Name: Shane Aspegren
Nationalities: American
Occupation: Multi-instrumentalist, composer, author
Current release: Shane Aspegren's Describing The Thing EP is out via Prohibited.
Recommendations: I occasionally post topics about sound and listening on the IG of @ondosound but there are so many great full length books on the topic. A good place to start is this really wonderful book called The Third Ear that I I would highly recommend. I occasionally reread parts of it, and it is slightly outdated, but still a beautiful ode to sound, music, and the ear.

If you enjoyed this Shane Aspegren interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in sound?

I started playing drums at a very young age, so my very early musical experiences were physical. I loved hitting things, but also loved the rhythmic and ambidextrous games between my limbs.

My approach to working with sound over the years has shifted a lot towards a fascination with texture, but I remain very interested in the physicality of sound. That aspect is especially apparent in my “other” sound practice, (ondosound.com) where I am working with sound as a meditative and therapeutic medium.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what are examples for this – and do you feel there is a systematic or logic behind these sensations?

The process of making music has always been, at least partially, about searching for certain emotional responses. I’m not sure that I can verbalize any kind of logic or systematic path towards this.

It definitely becomes a different process when I’m working by myself (as with this new EP and forthcoming album) as opposed to collaborating with other people. Either way, it remains an instinctual process for me. When I have a strong musical connection with someone, such as my longtime music partner Jérome — the other half of The Berg Sans Nipple (and our forthcoming project called Ça Va Chéri) — we have a certain kind of understanding with one another in that search for finding the emotion.



With the new solo music that I’ve been making, i’m often recording many more ideas and then needing to go back with fresh ears later on. My immediate emotional response might not be as clear as I thought it was in the moment. That immediate feedback of what’s working beyond your initial perspective is something that I really appreciate when I’m making music with someone I really connect with.

Having said that, I also love this other one-sided way of working and happy to be releasing solo recordings for the first time.

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

I’ve lived in three really amazing cities as an adult: Paris, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. Each of these places has a distinct olfactory (scent) signature, which evokes very specific memories and feelings.

The sonic fingerprint (ear print?) however, is much less distinct for Paris and Los Angeles. Hong Kong has so many sounds that are so unique to the city. I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I’m currently back here for a project right now and I’m noticing how chaotic and specific that the sounds are here.

I am much more into deep listening in nature these days and I’m happy to able to find that easily in both Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

For some, music equals sound, to others they are two distinct things. What is the relation between music and sound for you? Are there rules to working with sound, similar to working with harmony, for example?

I’ve been very interested in the border between music / sound / noise / silence / etc. I took a long break from recording and composing music with DAWs and computers in general. In that time I became much more invested in my sound healing practice, where I am working with sound in a meditative and therapeutic way. I started doing these fairly elaborate sound baths which incorporated synthesis, binaural sine waves, drones, etc.

In that time, I became extremely interested in playing with the border between purely abstract sound and music ... questioning where that was and if it mattered to me. This comes back to the previous question regarding emotion. I think that there can be emotion in both abstract sound as well as organized music, however I was extremely interested in finding that space where emotion was not as easily manipulated in the way that music can be.

Currently, I’m much more interested in emotional summoning through abstract sound.

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

I think that there are many paths to finding how to be creative. In most ways, I grew up quite sheltered ... a very small town in Nebraska, pre- internet. That ended up being a blessing for many ways, because I had a lot of time to do nothing but practice. I would drive to another larger University city to take drum lessons and then spend my free time exporing on my own.

When I went to University, I discovered all of this other music ... electronic stuff, punk, minimalist composers, free jazz, and music from Africa, Brazil, etc. I’m always appreciative of the time I spent learning to be “good” at percussion and then breaking it apart by discovery and experimentation afterward.

In the end, I think it’s the discovery and experimentation part that is the most important.

Yann Tiersen, in a surprising statement, told me: "I feel more sincere with electronic instruments." Is that something you can relate to?

I probably feel the most sincere through playing percussion ... Just because of this direct, physical nature I was previously talking about.

Electronic instruments, on the other hand, provide more of an element of surprise. I really like the wandering and exploratory nature of electronic instruments — the amount of transformation that can take place through all the possibilities of manipulation.

