Name: ORKA
Members: Francine Perry, Jens L. Thomsen
Interviewee: Francine Perry
Nationality: British (Francine), Faroese (Jens)
Current release: ORKA's new single "Bird" is out via Kervið. A new full-length album, their first in 6 years, will follow later in 2023.
Gear Recommendations: Two new pieces of gear / software that I’m really enjoying are firstly, the Microcosm pedal by Hologram Electronics: it’s a granular sampling and delay pedal that makes incredible ambiences and really mangles and reforms any sound you put through it. It’s a lot of fun and really inspiring to work with.
Secondly, the plugin Portal by Output, which does pretty much the same thing that the Microcosm does but it’s a software plugin so useful for when you don’t have the pedal around. I’d always prefer the hardware version if it’s there, I just find working with hardware more immediate, but Portal is very deep and there's so much you can do with it.

If this ORKA interview piqued your interest, visit the duo's official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud. For an even deeper look into their thoughts, read our 15 Questions ORKA interview. 

The views of society towards technology are subject to constant change. How would you describe yours?

I’m very positive about technology in all forms. I love that our tools are constantly upgrading / changing / enhancing.

I wish technology could change and upgrade in a more environmental way though, the way in which gear becomes obsolete due to computer upgrades is wasteful.

But from a creative standpoint it definitely keeps everyone on their toes, and I enjoy using new tools when they come in like new plugins or new features in whichever DAW.

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/producer?

I was lucky enough to grow up in a musical household, and started playing drums when I was 8. I don’t remember this but my mum tells me I saw a female drummer playing in a school concert and I was adamant I wanted to learn drums after that. Luckily my dad did too and we used to share drum lessons.

My brother is very musically talented and played guitar and also DJed and produced dubstep when I was growing up, and my mum was classically trained at oboe and piano so I had lots of influences and also was lucky to have these instruments in the house at my disposal so I got into playing everything I could. This helped me develop myself as a songwriter / producer as playing around learning instruments quickly led to me wanting to record what I was doing. That’s what got me into making productions and recording in the first place.

I didn’t necessarily play well at the time but it didn't matter, you can be creative with production and do many things to alter the sound. I think this showed me that you can be more DIY with production and create something more interesting if it’s not ‘perfect’.

I think often it can seem like the most successful artists and producers are all the ones that were naturally gifted from a young age, but this definitely isn’t the case. I truly believe you can learn most things in music and there shouldn’t be any barrier for anyone who wants to be an artist or producer. For example I believe you can teach someone to play in time even if they don’t think they have rhythm.

We are all also constantly developing skills, with the changes in the technology, but the best producers in my opinion are the ones who have a clear set idea of what they want to do before they start a track, and then go about doing exactly that. You don’t have to be a trained musician for this but if you have the creative ideas, that’s the most important thing in my opinion.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and then becomes increasingly professionalised. How important is playfulness for you today and if it is important, how do, concretely, you retain it?

Playfulness is extremely important as often when we overwork ideas they can become stale.

For example when we were working on one of our tracks "Atlantic", it went through a huge amount of revisions and almost didn't make the final album. At the time we were listening to lots of Gqom, it had a bit of that influence mixed with quite hard techno and we used to play it in our live set.



But when it came to finishing it for the album, we kept pulling it in different directions and eventually the initial fun of it was lost. We’d pretty much scrapped it at that point until about 2 years later in Jens’ studio in the Faroe Islands we re-opened it again, in a new space with a new frame of mind.

We stripped everything away from the old version of the track aside from the main tribal tom drum, added a new vocal part and it became something completely new and fresh. This time it was very quick to write, we just had fun with it.



When it flows like that and it's fun, that's when I feel you are doing right by the song, keeping to the initial idea and just giving it what it needs. We sealed it off by recording improvised overdubs with Yann Tiersen, Quinquis, Ólavur Jákupsson and Kári Sverrisson, at Eskal, the remote island studio in Ushant.

[Read our Yann Tiersen interview]

Using voice, percussion, our home-built instruments, and modular synths, these recordings add depth and sense of space to the track and we also had a lot of fun making them, recording all of us together at the same time in a circle, not being too precious about anything and keeping the bits we liked.

Which other producers were important for your development and what did you learn from them?

Producers like SOPHIE and Arca are a big influence, they are totally unique in their sound, and both create otherworldly textures. I really respect how uncompromising they are with their stylistic choices.

Fever Ray’s first album is my favorite record of all time. They went away to a cabin in the woods to write it and you can really hear that. It’s also so clear in its aesthetic and the songs all blend beautifully together.

Björk is also a big influence, she is incredible at taking on new technologies and drawing new influences to her albums but still keeping so true to herself at the same time.

