Part 2

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Ableton Live has been at the heart of my process throughout the years and I’ve developed alongside it throughout its lifespan and growth. That’s been a constant throughout all the permutations of my work and is very central to how I think about writing music. I’ve found Live, along with Max, to do pretty much anything and everything I can imagine.

I’ve always been pretty digitally focused, with Ableton as the core of things coupled with controllers I feel intuitive with. Right now that is a Push 2 and Roli Seaboard, I’m working to get more into the MPE side of things as much as possible.

I’ve always used a couple key hardware synths for certain sound design tasks, which in the past have been an Access Virus B, Mini Moog Sub Phatty, Korg Poly-Six, etc. Currently I’m using a Nord Lead 2 and a Modal Electronics Skulpt for some outboard stuff, usually bass and synthesized pluck sounds. I’m always trying to discover new lead melody sounds, plucks, keys and find that layering acoustic and synthesized elements together to get the sounds I’m after.

I’ve long used a variety of plugins such as NI Reaktor, Kontakt, Omnisphere, and recently have been really enjoying Expressive E’s Imagine for physical modeling, Arturia V Collection and Pigments 3, and NI Straylight granular synth.

I’m increasingly into granular synthesis and use it a lot for melodic and atmospheric sound design. I love using Max devices such as K-Devices, Midivolve, Euclidean Pro, etc - for interesting polyrhythmic mapping capabilities, etc.

I try to not get so caught up in the “how” that I lose sight of the “what”, meaning at the end of the day, as much as I love gear and the intricacies of various instruments and tools, what I care about most is songwriting and composition. I care about getting musical ideas translated into tangible reality.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Wake up, drink coffee with my partner and often have some quiet time of reflection, pondering the deep existential questions … or not! Then ideally I go for a run, get some exercise outside in a beautiful nature setting, shower, check emails and handle logistics/communications and essentially clear my day for creative work.

Then, music projects all day until evening, eat dinner, get back to work for another few hours, then usually relax with my partner and usually watch a film. This isn’t always totally predictable, but I’m pretty happy with a day like this.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that’s particularly dear to you, please?

For the track “Heart Matters” from my recent album, I started the way I almost always do: create a mesmerizing beat and emotionally rich chord progression. I always focus on getting the chords and inversions potent and expressive from the beginning, because everything else in the track will work from that.

From there, I created an ostinato, a sort of repeating dronal riff that gives a constant motion and tonal flow to the track, adding additional contrast to the chord progression. Then, I experimented with some granular time stretching and synthesis with some vocal recordings and derived the vocal parts that gave the track an added layer of harmony and interest. Next, I created a bassline that supported and harmonized with those layers.

I then laid out a basic arrangement in the form of scenes in Session View, to be able to audition parts and sections as they developed, and started adding additional string parts to supplement the original chord progression. Next, I started experimenting with intervals and inversions to create some variations that would bring different harmonies in for different sections of the track, to be able to play with the ebb and flow of energy.

I then created a B theme by creating an alternate, but complimentary, chord progression, and started adding new layers of harmony to support that variation. I started playing the different scenes to audition the contrast between these parts, creating textural percussion layers and variations to give the drums some more interest and energy shifts.

This was the basic approach to get the primary themes of the track down. From there, the track went into many, many hours of refinement as all the others do (which is its own long story).

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

There have been some wonderful exceptions, but making music has been a solitary activity for me throughout the majority of my creative life. This originally came from a necessity, but quickly turned into a default mode because it’s just what I knew and was the easiest approach. There was a wonderful era where I collaborated consistently with my music partner in my old project Aligning Minds, and we would go into multi-hour epic excursions of improvisation collaborative wormholes. It was truly special.

I have collaborated with many different artists over the years, instrumentalists, vocalists, rappers, spoken word artists, etc - but usually in the end, I still enter the “grand architect” mode and determine the final result as a producer. It can be both a blessing and a curse in some ways, as producers end up spending a lot of time in solitude, but it's amazing to have creative control over the final form and it's easy to get used to that.

