Name: Philippa McIntyre aka Philippa
Nationality: New Zealand
Occupation: Producer, DJ, Music Performance and Production Tutor
Current release: Philippa is one of the remixers featured on Fat Freddy’s Drop's Blackbird Returns. The album is slated for release on September 29th 2023 via The Drop.

If this Philippa interview piqued your interest, visit her on Instagram, Facebook, bandcamp, and Soundcloud.



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

I honestly think society places way too much emphasis on technology.

I have a healthy respect for emerging tools, and I’ve spent years learning and teaching in arts and technology institutions, but honestly, it’s not about the gear. Or VR. Or the AI.

It’s about the music, the quality of the ideas, and the human being behind those ideas - it’s people that are interesting.

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?

My mother is a piano teacher so I learnt piano from five years old, and I like to think I’ve been listening to music since being in the womb ... which is true, right? Mum was teaching piano and listening to music when she was pregnant with me. Music has been at the very heart of pretty much everything in my life, the whole way through.

And yes music in general is a learned skill - whether you are an instrument player, singer, composer, producer, mixing engineer and so on - it’s all about the 10,000+ hours dedicated to learning your craft, there are no shortcuts.

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?

This is such a good question, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent years.

To write well I have to play a Jedi mind trick on myself and pretend I’m writing “just for me” - just for my own enjoyment. As soon as pressure enters the equation the whole thing falls apart. If I write in a self conscious manner and think of industry expectations it gets too serious, and the natural playfulness and exploration which drives (at least my) creativity is suppressed.

It’s a funny one, and no doubt partly responsible for the classic “difficult second album” ... Once you feel that people are taking notice, it can become terrifying / hard to write.

Writing music is hugely personal - and my process involves stripping away a whole bunch of life bullshit to get to a creative core that resonates on an emotional and spiritual level.

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

This is a difficult one to answer partly because those influences are constantly shifting and changing over time.

Sometimes I loop back around to people, and I guess some never leave, but one producer I've been thinking a lot about lately is Germany’s Koze. He's so unique and it's this specifically that I love about his work: he makes deep house with a classic hip hop influence, but there’s a golden stream of lyrical melodic magic that is purely him, no one else.

A long standing historical influence would be the Soulquarian crew - NYC based hip hop and RnB producers from the late 90s and early 2000s. I still listen to a lot of that music and will probably never stop. All of that crew were (and many still are) making really compelling music, both sample and instrumental based, grounded in jazz and soul.



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

At the start, I basically work as fast as possible - I try to write a piece of music in a weekend, or over a few days, generating ideas, sketching an outline and filling it out. Next I bring in instrument players and record, if the track is calling for that. And then finally sound design and mixing - which takes a lot of time as the more one hears a track, the less one hears what's not working with it.

So I’m constantly searching for “fresh ears” and sometimes need to rest a piece for a few weeks - sometimes six months or even a year if I’ve lost my way with it. When I come back to it, it’ll be clear what’s working versus what is not, hopefully.

That is not always possible of course - depending on deadlines and the fast paced turnover of records in the realm of the dance industry ... so it’s a challenge.

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

I’m a little wary of using the terms “most” or “many other” as generalisations come at the cost of overlooking nuance.

But I guess what I specifically do is focus on musicality, songwriting and recordings. I have a penchant for jazz instrumentation - and instrumental house in general, which is why the Fat Freddy’s Drop remix was such a huge pleasure - so for me recording a bass or trumpet player is definitely something I want to be doing.

I think the risk of electronic music and using DAWs, is that you can end up with flat and lifeless music ... the challenge is to bring a sense of human warmth, authenticity and presence. One of the ways to do that is to capture the magic of an actual moment, the here and now, via recordings (instruments, synths, field recordings, vocals, whatever), which probably sounds a little esoteric, but there is magic in the now-ness of life.

And then there’s the fact a human-played instrument is just so damned exciting. Expression in music comes in a million little ways, and machines can’t be so perfectly imperfect. Endlessly reproducible algorithms are so boring.

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 and approach towards sound? Do you find using presets lazy?

It’s not about using presets or not, it’s about your taste. If you like the sound then go for it.

Having said that, music made entirely of a bunch of pre-cooked store bought sauces is not going to be authentic or original in any way whatsoever. So if you want your music to sound like microwave pot noodles rather than homemade hand-pulled full flavour noodles served in a broth that took 24 hours to brew - then go for it.

Ha! I’m sure you get the metaphor. There's probably a happy midpoint to be found there. I’m not against presets, I use some sometimes - whatever works really. Like most things in life, it’s not a binary, either / or thing.

Production tools can already suggest compositional ideas on their own. Which of these have proven particularly fruitful in this regard?

Sampling is the art form that keeps on giving, with regards this question.

I often use sampling as a starting point for compositional ideas, and I guess it's not so different from an instrument player taking inspiration from a song’s cadence or the particular way someone plays.

There are so many ways one can use samples for inspiration - embedded directly in a track and giving harmonic and melodic points from which to kick off from, or in a myriad of more modern ways with tools of digital sourcery.

I like to mine jazz records for chord progressions that resonate with a current emotional state ... I’d then use that chord progression to build new harmonic material.



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?

It’s certainly a new frontier of discovery, and we are just at the start of it. For sure there will be helpful compositional tools we can all make use of.

But at the risk of repeating myself - it’s humans that are exciting, not algorithms.