Commute, and inevitably ends up as some of our all time favorite, prominently turning up on our Best of the Year lists, so it’s no wonder that we’re extremely excited to take a peak into this master’s studio today. Enjoy!

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 come from the generation just before audio on the desktop was really possible. The first pieces of noise and music I made were on hardware, using pedals and other bits and pieces. That said, I recognise that these were just sketches, not even really anything more than ideas. I think with audio on the desktop, using programs like ACID and then later some of the early mac applications for OS8.6 on my first laptop, that was really the first time I felt I could really chew into sound. I could make it something that felt contoured and reflecting the way I wanted to sound… partially if not fully. I was playing in bands in the 1990s, and some of these had pretty strong ties to electronics. One was an industrial band, that echoed Ministry I suppose. I worked in the studio with the singer a fair bit making a record for a couple of years and that was where I started to get into how collaboration with sound could work. I then worked with some guys who were exploring low key instrumental hip-hop, strongly influenced by folks like DJ Krush, so that opened up some other avenues to think about filters and envelopes etc.

The first piece of serious gear I bought was an Akai S-900 sampler. It was a great tool and showed me some pretty hefty limitations that eventually became the basis of what I tried to fight against in relation to how I make work. I used that sampler in conjunction with early versions of ACID and other hardware like the frostwave filter, cassettes and other pedals. It was all very adhoc and makeshift. Using whatever I could get my hands on. It took a while for all those experiments to forge into anything really meaningful. But having that time was really wonderful. A chance for error after error.

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

I’m not sure there’s ever a final iteration. I guess as your work progresses through various phases and interests that is reflected in the kinds of spaces and equipment you want to explore. I know for me now, I do a lot of recording in various studio spaces and environments, depending on what kinds of instruments I am working with. For example, Wilderness Of Mirrors used pianos and organs I recorded in various places in Australia. The next record, which I am starting to think more seriously about at present is going to be based around a lot of orchestral ideas, so I imagine that’ll require recording in a bunch of specific spaces.

The studio I have here is however pretty much perfect for me. It’s a good mix of software and hardware that I find relatively limitless in terms of what it can offer. I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to strike a balance between enough, but not too much gear. I now have what I consider to be a very satisfying mastering chain and I use it a lot for the shaping of sound too. I think it’s easy to come down with a bad case of gear lust, but really you don’t need a lot to make great work. All you really need is ideas!

Mexican Death Whistle

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.

OK, as of today, this might well be my Mexican Death Whistle. These instruments were used by the Aztecs in a variety if settings, during human sacrifice to guide the souls of the sacrificed to the underworld and also in battle. They sound like the soul screaming as it’s chased out of the mortal body. Some people say it sounds like the scream of 1000 corpses. It does! I am truly haunted by this instrument. It has an unerring quality that is quite unlike anything I have ever experienced. It somehow taps into a sense of sound as beyond that of human comprehension. This idea of the mystic or the notions of sound as supra-human in their possible meanings, is something we tend to overlook these days. I have had a number of experiences in my life, listening to sounds in environments that have haunted me in differing ways. I think to be haunted by sound is one of the truly magic parts of being alive, and being human.

If we’re talking pure gear porn, then I would have to send a love letter to my Massive Passive. That thing is like pure auditory heaven.

And what about the software that you use for production?

Most of what I do is process oriented, in that the way a sound starts its life in a composition is not generally how it ends up. I enjoy drowning elements in various processes and exhuming the remains. This kind of iteration, erasure and deconstruction is at the heart of a great many records I have made.

To this end, I find that quality sound transformation processes are vital. UAD’s plug ins are quite often mind blowing. I use them extensively and I find some of their emulations better than the hardware in some ways. The hardware perhaps has more idiosyncrasy, but UAD’s plug ins have a very strong ability to create those same sensibilities and qualities that hardware possesses. I have a great deal of time for their outstanding software and hardware!

(click to zoom in)

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?

