Part 2

In the light of picking your tools, how would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I get so annoyed seeing this debate play out on Twitter etc because it comes from such a faulty premise. There’s no such thing as “music of the future,” there’s only music that tries to imagine a future. There’s no such thing as music that isn’t informed by technologies and practices of the past—there’s some kind of “tradition” in everyone’s music, no matter how hard they try to escape it.

Everyone’s music is “of the future” only in the sense that it’s responding to the unique and unprecedented social / technological reality of the present. Everyone’s music is “continuing a tradition” in the sense that it’s using instruments, theories, techniques, and ideas that have developed over hundreds of years.

When you say you’re making “future music,” you have to also acknowledge its roots in existing cultures, ideas, and technologies—otherwise you’re erasing the history of the labor that created the conditions for your music to take shape. When you say you’re making “traditional music” you have to acknowledge your own subjectivity as a contemporary human, who is inherently rooted in traditions, but never solely in them.

I think the dialogue of “future music vs. continuing the tradition” is ultimately harmful because it empowers non-Black artists to engage with musical styles like hip hop, acid house, jungle, and jazz that are clearly rooted in Black history—and others like techno, dub, and electro which are specifically Afrofuturist—from a fantastical mindset in which they’re either completely divorced from the history of Black labor and culture that makes their work possible, or able to somehow authentically capture its essence even though they exist in a completely different context.

I think it’s important to consider and learn about the history that your art springs out from, while also consciously creating from within your own subjectivity. This is something that all the originators and great contemporary minds of electronic music do intuitively.

I’m ultimately hoping that my music reflects my authentic subjectivity and doesn’t rely on malformed or misappropriated cultural imaginaries. But I also want its rich tapestry of influences spanning basically the past 100 years of popular music to shine through. And I intend to always pay respect and situate my work in the greater context of social conditions, institutional / technological development and labor that make it possible.

How would you describe the relationship between technology and creativity for your work? Using a recent piece as an example, how do you work with your production tools to achieve specific artistic results?

I definitely feel like what I’m doing is always guided really strongly by the technologies I’m using.

Whenever I’m making sounds I’m always balancing between doing what the instrument wants me to do (like what’s the easiest thing to do with it—e.g. scroll through presets) and doing what I want it to do (having a sound in my head already and trying to make it appear in real life). I don’t know how specific anything I’m doing is, I kind of just follow my nose until I start hearing something I like … I keep learning more and more things and getting a little more control over what happens but ultimately it’s still a pretty intuitive process.

For the new record I definitely wanted to get better at synthesis and there’s a bunch of lead sounds on it that I designed from scratch, just starting with the default patch in Serum or Operator. There’s also a ton of sounds I got from sample packs and by tweaking presets. The gag is that nobody will know which are which … except for maybe the deepest production nerds – but honestly I try to care the least about their opinions out of all my listeners.

Within a digital working environment, it is possible to compile huge archives of ideas for later use. Tell me a bit about your strategies of building such an archive and how you put these ideas and sketches to use.

I’m always gathering samples, like a digital forager. I used to get a lot of kits from Reddit and hunting on forums. Now a lot of my sounds come from Splice, which is like foraging in a Whole Foods … very easy and satisfying.

I also used to get a lot of sounds from my internet friends, many of whom are amazing sound designers or just collect a lot of useful samples. And these days, there’s a bit of crossover between those two things, because my friends are commercially releasing samples, or I'm remixing their material—I’ve been rinsing my friend Zoey’s new pack for the Rubicon Splice label lately, for example.

I used to collect all my Ableton files in one gigantic project folder, so I could drag channels from one project into another straight from the built-in file browser. This got really disorganized and unwieldy so I don’t do it anymore. However for the past 2 years I’ve been gradually collecting a huge folder of instrument racks containing synth presets and effect chains—I use a lot of effects so I find this to be a better abstraction for patches than just presets inside my soft synths.

I have a lot of ideas that don’t go anywhere compositionally but produce some cool sounds. I try to spend a bit of time going back through these and turning the cool sounds into racks so I can use them later. Often it’ll just trigger a tangent where I hack apart the old idea and make a completely new one out of some of the sounds—this is usually more productive than collecting the racks in a big folder where they lose all their original context.

How do you retain an element of surprise for your own work – are there technologies which are particularly useful in this regard?

Yeah it’s a lot about surprise for me, I do like to have some elements of randomness.

I use a Max 4 Live sequencer called Strokes that makes kind of unpredictable but still very musical Euclidean patterns out of four independent sequencers. Another very surprising device is the LFO-Cluster by Suzuki Kentaro, it basically chains together 6 different LFOs that you can offset from each other and run through really weird and unstable waveforms. I like all the Michael Norris spectral stuff even though I have no idea what any of it does and it never seems to produce the same result twice.

I’m learning to always resample things that I get out of these tools so I can sculpt them into more cogent musical ideas.

Production tools can already suggest compositional ideas on their own. How much of your music is based on concepts and ideas you had before entering the studio, how much of it is triggered by equipment, software and apps?

I don’t really think that much about what I’m going to do before I open a blank file—sometimes I’ll come in with a vague idea that usually can’t really be put into words. Sometimes I’ll make an acapella out of a song I like and start a track as an edit, and often delete the vocal later or turn it into a tiny chop (as I did with “Ski Tool”).



Sometimes I’ll be watching a film and try to cling onto the feeling I got from it and channel that into a track—this doesn’t usually work lol. Some tracks, like “Update” from the new record and “Iris (Cacti Dub),” were started within hours of the end of an all-night rave. If I have the energy I like starting ideas from within that whimsical, delirious post-rave glow.



But on my typical grind, I just kind of start dragging in drums, riffing on software instruments, and seeing what directions I get pulled in. I try to work even when I’m not feeling inspired already, if I have the time and can summon the energy. I will often pick the tempo before I start working which kind of directs my ideas a lot. But I often change the tempo dramatically throughout the process of writing and arrangement.

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

The biggest one was the guitar, I feel like that’s shaped my understanding of music in the most formative way. The traditional 16-note sampler was the second big one—learning how people chop and flip samples. Then after that came the Ableton sampling engine, with all its extreme stretching, pitching, and granulizing abilities.

I think more recently Serum has had a huge influence on me—it’s the first synth I’ve used that’s actually been fun to make sounds from scratch on. So it’s been a huge platform for me to learn about and get comfortable with real synthesis in general.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. Do you feel as though technology can develop a form of creativity itself? Is there possibly a sense of co-authorship between yourself and your tools?

I think it’s already happening for all of us, even without direct AI assistance. The way most of us live our lives now is so digitally mediated, that we’re kind of already blurring the lines between physiological and digital / algorithmic consciousness … our thinking is already shaped very deeply by the activity of algorithms that choose thousands of hours of mental stimuli for us. Even the most self-conscious Luddites in the producer world are still making music “for the algorithm.”

On a more practical level, everybody who makes computer music is intimately familiar with the feeling of collaboration between themselves and the tools in their practice. I guess machine learning will make these tools a little more sophisticated, and take more of the curation out of our hands. But I’m hoping that as a result we’ll be able to do more and more things that were previously impossible, even though it seems like all machine learning can do is try to replicate things that we already recognize and respond to.