Name: Steve Bates
Occupation: Sound artist, producer, engineer
Nationality: Canadian
Current release: Steve Bates's new album An Infinite Antenna is out September 25th via Constellation.

If you enjoyed this Steve Bates interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Steve Bates interviews about sound, and Colonialism on the Universe and Existence as Vibration.



Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I think contemporary life has expanded the battlefield against individual creativity to almost everywhere and I think trying to remain creative and open and responsive is critical.

Gratefully, an outlet for me has been mostly music. We make fun of hipster coffee because it gets commodified and ego-driven and ventures beyond useful, modest creative actions but it’s important to be creative in small daily gestures. I made a couple little experiments to remind me of this. If I ever check the time and it’s 4:33, I take a snapshot of my phone screen. 4:32 is full of promise and 4:34 is a missed opportunity. It’s just a goofy John Cage reference but it entertains me.

Another little experiment is to take a photo whenever I notice an interesting texture on the ground. I stand and frame my feet and snap a photo of the ground I’m standing on. Accumulated they are more interesting than individually. Just little gestures like this are good reminders for me to try and always be looking and listening openly.

I think someone making strong decisions about the clothes they wear can be written off as self-obsession or being shallow, but what a simple, immediate way to exercise some creative thinking and most of us know what it feels like to be wearing clothes we like.

I remember being in a club in Saint-Louis, Senegal, one night. No one arrived until midnight or so and everyone who came in looked sharper than the last. It was like a parade of beautiful people dressing in their favourite clothes. I don’t think the band started until 2 am. By then it was packed.

I think there are dangerous forces around us that attack creativity on a daily basis in the form of ‘algorithmic governance’, a term I came across from sound scholars, Max Ritts and Karen Bakker. The insidious algorithmic playlist is a good example. What is now ubiquitous background music no one has to think about, was once carefully and creatively - obsessively -
programmed mix tapes made for friends with hand-made artwork. This kind of creative gesture just gets so easily erased and I think it’s fundamentally different than sending someone a Spotify playlist. Night and day difference.

So yeah, be creative wherever and as often as you are able.