Actually, not really. It’s funny, but I feel as of now I have pretty much everything I need to make the work I want to make. That’s not to say a Buchla Music Easel wouldn’t go astray or a few more modules for my modular synth system or a baby grand piano… maybe a shadow hills compressor…. but honestly I’m really fortunate to have a collection of equipment here I feel I can grow with.

The trick really is drilling into something, knowing what it can be pushed to do or pushed into doing. You need to push at the edges, that’s where the curious side effects and unexpected gold come from. The chance for almost intuitive or mindless play is sometime where the greatest potentials can be realised.

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

I think there’s two kinds of music, let’s think of them as schools of thought. One is the school of rhythm and melody. This school is instantly familiar and we know we can easily love what it represents. The other school is that of harmony and pulse. This school is less familiar in the accident. That said it’s no less potent. It merely requires us to apply ourselves and recognise the power of how certain ways of approaching sound and music might be executed for effect. I am a student at the school of harmony and pulse.

I like the notion that everything cycles, everything flows with a kind of asynchronous togetherness. It’s merely a matter of what perspective you take on the materials. All frequencies cycle, but can we make sense of that from every position, no. And that’s the beauty of it. We must move ourselves, we must invest our ears and bodies if the ultimate effect is to be revealed to us.

The ease of the earworm is seductive, it’s sweet, easy and instantly gratifying, but the encompassing nature of this other approach to sound and music is what I find powerful. It asks for more, it asks for agency of sender and receiver and the pay off is huge! It’s about transcendentalism and the chance to traverse into another possible you, one not always that you are aware of, but one that remains very much there, just waiting to be explored should the right situations present themselves.

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

On Wilderness Of Mirrors, I really wanted to explore a range of new terrain and that informed a lot of the processes and approaches I tried to execute. I was interested in that point at which source becomes unclear and in the case of this record where acoustic instruments took on distinctly electronic qualities. So a lot of the time, if I was recording an acoustic instrument, say a piano I wanted to present a particular perspective on that instrument. So to that end I spent a lot of time trying to frame the inputs as they come into the record. The first tone of the record is actually a piano being played by an ebow. I close miced that and also gained up it tremendously so that the input was red hot, roasted in harmonic distortion.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you go on tour?

I have a not so formal rule for touring, if you can’t carry it, don’t bring it. Especially flying in and out of Australia, any kind of excess baggage or the like is just going to completely bankrupt you. That said, I do have very specific backline and PA requirements and that’s become more and more central to reaching certain kinds of situations and phenomena in concert.

I basically run Ableton live, with a fair amount of internal processing and routing. Then on top of that I run a couple more aux channels of processing to have some more variation and possibility to augment the sound in real time. I like to think of concerts as kind of dropping people into the middle of an ocean, sometimes you’re underwater and the light at the surface seems distant and unreachable, sometimes there’s huge waves taking you up and dropping you but almost always we end up on the shore by the end of the show.

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 studio spaces are of two kinds. The first is a studio space that’s like a hotel room, utterly function, sometimes fun and interesting, but kind of ubiquitous. It serves a denomination of musicians equally. The other kind of studio is more akin to what I have built which is a relatively personal work space, an enclave, which fits very neatly into the kinds of ways I prefer to work. The space is not for everyone’s workflow, but for mine it tends to suit well.

Usually before each record I tend to redraft the layout and routing of parts of the studio. This tends to reflect the kinds of materials I am going to be working on and what processes are going to be happening as part of the record. I have a good deal of outboard gear and that often forms the backbone of a lot of the textural processes for the work. I like the idea of taking a very singular source and just eroding it through very thick processes. So I try and set up situations where that can happen in line with other elements and ideas. I find that overlaying of things in real time often creates opportunities for listening to the fundamental parts of the music in rather specific ways.

At some point in the next few years I’ll be building a new studio space, and I think that’ll be great in terms of creating more space in which I can record live instrumentation. That’s about the only real shortcoming of the current situation.

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 very much a process driven writer. I tend to frame all the work I do within a kind of contextual structure that gives the music a sense of direction, at least for me. So often it’s ideas, not necessarily musical ones, that start off the process of making work with sound. Sometimes it’s a particular sound experience or place, other times something completed unrelated to anything sonic. I tend to start with a very skeletal outline and then there’s a lot of iteration as the piece evolves. Through the process of iteration there tends to be a kind of harmonic layering that ends up quite rich really. It also means that what might start as rhythmic tends to become more textural as it evolves over time.

