Name: Derek Kamm aka KidIsLive
Occupation: DJ, producer, label founder at Mad Motel
Nationality: American
Current release: KidIsLive's new Mad Motel 002 EP is out via Mad Motel.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: The Universal Sense by Seth S. Horowitz, since he came up, will change how you think about your ears. This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin is a beautiful entry point into why sounds make us cry in Berlin apartments at 3 am. Ocean of Sound by David Toop is for anyone drawn to the ambient and drone side of things like I am.
And honestly, beyond books: go record something. A cheap handheld recorder and the birds in your backyard taught me more than any article ever did.
 
If you enjoyed this Kidislive interview and would like to stay up to date with his music and performances, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, 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?

Mostly open when listening in privacy, sometimes closed on the dance floor, believe it or not.

When my eyes are closed, I see a combination of all 3, especially if someone slipped something in my drink hehe.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

As a producer, I like to listen to all music, but especially my own, on all devices, to make sure it passes my personal test of accepted quality.

Tell me about some albums or artists you love specifically for their sound, please.

Gerry Read - He has a raw and uncensored take on what is underground but also what is pop; he weaves in both, which makes his sound his own. And produces from the heart.



Magico (ring.seoul) - Magico is a DJ from South Korea that I recently had a chance to see at the Apollo Studios party, which is my current fave party in Brooklyn, NY. Like his name suggests, pure magic.

He is a vinyl-only DJ who plays music in a way that is courageous and fearless; he'll do anything to keep the marathon working for the collective. I have seen many play, but he is different.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

Raw piano and strings have always done something to me spiritually.

I remember when I had moved to Berlin back in 2012 after breaking up with my fiancé at the time and was sitting in my room listening to“It's a process“ by Mychael Danna, who scored the movie Moneyball.



And I started to cry uncontrollably and played the song on repeat 100 times or so. Just reflecting on my life at the time, where I was, where I am, the possibilities of it all.

It was a blizzard of emotions embodying everything you can imagine. That song and others like it have that effect on me.

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us, and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Sustained sitars, an underlying hum of a bagpipe.

Essentially drone-like sounds I find very intoxicating and hypnotizing, where others might find too redundant or that particular frequency is over their head or under their feet, whichever.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

I love the sounds of spring and summer in the morning here in NY.

One of the first tracks I ever made, I actually went outside with my now very old Zoom Handy Recorder and recorded the birds singing in my backyard at the time, and layered those sounds over the ambient song I made.

These were the first experiments I did with sampling and layering that made my passion for production stronger and more curious.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

The Maracanã is the legendary soccer stadium in Rio de Janeiro, one of the largest in the world (it packed in nearly 200,000 people for the 1950 World Cup final).

Picture standing alone at the center of that enormous concrete bowl and shouting: your voice would ring out, bounce off the distant stands, and come back to you as long, washy echoes and reverb.

You'd sound tiny and enormous at the same time — one small voice filling a massive space. I was blessed to do this as a little kid once when traveling there; I remember it vividly.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?

When I recorded The Original Madam, which was later used in Visionquest Records by Wareika in "Madam Scorpion."



I had recorded that in this studio in Brooklyn, NY, which was very interesting. I forgot whose studio/apartment it was in, but we had microphones coming from the ceiling hanging down in front of 2 violinists and 1 cello player. We had a percussionist in the kitchen, a trumpet player on the sofa, and mics everywhere- the reverb and output were so unique.

What was yielded was my first track of major recognition, or at least for me in that time period. This was when I yearned to record in weird places with weird and lovely talents. Nowadays I am in my own home studio, which is a sanctuary for me.

[Read our Wareika interview about their Creative Process]
[Read our Wareika interview about Improvisation]
[Read our Wareika interview about Collaboration]

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

That’s an interesting question. And honestly yes. Anytime I play with low frequency, you can feel that sound in your chest.

The Minimoog, for instance, has this sound to it that when you dial it in just right, you will attest there is something very material about sculpting that sound.

How important is sound for our overall well-being, and to what extent do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

In the sense of society's 'acoustic health' — how much space it makes for music, quiet, and listening versus constant noise- it is a fair mirror of its overall health, because environments that sound better tend to be ones where people are less stressed, more connected, and better cared for.

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?

The ocean and all its mysteries yield and render beautiful sounds, the sounds of waves crashing, or gliding over you as you head out to surf. There is this danger and beauty you feel with that sound, unlike any other for me.

I would assume an astronaut would say something else has the same effect.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?

I do think interspecies communication is possible; we already live it.

Anyone who has hushed their voice to calm a dog, mimicked a birdcall and gotten an answer, or noticed a cat responding to their tone knows we exchange meaning across species all the time, even without shared language. Science backs this up: animals read our pitch, rhythm, and emotional tone remarkably well, and researchers are decoding everything from whale song to prairie dog calls.

And yes, I'd say there's absolutely a creative element to it. Since we don't share words, communicating with another species is improvisation — you listen, imitate, invent, and adjust, almost like a musical duet. It's less about translation and more about finding a shared rhythm, which to me is one of the most creative acts there is.

It matters, too: learning to listen across species lines makes us better listeners, and probably gentler inhabitants of the world.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard, and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

I've been spared so far, and I don't take that for granted. In this line of work, your ears are the whole instrument.

So I treat listening the way athletes treat their bodies: moderate volumes in sessions, and real breaks where I let silence do its work. I've come to think of quiet as part of the music, actually, the palate cleanser between sounds.

Maybe that's the deepest precaution: loving silence as much as sound, so I never feel the need to drown myself in volume. I want to still be hearing the small things, room tone, birdsong, the tail of a reverb, decades from now.

We can surround ourselves with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself, and what importance does silence hold?

I respect Gould, but I have to disagree with him a little. For me, it's like eating -  even your favorite meal loses its magic if you never stop eating. Silence is where the appetite comes back.

As I said before about protecting my ears, I've come to treat quiet as part of the music itself, the palate cleanser between sounds. Some of my best ideas in the studio come right after I've stepped away from it, walked outside, and let my ears reset to the birds and the wind.

If sound is the sculpture, silence is the marble it's carved from. Without it, everything just becomes noise, and I never want music to become noise to me.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

Here we go, love this question, I think about this more than I should hehe.

We live in such a visual world now; everything is the image, the thumbnail, the aesthetic, and I think we've forgotten that the ears don't lie the way the eyes can.

You can dress something up to look however you want, but you can hear sincerity, you can hear fear, you can hear love in someone's voice within a second.