Part 2

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

I relate to SOPHIE’s attitude completely, but I think it goes even further than that.

There’s also tremendous structural freedom in electronic music, if you choose to take advantage of it, and I think that’s one of the most important and interesting aspects of electronic music. The music can take any sort of unusual shape and, so long as you’re still able to make it feel compelling. You definitely see these anomalous structures in SOPHIE’s music, so she must have been aware of this as well.

My process is extremely exploratory, and some measure of aimless wandering is priced in, so to speak. I do appreciate the benefit of limitations when the goal is to get something accomplished efficiently.

But, when I’m working on my own music, that’s not usually my goal. I’m rather trying to access new ideas and new sounds, no matter how long it takes, and so the more open the process and the greater the palette of possibilities, the better.



From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, what does your current production workflow/process look like?

It’s really pretty different every time, mostly because I don’t have a fixed process for starting a track. But broadly speaking I’ll have a phase of collecting ideas, followed by a phase of organization and pruning and creating structure. If I realize that I still don’t have enough musical material for a finished track, then I’ll go through that process again.

And, if I’m still not getting anywhere, I’ll often just reimport the strongest elements into a new session and essentially start over, trying make more progress by reimagining it as fully as possible.

Rhythm, sound design, melody/harmony, something else – when do the different elements of a piece come into play for you?

Basically everything happens at once for me - for example, sound design definitely has to happen at the same time that any melody / harmony / rhythm is created. I don’t ever produce with placeholder sounds and then try to find more interesting sounds to replace them. However, I do often continue to process and alter sounds as I continue working on a track.

It’s pretty normal for me to print everything to audio pretty early on - I often prefer to work with audio rather than MIDI - so that limits my ability to reconsider sounds anyway.

One of the most interesting elements of electronic music, in my opinion, is the fluidity with which different sounds can play different roles. Once you’re not dealing with actual drums, for example, what does it mean for something to provide rhythm?



In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like? Do you find using presets lazy?

Personally I don’t use presets so often, but that’s not for ideological reasons. It’s just more the case that, for my music, presets don’t generally provide a shortcut anyway.

I really do believe that music is only about the end result, and not about process. It wouldn’t give my music extra value if I marketed it as “handcrafted” or “artisan”, or if I implied that all other artists get their sounds from sample packs, but that I painstakingly craft every little sound myself. The only actual measure of quality in music is how good the finished music is. That’s the only thing that the listener gets to directly experience.

Process is often only interesting to other musicians and producers. It’s not usually interesting (or even comprehensible) to a general audience, unless they’re searching for a way to justify to other listeners that your music is good. I find that attitude in an audience really corrosive anyway (i.e “this music is great primarily because this person is so skilled”).

I’ve actually been quite annoyed with this conflation as it relates to the posthumous narrative surrounding SOPHIE - there’s been a movement online to try to bolster the reputation of her musical output, and the argument often rests largely on her technical skill as a producer and sound designer. The problem is, none of that is what actually made SOPHIE great - it’s rather her adventurousness and rule breaking and vision, and the ability to push aesthetic boundaries while still making music that felt personal and emotional and relatable.

If she had done all of that while primarily using presets, it wouldn’t diminish the value of her music one bit. And, all her crazy sound design without all of those other attributes would have been musically worthless.

For me, the sound design is an ancillary skill that supports your other goals, and not the element that actually determines the quality of the music. If an artist is using other people’s sound design (i.e. presets), but they are demonstrating especially keen taste in their ability to curate and structure the music, then I think they’re very likely to make some extremely good music. And that’s the thing that matters.

Those analogies to visual arts make some sense to me, but I think that they’re pretty limited analogies in the end. Sculpting and design especially don’t really capture the way that the music creation process feels to me. But, they’re probably useful enough analogies when trying to explain the process of creating electronic music to a layperson.

What, to you, are the respective benefits of solo work and collaborations and do you often feel lonely in the studio? Can machines act as collaborators to you?

I think it would be extremely generous to call a machine a collaborator, at least in the normal sense of the word. The best part of working alone is that you can own all of the aesthetic decisions. You can completely stand behind the finished piece of music as an artistic statement that you believe in, and made in its entirety.


[The track "Phantom Limb" is a collaboration between Arthur Hnatek and TAUT.]

The best part of collaboration is that you have someone else to get you unstuck, and that you can do the same for them. For me, that usually means that the process moves much faster.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

I do like to get my computer to iterate on my ideas as part of my compositional process, and to alter what I’ve done and spit other interesting ideas back at me. So, more complex and higher quality developments in that domain are very welcome, from my perspective. I’m sure there will be some AI tools in the future which I’ll gladly use as part of my process.

But, unfortunately, I expect that primarily AI is going to be used to hollow out the middle of the music industry even more. There are currently tons of people making a living in music at jobs that have little to no aspect of public recognition, but who make huge amounts of music for ads, for movies, for video games, for apps, and so much more. I think a lot of the public aren’t really aware of these jobs.

I’m worried that pretty soon everything but the highest budget productions will be generated by AI. Why pay three different composers a demo fee for an advertising pitch when you can pay one demo fee to one composer and have them generate 10 options with the assistance of AI? Why pay a composer to write music for your indie film when you can save a significant amount of budget and have AI generate a perfectly acceptable soundtrack? If there’s some part that you don’t like, you can always ask the AI to generate something new ad nauseam, for free.

The value will be in landing a name-brand composer as a collaborator. You can afford a Daniel Lopatin or a Ludwig Göransson or a Jonny Greenwood for your soundtrack? Fantastic, that might just get you an Oscar nomination! But if you can’t … maybe you’d might as well just use the AI. Or, at least, that’s how I expect people will be thinking about it in the very near future.

If you could make a wish for the future directly to a product developer at a Hard- or Software company – what are developments in tools/instruments you would like to see and hear?  

It’s a generic request, and it would be a return to the past, but I’d like to see more professional hardware. I know that the actual professional market is very small, and that the so called “pro-sumer” market is where a lot of companies make their money. But that means that the devices available for professionals, especially touring professionals, are pretty limited these days.

Funny enough, even though I gladly use new technological innovations, I don’t feel especially limited by music technology as it currently exists. New innovations would be a nice bonus for me, but hardly a necessity.

I think I’ve always felt that way - happy to integrate new technologies into my process when they become useful to me, but generally more focused on doing the best work I can with the tools I have.