Generally I am working slower than I did say five years ago. I am sure that’s partly to do with the fact that I am more critical for the most part and also there’s probably a lot more commitments and projects that require attention. The label is always a very time consuming beast and my gallery practise too is constantly expanding.

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 think there’s a huge difference in what I want to achieve in the studio and on stage. The core materials might be the same, but how they are listened to by an audience and what is possible about that listening are two very different things. For me, the live sound is very much about the physicality of the sound. The notion that the bodies of all in the concert hall are occupied by that sound. That they are engulfed by these waves of vibration and there’s no way to escape that physicality of the sound. What I particularly like about this is the transition from a kind of ‘listening’ sense to a physical ‘touch’ sense as the sound activates all these parts of your body. There’s something very seductive and intimate about it, and also at times quite confrontational and overpowering. I’ve experienced both ends of that spectrum and that sensation was at the root of a lot of the interests I had for Wilderness Of Mirrors.

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

It’s funny, I now think of multi-tasking as procrastinating. So if I am not focused on making work, there’s almost always something else to be done. Production duties for the label or emails to reply to, projects or events to be developed. There’s always something that requires attention, so to make space for creating new work is actually something that’s quite a conscious process. If I had to choose a way to procrastinate either of the little people living in the house with us are great to remind you the important stuff is never on the screen in front of you.

What gets you inspired?

There’s not really one answer to this question. I like the idea of ‘reading widely’, so to speak. For Wilderness Of Mirrors, most of the inspiration came from some very serious and frustrating ideological attacks on some issues and peoples here in Australia and elsewhere. That fuelled the record’s sonics for sure. By contrast, The Peregrine which I just re-issued was entirely inspired by the book of the same name by the English author J.A. Baker. The book in a very material way formed the foundation for the record. I used his observations and writings often very directly to shape the compositions.

I think inspiration is very much down to how present you are willing to allow yourself to be at a given time. When you become embedded in something, whether it be a film, book or a landscape, the more you’re able to invest yourself the richer the potential experience you can draw on. That’s not to say incidental moments can’t be fundamentally inspirational, more just to highlight the fact that I sense inspiration is not just a passive experience. It can be very engaged and ultimately it must be engaging.

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

I think like all music, accessibility has created some genius and some pap. The challenging is for making sure we navigate through those possibilities as best we can. I have to say at times I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work that’s being produced and a great deal of it is amazing. Last year, I was really satisfied as a listener as a great many of my friends and peers created records I loved. Ben Frost, Grouper, Xiu Xiu, Blank Realm, Alessandro Cortini and so many others made killer records which I really enjoyed listening to. It’s very satisfying, for me at least, to listen to music from my friends and truly enjoy the work from multiple dimensions and perspectives. I’d be very happy if every year was as solid for listening as last year.

