Part 2

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

I work with a DAW and use a lot of presets. I’m not a purist, inside the DAW I choose sounds with a pop-like efficiency, and then play a lot with midi scores and plugins to pervert them, or not. I don’t really write, I copy paste and then arrange and rearrange. Every sound I use comes from software, field recording, movies and midi scores I collect here and there. In the hierarchy of sounds, you might call them cheap sounds.

The lyrics are collages as well, made of pieces of texts from various sources. I keep vocal notes and a notebook where I record and write down every phrase, word, and slogan I encounter that appeal to me, from essays, the news, Instagram, TV series, self-help books, etc. but also words that get stuck in my head for some reason. Phrases that haunt me, movie dialogues I keep coming back to. All these words placed next to each other, taken out of context, eventually become lyrics. Sometimes I add elements myself and sometimes I don’t. For example, in the track Never Easy from my album Mind is Mud, freshly released on Cortizona, there is a phrase from Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, a slogan from a cosmetics store window in Brussels, elements from the Wikipedia page of the word Autotomy, and some pieces of a poem I wrote.


How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I was talking about portability and urgency earlier, it’s an important aspect of my work mostly because of the relative precarity I’ve been living in for a long time. The feeling that everything is hanging by a thread is present in my life as it is in my music. I can’t afford to linger by the roadside, I have to take the shortest route to get there. It’s important that I choose my words carefully and get right to the point. It’s a perilous but exciting adventure, that I hope results in a direct, unapologetic music in which fragility and flaws remain present and well alive.

For me, music is one of the not so many things that brings some kind of meaning to human life, being a place where communities are created outside work, religion and family, where our own mortality is what brings us together. In a market-driven economy, societies desperately need spaces where people can meet beyond the reach of profiling algorithms, with or without verbal communication. Trying to understand music means thinking about community and politics. This doesn’t answer the question at all, does it?


Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango) by Grace Jones.


If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

In his infamous 1997 essay Abducted by Audio, Kodwo Eshun writes: 'After drum 'n' bass has retroactively switched us back on to the presence of rhythm, we know that the future will not only be just rhythmic, it'll be hyper-rhythmic. So, in this sense when cyber-people keep talking about, "What's the fate of the body?", when they keep on moaning, "the body's going to wither away, the mind-body problem, it's so depressing," as far as I'm concerned rhythmic psychedelia is the opposite. The body's being triggered, the body's being switched on. (…) And this seems to be the task of the future: to understand rhythmic intelligences and hyper-rhythmic music as something that's happening to us we can't yet understand, that we can only begin to grasp’.

We are in the future he was talking about, and the rhythmic psychedelia has indeed bloomed. Artists all around the globe are revisiting, deconstructing the codes and hierarchies that have governed electronic musics. It’s exciting and it feels like we’re only beginning to grasp the scale of the phenomenon, the scope of the possibilities. I’d like to see and hear more genre-fucker hybrid music in the future and more fluidity between scenes. In experimental music and club music in particular. I hate niches, I know they’re kind of inevitable and sometimes useful but to me the very idea of niche is literally anti-music.