I would welcome some new collaborative possibilities, and hope to return to that at some point in the near future. I very much prefer to be in the room with collaborative forces versus working online.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

My work is an expression of my interpretation of my experience of the world … Which is quite the derivative experience in the grand scheme of things. I think the best we can do as artists is to create something that many people can relate to universally, from within their own unique experience of the world.

I like to think of music as a tinted/stained glass window through which to experience life and the world, therefore seeing and feeling it in a different light and perspective. I think it’s incredibly important and useful to be able to process what’s around us. Music also sometimes, to me, is a respite from the world. A way to travel to an alternate one. There are so many helpful uses for it.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Music, that of others and my own work, has assisted me through the most profound and challenging moments in my life, consistently.

An example is that when I was 17, I was in a near fatal car accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. It took me around 13 months to fortunately regain the use of my legs and start walking again. The album by Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness truly got me through that period on an almost hourly basis, the immense pain of a partially severed spinal cord, and the emotional upheaval, was eased and transmuted through that music, for me.

As far as my own work, that experience was a very powerful catalyst and caused a major change in my life perspective, which absolutely reflected in the music I resonated with and wanted to create. It was a totally life-affirming event, and emphasized the fact that I wanted to remain living and creating on this planet, and that music could be used to much more positive ends, to uplift and expand consciousness. There are many dramatic examples of this in my life experience … too many to list here.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

Music is delivered and composed of a combination of various sciences to even arrive at our ears, but I think the effect it has on our emotional being and psyche is something we don’t fully understand yet. Therefore, it seems like magic, and I think magic can be summarized as a phenomenon that we don’t yet have the ability to analyze, understand and predict.

I think the science of how to make it is extremely dialed in and established, yet the effect it has on us, and why, is still rather mysterious.

I personally prefer music to feel like a mystery to be explored ... I feel intuitively drawn to that. Beyond that, I’m just as on the edge of my seat of wonder and bewilderment as the next music fanatic.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee?

I think most things in life can be a creative act if you approach them with that intention, the intention to express oneself through a medium. All mediums operate on some level of sensory perception, but some seem more conducive to a bandwidth of human expression than others. Sound happens to be an extremely versatile and effective one.

Taste is also a very effective one, so do I think it’s possible to express oneself through a cup of coffee? Definitely. But it might take some unconventional approaches to expand on the medium to make it more expressive, so as to convey a deeper range of unique experience. It could end up being a pretty weird cup of coffee!

I think that out of all of the senses we have available to us, sound/music is an extremely effective medium to convey unique experiences that inspire, inform and communicate. I also think everyone is capable of being an artist in some capacity, in the aspect that every person has the need and ability to create. It can take any of a multitude of forms, really - we’re just all very conditioned to look toward certain mediums more than others, based on our past experiences and sensitivities.

What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t in more mundane tasks?

I feel able to express distinct emotional states through music that I would never be able to communicate in any other medium. For instance, I could summarize an emotional state to the best of my ability in spoken language, but it would mostly only point to the concept of the emotional experience, not transmit the actual emotional experience.

I think as far as all mediums, again, sound/music is the most effective (that I’ve experienced so far) at instantly, in real time, conveying emotions to others, experientially … no other medium can really compete with that.

Some people are more visual creatures, and derive profound emotional states from those types of experiences, so I think that a lot of it depends on a person’s neural pathways and their brain’s proclivity to certain types of sensory stimulation. It just so happens that most human beings are very responsive to sound/music and are able to feel emotions from it. Since I’m one of those types, music is the most powerful vehicle for me to express myself emotionally, so there is no mundane task that even comes close.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

It’s a beautiful mystery I’m not sure I wish to understand or be able to explain. The vibrations our brains receive and interpret seems like decoding the language of the universe and I’ve got pure gratitude for it!