lawrenceenglish.com | room40.org

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 young, like 15-16 or something, I started playing bass in a grunge band and after a while one of the guitar players and I started working together on the songs, and that was my first real step towards making my own music. I didn’t actually write anything at this point, but I kept feeding in ideas and figuring out structures and stuff like that. And then that band broke up, but a while after the guitarist and I formed a new band with some of the people from the same grunge band and at this point I had started writing stuff for real. I remember being heavily influenced by the Swedish band Fireside at the time. So when I moved from Värnamo, where I grew up, to Gothenburg, I didn’t really have anyone to play with, but I still wanted to create music and so I figured I’d have to do it myself to make it work. At this point I had discovered Sigur Rós, Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor and the likes and wanted to do something in the veins of that. So I started writing songs heavily influenced by the post rock thing. It was really basic to begin with. I had bought an Epiphone SG which I basically just lined into a 4-track portable tape recorder. And I remember I used to create drum beats in a game for Playstation called Music (yes, really… ) which I then transferred to minidisc and then onto the tape recorder that I had borrowed from a friend. At this point I knew nothing about recording or mixing, but I borrowed books on recording and mixing techniques at the library and started reading up. The first actual recording piece of gear I got was a cheap condenser microphone from a manufacturer called JJLabs. At this point I had no idea how things worked, and no one had told me that a condenser microphone needed phantom power… So I thought the thing was broken, went back to the store only to have the staff basically laughing their asses off at me. It was humbling experience.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
Well basically everything from a 4-track portable tape recorder and a pair of taped-together headphones in the living room, to a Korg D16 and a couple of KRK V4 monitors in the bedroom to building a full on studio with loads of analogue vintage gear, back to the bedroom once the studio tanked and to the space where I’m at today, which is a very nice space that I share with three other guys from Gothenburg. Today I have a MacBook Pro and an AVID external sound card with Pro Tools 10. Over the years I’ve managed to get my hands on some very decent microphones which is a thing that a lot of people miss, or choose not to invest in I think. People buy one or two and then record everything with that, making everything sound the same and having to eq a lot. If you have the option of pairing sounds by recording them with different microphones, you save a lot of work when you go into mixing. Since I share my studio space I have access to a lot of nice instruments and effect pedals that I use as well. I rely heavily on analogue gear and acoustic instruments for creating what I do.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
I would have to go with my Roland Space Echo. I love it and I use it all the time. The thing is it’s so versatile. You can go from just very subtle reverb, to using it almost like a basic filter. You can create full on tape feedback, you can use it as a distortion unit or to bring warmth into almost anything you record. It’s beautiful to add to acoustic sound sources like piano or acoustic guitar, giving them almost an alien quality, or to Fender Rhodes for that matter. It’s basically all over my records. I bought it about ten years ago when a friend and I were building a studio here in Gothenburg and it’s by far the best investment I’ve ever made when it comes to music equipment.

And what about the software that you use for production?
Well basically I’ve never really been into computers, so software for most parts is unknown territory for me. And I’m not saying you have to be into computers to work with software, but to me software is totally uninteresting. Using software is just for convenience. So I use Pro Tools, but to be honest I’ve never bothered learning it thoroughly, which would probably be a good idea. But I don’t really feel the need to do so since I don’t use any software synthesizers or anything like that and I never use MIDI. To me it’s basically a glorified tape recorder that enables me to edit more easily than I could with a regular tape recorder. And I’m not trying to come across as elitist or like some analogue fascist here, it’s just I never got into these things and I don’t really like working in a software environment. But I know the basics of Pro Tools and I know how to get what I want out of it, so I don’t see the point in digging deeper. I know I may come off as sounding a bit lazy here, and I’m sure the my palette would benefit from knowing more and I’m sure I could work more efficiently if I bothered learning more about the program, but the thing is I’d rather focus my energy on the actual creation of music, not the means to do so.

