Part 1

Name: Jacob Bergson aka Taut
Nationality: American
Occupation: Producer, composer
Current release: The new Taut single "Fissure" is out now.

If you enjoyed this Jacob Bergson interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.



Tell me about one or two of your early pieces that you're still proud of (or satisfied with) in terms of production – and why you're content with them.

I can sometimes be an iterative producer - I get subconsciously stuck on an idea, and then end up making several different tracks that employ similar techniques or concepts.  

When I’m proud of something old, it’s generally because I was already able to execute the idea well, even with a more limited skillset.

When it comes to arranging, sound design, performing, composing, etc – what are currently concrete topics and aspects that interest you and where you want to improve or simply challenge yourself?

This year, developing my live show has been a major area of exploration and development.

I’ve been trying to figure out how accomplish several things at once: I want to present a show that’s representative of Taut, yet still flexible enough to work well in many different contexts. And I want to present something that comes across as polished and high quality, but also as improvisational and spontaneous and reactive.

I think it’s an achievable goal, and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far this year, but it’s still a work in progress, and the oppositional nature of many of those goals does make it a challenge.

Do you keep up with recent developments in terms of gear and software? If not, why not? If so, what are you looking for?

I’m not a luddite, but I’m also definitely not an early adopter. And, that posture really extends to everything that might be new to me - be it hardware, software, new artists, new apps.

For that reason, I find that I keep up with recent developments roughly to the same extent that my friends do - the more often I hear about something new, the more likely I am to check it out.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches, and musical forms you may be very familiar with?

For me, that’s the core of my music making approach still. I’m always trying to  find something new, and I’m always hesitant to just do a new version of something I’ve already done.

I don’t have a fixed way that I start writing a song - I just start creating elements that might work together, and then try to be as patient and open as possible while I wait for the music to tell me where to go next. At a certain point, a song usually picks up its own sort of momentum, and it becomes quite obvious what need to happen to bring it to completion.

When I’m producing for other people, then it’s usually a different approach -  we’re often working under time pressure, and so the idea is to reach into my bag of tricks and grab stuff that I know will work. It’s much harder to be so experimental when somebody else is watching you (maybe impatiently).

That’s one reason that I often like to produce alone, even when I’m working with others. It eliminates that element of self consciousness.  

For your own creativity, what is the balance and relative importance between what you learned from teachers, tutorials and other producers on the one hand – and what you discovered, understood, and achieved yourself? What are examples for both of these?

This is interesting, because I think it’s super hard to find exactly where that line is there.

I can say that, for me, the situations where someone sat me down and told me “do this thing in such and such a way” have been pretty rare. But I’ve done plenty of learning from watching other people work. I find that to be somewhere in the middle - you’re not entirely figuring it out yourself, but you’re also not being directly instructed.

I’m not big on online tutorials, unless I just need someone to explain a tool that I don’t understand. Unfortunately, so many of them are suffused with bad information, so I mostly try to avoid them. Otherwise, I tend to make new discoveries through a brute-force-experimentation type approach.

Already as a little kid, I was drawn to all aspects of electronic/electric music but I've never quite been able to put a finger on why this is. What's your own relationship to electronic sounds, rhythms, productions like – what, if any, are fundamental differences with “acoustic“ music and tools?

I find working with acoustic and electronic sounds to be quite different, and I think the main difference is physics.

If you’re making electronic music, your speakers only need to be able to turn the voltage that you’re feeding them into sound waves - otherwise, it would be impossible to listen to the music you’re making at all. But, that’s really the only physical restriction in play. As long as your music doesn’t violate that one rule, then anything that you can generate within a computer is fair game.

But, with acoustic music, you have to deal with the laws of physics several times. The sound needs to be not only reproducible through speakers, but also capturable through a microphone. You need to be able to sufficiently vibrate the air to get the sound to move the microphone’s membrane in the first place.

And then there’s noise - the noises that people involuntarily make by moving their bodies, the noise that naturally occurs even in very quiet rooms, and the self-noise of microphones, amplifiers, and converters. Any sound quieter than that ambient level of noise, or close enough to it, can essentially not be captured.

Then, there’s also the question of performance - most of the time (there are, of course, exceptions to basically everything here) acoustic music implies that there is a performer who is playing an instrument. Which, then in turn implies that the music must be playable by a human being, with two hands and two feet, and ten fingers and toes. Again, this is a restriction that is simply not present if you’re asking your computer to do the “playing”.



When making electronic music, at some point what you’re really dealing with is the limit of your own cognition and your own musicianship - if you’re really trying to push boundaries, then you’re coming up against the edge of what you’re able to understand and control and actually wrangle into something listenable.

Jean-Michel Jarre maintained that, despite the advances in virtual technology, we are still "analogue animals made out of blood and bones who need buttons and knobs to touch.” In how far is this statement true or false for your own music?

I think “need” in this context might be overstating the case for hardware. Clearly everything in your environment does have an effect on the process of music creation, from the available instruments to the ergonomics of the studio, to the accuracy of the monitoring.

A specific physical relationship with a piece of hardware can definitely yield results that would be very difficult to replicate otherwise. But it’s also obviously true at this point that it’s quite possible to make great music with nothing more than a laptop and headphones. One of the tracks on one of my upcoming EPs was created entirely “in the box”, and I bet you wouldn’t be able to tell which one that is if I didn’t tip you off.

An important element of my own musical practice is the development of my ability to get good results with almost any set of tools. Ultimately, the music comes from your imagination, it doesn’t come from the synthesizer or the drum machine, and it doesn’t come from your hands.

What are examples of production tools/instruments that you bought for a specific purpose?

Most of my plugin purchases definitely come about due to specific use cases - I’ll generally have a mental wish list of things that would be nice to have, and then eventually I’ll encounter a situation that justifies the purchase. So, for example, my last plugin purchase was a de-esser, which I suddenly had a pressing need for. But, it’s also a purchase that I know will be useful again in the future.

A couple years ago I bought an effects pedal, the Microcosm from Hologram Electronics, specifically for one solo piano show. It sounded cool for that purpose, but it ended up not being especially useful on a regular basis for me, and so it’s been on long-term loan to some friends for a little while now.

Richie Hawtin, speaking about semi-modular equipment, has stated that a deeper understanding of sound synthesis can lead to “life lessons that go beyond what we can hear.” Can you relate to that statement?

I think the most significant conceptual jump that comes from using modular or semi-modular equipment is the possibility to reconceptualize each individual component.

For example, on a synthesizer with a fixed architecture, a VCA is fundamentally a volume control. As a user, your understanding of it doesn’t need to extend any further than that since it would be impossible to use it for an alternative purpose anyway. But in a modular system, a VCA takes on a different meaning: it’s simply an amplifier, and it amplifies any signal you plug into it. Suddenly, that reveals a much broader set of use cases and a much more flexible way of thinking about audio and sound design.

Mental and conceptual flexibility are definitely valuable cognitive traits, but I’d be skeptical as to whether musicians are actually deriving those life lessons from their experience with synthesizers.