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

Our ORKA live setup has evolved quite a bit over the years. Before I joined the band Jens was playing with multiple musicians solely using homebuilt instruments he had made as well as voice. Lots of the homebuilt instruments sounds we still use today in sample form. They sound amazing, very industrial and unique.

Then around the time I joined the band, Jens was moving into making more electronic music and playing solo using Ableton Live as the main brain for the set. I would play the drum parts on a SPD-SX and he would also use a sampler to play more melodic parts. We also still had the Lamp (one of the homebuilt instruments made from an industrial lamp fitted with a bass guitar string). You can play it a bit like a slide guitar but it sounds much more gnarly.

This worked for a while but we had a few gigs where Ableton was acting up and we decided to move away from the laptop set up. Jens now plays on an MPC Live which is the main brain for the set and I’m still using the SPD-SX, so we’re much more involved with every part of the set physically playing each sound. We also have a Moog Mother 32 for some amazing moog bass lines and some guitar pedals for effects.

The set up is super simple now and way more engaging both to play with and to watch and we can trust it a lot more, the MPC Live and SPD-SX have never crashed or let us down.

Have there been technologies which have profoundly influenced, changed or questioned the way you make music?

I bought an Elektron Octatrack in 2016 and it was the first really expensive bit of gear that I’d built up to buying and felt like a bit of a risk. It took me a while to get into the workflow and even to understand the workflow, which is common with the Octatrack. But once I got into it, I found it the most inspiring writing tool.

The way you can add samples and manipulate them in a way that’s not linear like if you’re working in a DAW. It’s a little bit like working in Ableton Live’s session view, you can come up with ideas and not have to be restricted to structuring those ideas. Instead you can improvise with them and build ideas in an organic way.

I found that change in workflow very inspiring and I wrote most of my 2nd solo EP ‘Violet’ on the Octatrack, which Jens then mixed.

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 feel limitations can be extremely helpful, but it’s all relative. SOPHIE’s productions and especially her sound design and textures are incredible. The sounds feel like they are coming out of the speakers and hitting you in the face. They are so minimal at the same time as being maximal and huge.

When you have a clear identity and ethos like this it doesn't make sense to limit yourself. But I also think limitations can be very useful for lots of producers, often it is good to choose a particular palette to work with for one track, for example a particular group of samples or some specific instruments or synths, and not stray too far by putting anything and everything on top.

It’s so tempting to add absolutely everything to a track these days because we have every sound and instrument at our fingertips in every DAW. But then things can get lost, and the most important thing is that the original idea, mood, vibe, emotion is coming through.

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

Usually when we’re working on ORKA tracks we will get together in one of our studios and both come up with an initial idea then or bring one to the session. It will be very rough to start with, usually just a part of a track like a drum part or a vocal sample hook.

We tend to work in either Ableton or Pro Tools, ideas might be started in Ableton but will always make their way into Pro Tools for final stages and mixing. We’ll both then swap ideas over and work on them in the same room but on separate computers, we’ll go back and forth in tandem like this, swapping which track we’re working on and building it up until the track is mostly formed, and then we’ll both work on it together to finish it.  

It’s a really collaborative way of working and allows us both to have our own time with each track from the beginning stages so we’re totally intertwined with the tracks we’re putting out from the start.

From your experience, are there things you're doing differently than most or many other artists when it comes to gear and production?

Most electronic acts have drum parts playing via a drum machine or sequencer or from Ableton in their live shows but I don't know many that physically play them live throughout the whole show.

For the style of music this is quite unique, you have to be really metronomical, and I think the physicality adds to our live performances greatly so people can really visualize what they are hearing and what’s happening on stage.

You can get the sense of this in our video "Juno" taken from our performance at G! Festival:



In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. Do you feel these terms have a relationship to your own work of and approach towards sound? Do you find using presets lazy?

I don't think presets are lazy, I think everyone has a different way of working and if that’s using a preset it’s totally valid.

I personally prefer to start with a preset and sculpt something from there. I’m rarely happy with the sound as it is. If I was then I wouldn't mess with it! But it's more that I see it as a starting point and then I’m always going to be going in and changing it to fit exactly what I want.

I also like sounds to be changing and developing across tracks, it gives a more organic interesting sound so I’ll always be going in with automation and manipulating sounds across a track.

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?

My hopes are that AI can be every producer's best friend, doing the tasks which take up unnecessary time when you're just wanting to get into the creative flow state. Bouncing stems for example, or organising a session, color coding, naming etc. doing things that are necessary but take up time when we could be creating.

In terms of AI writing and composing I do shy away from this. My worry would be that all music will start sounding too similar if we’re all using the same AI tools.

It doesn't worry me if some people want to do this. But in my own work I would want to not use these tools and continue to work differently so that I can have a unique sound.