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’ve always been in environments where you make do with what you got and you work with that, so I don’t really have anything specific that I dream about. I would like to get an Arp Solina String Ensemble and a Yamaha CP-70 or something similar, and I would like to get some more and better pre-amps and microphones, but all of that are things that I could get if I just save up some money. Like I said, I go with what I have and use the limitations of that to be more creative. Or maybe I’m just saying that as an excuse to not bring more shit into the studio.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
I work a lot with tiny, almost inaudible details. Small sounds that you will actually really never hear. But if I were to take them out, you’d sense something was missing. So it’s more of a psycho acoustics kind of thing, although of course it’s not very scientific. But I would say that these are sounds that are more felt than heard, if that makes any sense at all. Even in seemingly very sparse arrangements there are often these sounds in the background. It could for instance be a piano take that I copy and then process this copied track with whatever it “needs” to be processed with and then I sort of hide it in the mix. That way you can add frequencies that aren’t there to start with that can give the arrangement another nuance. It’s as if it’s sounding like it should, but then there’s just something slightly skewed, something you can’t put you finger on in the sound. Almost like an audio illusion. I of course use the same technique to just make mixes feel and sound more massive and full-bodied as well. The thing is you just have to know the frequencies you’re dealing with to find a balance, then it’s just the imagination that sets the limits.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your last album?
Depending on what you count as my last album I would probably say yes. And no. The thing is I always try to find new approaches to creating music. Sometimes I just wanna dig into acoustic sounds all the way, like I basically did with Fall In to Fire and sometimes I just want to play around with synths and percussion as I’m doing at the moment. For Fall In to Fire I bought and used a lot of old cassette players, both stationary and walkmans. I would then record and arrange these massive song structures in my computer, then transfer them to a slightly de-magnetized and heavily over dubbed cassette tape and then run that through a walkman, while manipulating the speed by basically physically abusing the poor thing. And then record that onto my computer again and keep repeating this until I got the sound that I was looking for. It was a very time consuming process, but this way I could create loads of layers that were both out of tune and out of sync with each other, creating a very fragmented sound world.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
It’s actually very basic. I use an electric guitar, a Boss DD7 delay, a Boss reverb and my Korg D16 for its built in effects and the amazing sound of its digital distortion. I also have a Boss loop pedal and sometimes I have a Korg Monotribe just to add some sounds or filter. Sometimes I have some sampled sounds or field recordings on cassette player or my iPod and I also generally bring an E-bow as well. And that’s basically it. I’ve found that having a quite limited set-up is what works best for me. These are all items I know very well so I know how to use them and I know how to improvise with them, both in terms of actually playing, bur also if anything should fuck up during the set, which of course happens now and then. That said, I don’t really play that much live anymore. It’s complicated I guess, and I like it when I do it, but it’s also a major mental effort on me to do it, and I’m not sure if it’s always worth it to be honest. I guess I’m more of a studio person.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
I would say the access to a lot of different instruments. We have a pump organ, a fender Rhodes, a piano, accordion, banjo, violin, mandolin, lap-steel, acoustic and electric guitars, electric basses, amps, loads of effect pedals, various synths and organs, zither, drums and so on. There are plenty of stuff to play around with. But what I really would like to improve are the acoustics for listening, because honestly what we got now is very far from optimal. Finding the sweet spot is very hard and I have to constantly reference listen in headphones and at home to know where I’m going with a mix. What I would like to do is just get someone in to help me out with it, but that costs a lot of money so at some point I will have to deal with it myself and just fucking do it. But I keep procrastinating unfortunately…

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?
My music almost always starts with a snapshot in my mind, like a brief, flashing image of something. For The Black Sun Transmissions it started out with an image of people dressed in black standing on a shore, for Fall Into Fire it started with an image of someone lying on his back in a marsh landscape, surrounded by heather and pine trees, staring into the sky. Once I get these snapshots, they grow in me over time, evolving into sort of narratives. And once I have these narratives, I know what sounds to create and what different parts I have to make to tell the story. And that’s the hard part. I’ve discarded so many ideas because they weren’t aiding the story or going in line with what I wanted to tell. It’s also a very time consuming approach because I know what I want, I just don’t know where to get there. Fall Into Fire was created over the course of a year, which is really fast for me, but then I also spent so many hours in the studio, just to get away from everything. But really, most of my records take somewhere between 2-3 years to make. And once they finally do see the light of day, I really never listen to them again.

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?
Basically, I never play my music to people. I’ve done it on a few rare occasions with people I trust, but I really never let anyone into the process when I create my solo albums. Once I get the master, I listen to that in a few different systems, in my studio and on various headphones. But once the music has been sent to the printers, I basically never go back to it. And I hate hearing it on the rare occasions people play it when I’m around. It’s hard to explain, but to me the music I make is kind of a private thing, and I don’t want to have to talk about it or you know, represent it, if that makes any sense at all. I don’t mind doing interviews or talking to people who run blogs or whatever, but when I’m confronted with the music in real life I just wanna disappear.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
Oh yeah, all the time. The good thing about my studio though is that it’s so littered with different instruments and equipment that there is actually no room for a sofa there and there is no space for hanging around doing nothing. So basically you’re forced to work when you’re there, which I really like. It’s sort of like going to the office actually. So when I’m in the studio I work very focused, often pulling long hours if I have the time to do so. But what I do is putting off actually going there. The studio is only a 15-minute walk from my apartment, but during the weekdays I constantly try to convince myself I have more important things to do. Which is of course sometimes true, and sometimes not. But I also think it’s good to not be working too much with music either. You need to get other input in order to get new ideas, and things need to mature in their own way as well, and you can’t really stress that process, at least I can’t. And I don’t really want to either. I also have a tendency of over doing it, becoming slightly manic and obsessive about the whole thing. That’s one of the reasons I’ve almost entirely stopped taking my computer home to sit and edit things. I just can’t stop and then I go to bed too late and then I’m totally wrecked the whole next day. So yeah, I procrastinate. But I do it on purpose. More or less.

