Part 1

Name: Scott Paterson
Nationality: Scottish
Occupation: Producer, composer
Current release: Scott Paterson teams up with Iain Cook for their duo project Protection. Their latest single "THX" is out now via Saint Lucky. A full EP, Seeds II, will follow on September 1st 2023.
Recommendations: I’d love to recommend Rick Rubin’s recent book The Creative Act. It’s such a life affirming read about intuition, instinct, where our creativity might come from, tips to help navigate when we might find our creativity a little blocked and much more. I feel like a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about in answer to your questions is also discussed in there. It’s rare to read a book and feel so in agreement with everything said but I found myself nodding along with just about every page. I’m sure many of your readers will feel the same.
The piece of art I’d recommend would be Roden Crater by James Turrell. I love James Turrell and have been lucky to get to see quite a few of his pieces in different parts of the world. I’ve found his work to be so peaceful and emotional and spiritual. Roden Crater is an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert where he’s building a ‘naked eye observatory’ built to last millennia that is a place to experience the desert sky and light in the day and the stars and planets at night.
Work began on building it in the 70s and it is still under construction all these years later. It is the apex of his life’s work and looks truly mind blowing. From the pictures I’ve seen it almost feels like a structure from an ancient civilisation, an epic undertaking like the building of the pyramids and proof of the awesome feats we humans can achieve. I find it hugely inspiring.
It’s not yet complete it’s not open to the public but I hope I can visit someday. It’s truly at the top of my bucket list of places I want to get to experience before I die.

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

For the thoughts of his Protection partner, we recommend our Iain Cook interview.



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?

Wow, that sounds like you might have synesthesia! I don’t see shapes or colours or anything like that but I find it fascinating when I meet people who do, I love hearing about that. It would be great to be able to press a button and turn that on and experience it myself. I would love to know what that is like.

But for me, I think my physical body reaction to music really varies on the set and setting that I’m listening to it in. Is it in my car or in the studio? Is it day or night? Am I feeling tired? Am I feeling energised? Is the music on headphones or coming out of a huge PA system with a gigantic sub? In a club or at a festival? All of those things will affect my experience.

If I listen to more introspective music, perhaps something ambient on headphones and it’s late at night I can easily drift into quite a meditative ‘other state’ with it. But similarly I can experience that same feeling if I’m in the studio and writing something and happen to get into a flow-state where I’m no longer really thinking, just doing, and everything seems to be happening of its own accord. Those moments are special and time can really fly by without noticing it.

I do actually meditate too and something I realised once I learned how to do that was that I’d already been doing it since I was a teenager without realising it. By playing music in my bedroom and just getting carried away in it, I’d be lost for hours, not even thinking, just playing the instrument and experiencing the sound. That kind of single point of focus on one object, the sound or the instrument, is a kind of meditation I suppose.

But back to the body experience, it could be a completely other feeling if it’s music coming out of a huge club type PA with enormous body-shaking bass. Depending on the type of music that kind of volume can sometimes feel quite womblike and be oddly calming if it’s some enormous drone or it could be completely energising and adrenaline rush inducing if it’s something really exciting and high tempo. I think everyone can relate to that.

Most of my waking day I listen to music with eyes open but that’s interesting you ask because I think everybody does hear in more detail with eyes closed. I do close my eyes when we’re mixing and I really need to hear something in detail. It’s a bit like the aural equivalent of zooming in, isn’t it?

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 started to learn guitar when I was 13 and like most people gains were quite slow and hard won. But I loved it! It was my favourite thing to do and after a few years I had gotten pretty competent and was able to figure songs out by ear which was a great skill to have and has stood me well all these years later.

Learning that instrument made me realise that, not just me, but anyone can learn anything they want if they just put the time in and have the passion for it to keep pushing through the roadblocks that come up.

In the last ten years I’ve actually had a similar experience in figuring out how to produce electronic music. The same as learning guitar it was really hard at first and the gains seemed so tiny and incremental that it was almost hard to measure. The gap between what I was able to make and what I wanted to make seemed so vast! It really took about 3 or 4 years of absolute dedication to it to get to the point where I felt good about my skills and could actually realise the kinds of music I had in my head.

