Part 1

Name: Ben Broughton aka NIQH
Nationality: British
Occupation: Producer, composer
Current release: NIQH's Familiar Rift EP, mastered by Hypna, is out via Plasma Sources.

[Read our Hypna interview]

Recommendations: The animated series Aeon Flux and the book series Remembrance of Earth’s Past, by Cixin Liu.
Aeon Flux I’ve been in love with forever - the lithe movements of the protagonist and insanely detailed worlds illustrated in that style of animation really speak to me.
Remembrance of Earth’s Past is an insane trilogy of sci-fi I’ve only just got round to reading, but when I started I couldn’t put it down. I think I got through 400 pages on average a day with those books - the first feels like one massive conspiracy you are uncovering, whilst the second two have some of the most thorough world-building and gut-wrenching twists I’ve ever encountered in a series. They’re actually turning it into a Netflix show soon …

If you enjoyed this NIQH interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram, and Soundcloud.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Eyes open! But it doesn’t mean I don’t see stuff. I tend to see landscapes or scenes in my mind’s eye - this is the main response elicited in my body when I listen.

The scenes vary wildly but generally these are alien and surreal in nature. Kind of like a motif, there are some recurring images which always come back - my favourite being a big purple hi-tech jungle where everything glows, some of the trees levitate and parts of the branches are almost cross-sectioned and replaced with these solid slabs of purple neon.

I often describe my taste as music I can climb inside - certain musics, regardless of genre, resonate with this ideal for me and help pull me inside a more vivid version of these spaces. If a piece elicits the purple jungle in my mind’s eye then I’m doubtless going to love it. I see the purple jungle when I listen to 'Souvenir' by Mr. YT, ‘And We Go Gentle’ by Hiatus Kaiyote and ’Mist’ by Clever Austin, as a few examples.



What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

I had no clue what I was doing when I started out so very much trial and error. I remember picking up a copy of DJMAG when I was about 14 and just being totally obsessed with looking at the pictures of all the different gear you could get. I was hooked on imagining what you could do with all that stuff.

But yeah I was totally clueless back then as I didn’t have any peers at the time who were making / interested in electronic music. I remember buying Traktor and saying to myself “where is the page where you actually make music rather than mix it together?”, not realising these were two totally different types of software.
 
In those really early days, I used Traktor to make music by looping drum sections I liked from particular tunes and then using hot cues and literally all the DJ effects to trigger and manipulate cool textures and stuff from other tracks, blending it all together to create these weirdly hypnotic, but ultimately quite shit, songs. But yeah I still learned a lot and gained a love for discovering music, if only so I could collide the new material I found together in Traktor to create new reworks.

In answer to the second part of your question, experience rules everything for me. I could never ‘study’ how to be an artist. It is an embodied thing, manifested in living and experiencing the world around me and shaping that which surrounds me through my own personal prism. It is an inherently personal and subjective thing, and art manifests in so many different forms. I guess living an embodied ‘artistic life’ is, if you’re doing it every day, a form of self-teaching and training, but I definitely don’t think I can train / learn in the sense that someone ‘tells’ you how to be an artist.

Don’t get me wrong I think art school and stuff gave me the tools to think critically and can equip you with the ‘vocabulary’ to understand and appreciate art on certain levels. But it’s dependent on so many things such as the teacher and the underlying ideology of the school.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

Interesting - I sort of felt mine came a wee bit later in life! I mean my taste when I was 13-15 wasn’t anything to write home about. I loved Justin Timberlake and whatever else was on BBC Radio 1. I had a metal phase from 14-15 but didn’t last long. But even then I saw very vivid scenes in my mind - like for some reason I’d imagine entering Coruscant when I listened to the intro of Guns n Roses ‘Welcome to The Jungle’. So for me at that age, music still meant internal world building and escape.



When I discovered soundcloud around 16 my taste began to change - I quickly fell in love with electro house through podcasts and mixes I found online. From early on, I’ve always liked balls-to-the-wall abrasive stuff, like really aggressive late 2000s fidget and electro, and that’s never changed for me. I think I resonated with this music because it felt so visual and visceral to me … it painted really vivid sci-fi scenes in my mind.

The key thing that changed is that I understand that genres (of anything!) are at their best in their right environment. Before going out to clubs and stuff, I thought dubstep was boring, but once I got the chance to hear it on a properly good club sound system, I felt to myself “ah! This makes sense now.”. I was ignorant of how things interacted with a club environment - soundsystems especially. So yeah this was a big change, getting into clubs, and understanding how club music strategically responds and is optimised to these social situations.

I also think the more I make music or am involved in music, the more I appreciate chaos and discord in music, because I feel I have developed the internal vocabulary (and patience!) to help me appreciate what I’m listening to.

Like what I love about jazz is the constant teetering balance between chaos, order, discordance and compatibility ... the harmonious sections where the chaos interlocks and forms a brief cloud of beauty is all the more lovely because we had to struggle to get there. So yeah this is another key change.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Right now the key underlying idea is to create music to climb inside. The desire is to create hyper-immersive environments which are evocative of the imagined landscapes I talked about in question 1.

I really enjoy creating individual EPs, each of which represent a gestalt-like shapeshifting environment. I enjoy doing this mainly through heavy-duty abstraction of random recorded experiences, a sort of destabilisation and re-stringing.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

It’s very rare that I show up to make music knowing what I want to do. I just throw sounds at the screen until something sticks, generally, and once it does I find myself guided by impulse.

To be honest, the more I think about what I’m doing while creating, the slower and more difficult progression becomes. It’s why I like writing music first thing in the morning, cos my mind isn’t properly switched on, so it feels like the music generated becomes more unconscious, governed by instinct - I went through a period of waking up around 4:30AM and then working through till breakfast.

So with this in mind, I can’t say I came up with the musical idea, because that specific musical configuration was a happy byproduct of experimentation.

Also the music I make doesn’t really consistently follow rules or palettes (amen break in jungle, for example) set out by genres, so in many ways when I’m making a new piece (especially when I’m starting an EP), I feel like I’m making music for the first time, like everything I make has to be discovered through trial and error because there is no basis or frame of reference to build those ideas from.

My musical voice is also shaped by the tools I use. Like, you could be standing in two different caves, shouting something, the same thing in each cave - the intention behind the message is the same, there are some properties of what is heard which will sound the same, due to the fact you’re in a cave, rather than a field. But despite both being caves, each is still shaped differently and will affect the intention of the message in subtle, but still distinct, ways.

The same thing happens with software - I found making music felt ‘different’ when I transitioned from Logic to Ableton for example. So in this way, I feel the ideas that I discover are as shaped and informed by the equipment I use as much as my own faculties. It’s a two way dialogue between myself and my tools, where I become part of the tools and they become part of me.

My ideas don’t exist in a hermetically-sealed vacuum, they only exist through interaction.