What gets you inspired?
Books. I read a lot and I find that reading books open up windows in my mind, into my imagination. When reading you have to populate your own universe, and therefore you are sort of the co-creator of the book. It’s populated by both imagination and your memories and a mixture between the two. It’s populated by your grandma’s house, but with the garden of your uncle’s. It’s people smoking your mother’s brand of cigarettes and wearing the glasses your dad used to have when you were a kid. It’s the house you used to live in when you grew up, paired with the apartment you used to have paired with that house you walk past every day on your way to work. It’s a fragmented world existing outside of time and place and it’s all your creation. The impossible becomes possible. Often when reading a book, a sentence can spark a snapshot that sometimes evolve into an album. There are few things I like more that diving head first into a book and then just stay there, for as long as I like.

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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?
Technically it would have been the piano – I was started on lessons around the age of 5 and sometime after that I realized that anything sounds good if you play it all on black keys… So my first original ‘compositions’ were in that mode… Black keys and sustain pedal. We sold our piano when I was a teenager, because by then I was more focused on drums and guitar, but over the past several years I’ve wished to have a piano at home, which is problematic when you’re an apartment dweller…

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I’ve always kept it pretty spartan; as a teenager I recorded on a Tascam Porta02 4-track with a crappy Zoom 505 effects pedal and RadioShack microphone… I played an off-brand steel-string acoustic and an off-brand Gibson-style electric, and bashed on my drums just to make a sound. Nowadays I use a simple setup of 4 pedals including a loop station, as well as a Vox AC15 amp and a bunch of pretty decent Fender guitars, all recorded to tape and arranged in GarageBand because it makes more sense to me than most software I’ve encountered otherwise.

So, would you say that is your favorite piece of software?
I stick with GarageBand because it does everything I require and intuitively, it makes total sense to me. Even though it has its limitations in terms of number of tracks in a file, etc., I have found ways around that when my needs are more complex. I greatly prefer simplicity and encourage artifacts/errors in the process of building a track.

Tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
Probably my Fender CG-7 classical guitar, which I found in the basement of my apartment building in Ann Arbor, around 2005. I made sure it didn’t belong to any of the other tenants, and it ended up being my most-played guitar after that. It’s got such a nice warmth about it, and size-wise it fits me perfectly. I’ve written and recorded 3 of my albums for Kranky primarily on that one.

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 don’t do much in the way of research like gear-heads might, so there’s nothing I’m really dying for… In general the way it goes for me is that, in the process of touring or meeting other musicians, I’ll encounter an instrument or piece of gear that I see in action and think, “Dang, that would be super useful” which is when I consider making it a part of my setup. That was what happened with my harmonium, for example.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
Much of the overall sound comes from the use of microcassette tapes and reel-to-reel tape, that round-edged warmth and softness… But I try not to rely on that completely, so when arranging things on the computer through GarageBand I try to incorporate as many complementary textures as possible, creating a kind of weaving of hi- and lo-fi that makes sense to me, since the world around us exists in both of those modes concurrently anyway.