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 guess that’s exactly what I was saying in my last anwer, however, I also think that limitations are important and even necessary. I enjoy working on projects that have a deadline and limitations, whether that be conceptually or through limitation of means (instruments, recording set up, etc.)

Most often, if the canvas is totally blank, and the limitations are endless, it becomes much more difficult to find a starting point, let alone find what the final thing might be.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your sounds, pieces, or live performances that's particularly dear to you, please?

The track “Describing The Thing” is a good example of the way that I often start with one idea, but then end up completely transforming the original state into something different. This has always been the way I’ve worked, and I will usually revisit certain things — whether they be recordings or ideas in notebooks — and then extract one element or completely transform that initial idea or improvisation into something new.



I had completely finished another track that I called “Describing The Thing” in the spring of 2022. It was a 20 minute drone-y / ambient-ish piece of music that I was planning to release online. But then something didn’t sit right with me about it and I abandoned it.

I listened to it again in early 2023 and didn’t like it at all, apart from the vocals, which I loved. These had been made when I was doing a series of somatic-voice experiments. I was really interested in the vibratory qualities of voice related to certain energetic areas of the body.

I sampled and re-processed these voices, and then used them as the starting point of what became a new version of “Describing The Thing.” In the original version, the voice was the last thing that I incorporated. In the end, it became what everything else was built around.

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?

I probably would not choose lazy as the word, but I do tend to avoid using presets, unless I am using a readymade sound as an initial source to transform. But sometimes preset sounds, especially with age, can evoke a certain quality — an era, for example.

I don’t really adhere to any one way of working with sound and I try to find different approaches. There is also a lot of difference between working with sound in a live context as opposed to recording.

This applies especially to the work that I do with ONDO. The live sessions are very much about physical vibration, whereas attempts at recording this area of exploration has led more towards working with binaural beats and other techniques made for headphones or recorded listening.


ONDO Session Image (c) the artist

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?

Up to this point, I have not been too interested in working with AI.

On second thought, I did experiment with improvising in response to generative sound, but in a more Exquisite Corpse style. To explain, I started by improvising with the AI and then ended up taking out the generative parts, and sending my improvisation on to a collaborator to re-improvise with. I’m much more interested in this kind of responsive and playful way of using something like AI, rather than using it as a means unto itself.

That track will be coming out in the future, however, I’m not certain that I even want to say which track it is. It’s just another game to create something and the important lesson is that it would not have turned out the way it did if it was purely AI generated.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health? What importance does silence hold in this regard from your point of view?

This is a topic that I could discuss for hours, and the basis of the work I do with ONDO (ondosound.com).

I’m currently back in Hong Kong, a city where I lived for 10 years. I am reminded of how incessantly noisy and chaotic it is here. While I am interested in the subtleties of noise as a sonic exploration, the reality of the noise pollution that we live with in cities like this has some serious consequences to our psychological and overall well-being.

For me, deep, listening into nature has become a very important practice. True silence on the other hand, not that there is such a thing, is very difficult for me because of tinnitus.

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 was very conscious of this from a young age, and started wearing earplugs, while playing drums as a teenager.

Unfortunately the reality of playing amplified music for many years still took its toll and I do have a bit of hearing loss, on top of having had tinnitus for many years.These things are both slightly worse on the left side, where I always placed the stage monitor, back when I was touring a lot. Later, DJing certainly did not help out in any way.

I deal with it in many ways. Sam Harris brings up tinnitus occasionally in his meditations and I’ve been grateful for that perspective. Obviously, trying to accept that things are how they are with the sense of equanimity is helpful, but I also deal with it in very practical ways like sleeping with a fan, even in the winter.

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

Well, we certainly live in a visually oriented world, and I do think that sound is under-attended to. Sound and light are essentially the same though and we are just perceiving different spectrums of waves through different perceptive organs ...

It’s funny that the visual has taken over so much. When it comes to soundwaves, we are usually thinking about the auditory part of it, but there’s such a physical aspect to the way we perceive as well.

In that sense, sound is just as much about feeling as it is hearing. This is why we enjoy the loud music that gives us tinnitus after all!