And I guess that comes to your question can one train being an artist. I think you can definitely train to learn skills and techniques that will allow you to make the kind of art you want to make, yes. But being an artist is honestly just something that’s in everyone, I think. It’s just whether or not you can tune in to that as an adult.

I was reading Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act recently and, I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of we’re all born creative / artistic but that the world and structure of society is built to sort of iron that out of us.

For example, a little kid might sit and draw a blue tree and the school teacher will come along and say ‘Why have you done that? Trees are meant to be brown and green?’ And so the kid will learn to conform to expectations and draw trees the ‘correct’ way.

So to be an artist, all you really need to be able to do is tune out the world and listen to your instinct that’s there and that’s saying to you ‘hey, let’s draw a blue tree today’.

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?

Music was everything at that age! And everything was brand new and there were new musical discoveries almost weekly.

I was a teenager in the 90s and that was an amazing time for both the guitar music that I started out playing and also the electronic music that was coming through. The records I loved then are ingrained in my brain for sure and I suppose the experiences I had then were so intense and meaningful that they are what has led to me still making music to this day.

I know from speaking with friends that many people reach an age, perhaps in their thirties, and find themselves less interested in seeking out new music, perhaps they feel less excited by the new things they hear or it doesn’t hit them as hard as, say, the Nirvana record did when they were 13.

But I have to say I haven’t experienced that myself. Music is still everything to me and I’m still massively passionate about current music and am digging for new thrills every day. I find it still excites me and moves me just as much as it did when I was 13 and I get just as big a kick out of sharing new finds with my friends as I did when I was at school and maybe heard some killer new track on the radio.

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

I’m not sure if I know what it is that specifically motivates or drives me. It’s just something that’s there that I feel I want to do. Perhaps it’s just that I want to make music as good as the stuff that stops me in my tracks when I hear it. Or perhaps sometimes it’s that I want to make more of the music that I’m not hearing out there in the world, that can be a motivation too.

When I hear something new I feel inspired and often I’ll wonder how that piece of music was created. That in turn can send me off in the studio on a rabbit hole of ideas and things to try out.

Just the pleasure, the fun of playing and learning new techniques, is motivation enough. And of course the joy of the finished article when you stop for the day and there’s this cool new piece of music on your computer that nobody in the world but you has heard, something that’s just sort of floated out of the ether and into your hard drive.

It’s just a beautiful thing and it’s something that fuels the impetus to make the next bit of music.

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?

Great question. There’s the notion that ideas are there for anyone to catch if you just have your antenna up and are in the right frame of mind to receive them.

The notion that ideas have a time when they are ready to just appear in the world and if they don’t come through ourselves they’ll come out in another way through someone else. I quite like that.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What’s your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I think that seems like how I listen to music too, not just my own. First impressions of a track would be just the overall sound of it and how it makes me feel. Then subsequent listens I would probably pay more attention to individual elements and focus on them, how they play with or complement other elements. I rarely pay attention to lyrics at all so music has never really been about what it ‘means’ and more just about how the sound of it makes me feel.

I have no idea how I’d define my own personal sound! I’ve never really thought about that. But I suppose if we’re talking Protection’s music it’s the composite of Iain and I’s shared as well as unique, individual tastes and us just trying to make the music we’d like to hear ourselves.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you’ve had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

I would absolutely describe those sounds as musical, yes. If we close our eyes and zoom-in on them we can hear all sorts of melodies and rhythms in the places you’ve described.

It becomes especially apparent if you were to make field recordings out in nature and then put them in a sampler and loop them up. A series of wave crashes could sound random at first but if you made a little 3 second loop of it and let that roll for 5 minutes all sort of interesting little rhythms would become apparent. Same with bird song or a tree creaking in the wind.

You question prompted me to remember a sound I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I spent the early part of my childhood growing up in the Middle East and among many other memories of the time, a comforting one would be the soft chirp of crickets outdoors at night, it’d still be warm, there’d be a faint hum of a generator or air conditioner in the distance and the air would smell humid and like hot sand and we’d probably be getting ready to go out somewhere with my mum and dad. I feel calm when I think of that.

Totally different thing but it reminds me of these videos on YouTube by this bass player called MonoNeon. He’ll take some hilarious, random snippet of someone talking on the street or having an argument and then loop it and play incredible Thundercat-esque neo soul funk bass over it. They are hilarious! But also just makes you realise how much music is in just the way people speak every day.