Any particular new techniques that you tried out for your new album?
For ‘Sonnet’ I pretty much abandoned all the digital effects that I would normally add in with GarageBand, so all the distortions/effects/delays are from a few simple guitar pedals… Because of this I also kind of forced myself to find creative solutions to get the sounds I wanted, so it was probably the most experimental recording phase I’ve had in quite a while. One day, for example, I took every potentially useful thing from the kitchen that I could find, and made as many different sounds as I could with them by themselves as well as with guitars, kalimba, tapes, and so forth. I also became pretty fearless with my physical treatment of tapes, and ended up ruining a lot of cassettes and reels in the process, but it was a lot of fun.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
Since most of my output to date has involved vocals and guitar, that’s what I typically base my live show on, unless someone specifically requests an instrumental thing… So I usually strip things way down to guitar, voice, loop pedal and delay, often with a little bit of tape or vocal manipulation as an accent. Consequently I’ve been able to tour in Europe by train with just a guitar case and backpack, which is quite nice and low-pressure.

What is the most important environmental aspect of your current workspace and what would be a particular element that you would improve on?
We moved into a much bigger flat than our previous one at the end of last year, so the biggest asset has just been the extra space… It’s situated in our living room so I’m surrounded by all the beautiful things that my wife and I (but mostly her) have collected over the years. But again, just being able to breathe is a big deal, and like if I get a good loop going on the amplifier I can walk to the other end of the apartment or into the other room and zone out on it, or record it through the wall, that kind of thing. My needs are fairly few, so I can’t think of anything greater to which I aspire or that I feel I ‘need’ right 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?
This happens in a lot of different ways for me – if it’s a guitar-and-voice song, those two things always come first and the piece is built up in the process of recording and toying around with melodies and ideas and percussion ideas. With instrumental work it usually starts with a chord or two and then an extended improvisation around that. Most pieces for ‘Sonnet’ were 90% recorded in one day, but the other 10% and all the finishing touches took weeks of careful consideration after that.

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’m not a sound professional in the same way as some of my friends like Rafael Irisarri, so I tend to trust people like him to help me tweak errant frequencies or phase issues, that kind of thing. I usually listen on a few different pairs of headphones/earbuds as well as my home stereo and a car system or two, and am always surprised at the differences. But I’m either lazy or just easygoing, because I usually just find myself saying, “Yeah that’s fine, sure.”

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I don’t set deadlines for myself generally, so I just wait for inspiration to wash over and then get to work at those times. If I have a commission for which I can’t find the time or that I procrastinate on, it’s almost always just a consequence of feeling inspired to do something else, or other aspects of life getting in the way. We no longer own a TV and I’m not generally easily distracted, so I do my best to be productively engaged for as much of the time as possible, whatever it is that I’m doing.

What gets you inspired?
There’s a major range, but most of my ideas seem to appear on long walks or bike rides, like, getting in the rhythm of those two activities just teases little melodies or patterns out of my brain. I almost always keep a tape recorder with me because of the frequency with which those kinds of things happen, and how easily they disappear if not documented.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
This is another case where my consumption is based largely on contingency, and also the recommendations of friends… I know there’s a horrible mainstream of dead-behind-the-eyes trancy techno out there that seems to be more popular than ever, but there’s no need to touch on that, because there’s also a huge movement of gorgeous instrumental work to be heard, and I have a hard time keeping up when I’m also focused on my own stuff. Labels like Students of Decay and Holodeck are doing amazing things and I try to follow them as best I can… For all the easy-to-find trash out there, there’s a whole world of thoughtful, beautiful work to be discovered, which I think is wonderful.

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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 started composing music in the age of 12. The first piece that I wrote was called ‘Für Emmi’ and it was dedicated to my grandmother Emmi. It was a birthday present for her and I remember I played it on her birthday party as a gift. I already felt there the urge of creating music in all sorts of forms. I was missing physically something when I was unable to work on music. My first piece of gear was a Moog Source Synthesizer which I got as for my religious confirmation.

How many different studio iterations have you gone through, and what does your final setup look like right now?
I think the biggest once are maybe in total 5… I always tried to adjust to rooms that were available and as I hate working without daylight I always was choosing the rooms after their beauty instead of their acoustical qualities. Which has some problems in terms of frequencies but somehow you can work with the problems. I have today a mix of synthesizers, a piano and a harmonium and I work with all those instruments and I record on the computer. When I need a bigger set up I rent a room or I go to the rooms that already sound great.

Obviously, besides piano, tell us about your favorite piece of hardware.
My favorite piece is the Moog Sub37 and the Prophet 12. They are awesome synthesizers.

And what about the software that you use for production?
I work with logic x but at the same time I can work with all the other DAW as well. I have them all on my computer just not to get rusty with one system.

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 would love to have a big modular synthesizer one day.

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
All the sounds that I am recording are created 99% by the prepared piano. Sometimes I am using a sinus bass sound to get the very low frequencies. I record every piano layer with 6 microphones that are different in distance and I can shape the sound of each take with eq and reverb. I have the impression that my way of recording creates a desensitize that sounds like a full band.

Tell us about some of the gadgets used in preparing the piano?
I am using a lot of wooden sticks and clarinet reeds. I am creating a lot of the textural noise with vibrators on the tuning nails. I am using a lot of art erasers for the plugged sounds.

What are some of the new techniques that you tried out for your soundtrack for The Boy?
For The Boy I worked with my live setup and I created the soundscapes while I was watching the movie. I used a lot of mallets and violin bows on the strings. While I created the sounds I already worked with my left hand on the knobs of the sub-mixer and added effects to the real sound. Later when I recorded a lot of material I invited Daniel Brandl, a great cellist and he added some of the cello sounds. I also recorded 3 hours with the MDR Symphonic Radio Orchestra. I later chopped the recordings in pieces and worked with them like I would use samples.

What does your live setup look like, and what do you bring with you when you travel for an extensive tour?
I bring in all my mics for the piano which are 2 schoeps mk4 ,one neumann km187, I have a Helpinstill Pickup, 2 c-ducers, and 4 countryman for close up micing. I have an effectboard with different delays, like the eventide time factor, eventide space and the Boss RE20 and the rc50 looper by 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 love to work in spaces that are in the middle of a living area and the room I work in needs high ceilings and daylight. The main problem in the space is because it is a normal rectangle room, that it has some standing bass waves that I had to get rid off by positioning the monitors in a specific way.

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 depends on what I am working on… I am a big fan of starting spontaneous… so in a way I always record something when I have the chance just to capture the mood I am in. Sometimes this is a start of a new piece. When I write for bigger ensembles I use my laptop and I love writing on airplanes as they absurdly enough sometimes the space where no body can reach you.

How was your usual approach to composing music different from that when working on a film score?
Of course film scores are always different then my records because I am dealing with already existing content… in comparison to other collaborations a lot the time the film is already shot. I prefer to write some music to the script so that the editor can already work with my music as this helps the strength of the mood I think.

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?
It is sometimes very impressive as the sound in my studio feels rather intimate and in a big multiplex cinema you feel the power of sound in a different way. I loved actually always doing the final mix in a cinema kind of room. I know in Munich we mixed once a film in this kind of room and it straight away feels like you are mixing for a certain purpose. I am big fan of this.

Do you ever procrastinate? If so, what do you usually find yourself doing during those times?
I like actually sometimes the pressure of urgency but at the same time I hate it. But I think there are always different forms existing as I think that it is very important not to get too focused on urgencies as this can make you stop being careful and attached. I often take breaks, no matter how urgent things are just to get a relaxed feeling towards them and mostly that helps to work much faster.

What gets you inspired?
Traveling and nature, my family, good conversations, working as a continuous process of finding ideas.

And finally, what are your thoughts on the state of “electronic music” today?
I like the idea that electronic music is stretching more and more into other areas and that are working with orchestras and that electronic musicians are collaborating with instrumentalist. I think that there is a great diversity and you have in electronic music the freedom to create without any restrictions, which I feel extremely liberating. Of course there are trends and music that is hip but in general I am not a believer in hipster culture as I have seen things come and go and what stays and lasts are the things that have content and that are important. That is sadly enough not always congruent with commercial success… mostly the other way around… a lot of the music that is very breathtaking is not commercial successful and maybe so well-known. Which on the other side means that you can still discover great unknown music. The electronic music field is one of the big areas where you find wonderful discoveries.

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