Sean Twitch AMA, June 2022
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vc1bf8EhYrj4cKSKkUyQcBO_MfEGd0nEo_smJz7Nmmc
("From YouTube generated captions, proofread and edited for clarity and added hyperlinks by me, u/canadian-tabernacle.")
Transcript
Part 1 of 6
(00:00:00)
Morning.
Cheers, wicked.
Worked on it long enough.
Don't know.
(00:01:40) “Is your tour featuring a new release afterwards?”
I mean, probably ‘cause hopefully we've recorded some of them. We fucked up the last one. [laughs] Too stressed, but yeah we're gonna try and get as many as we can.
Hello hello.
Yeah, that was a coup getting a Barbican gig. Quite happy about that. It's going to be fun in there, I think. Sounds really good in there, so that's the main thing.
(00:02:55) [Are you playing in Berlin?]
Yeah, we got a Berlin offer. I can't remember what happened with that. So yeah, it might, we might be doing Berlin at some point. But I think, ah yeah, it was in the big concert hall. Can't remember what the issue was with it though. But yeah, we've got a vague plan of going there.
(00:03:20) “Forgot to book a Leeds show.”
Yeah, I know and a Manchester and a Glasgow and fuckin’ everywhere right. I mean I can't expect you all to go to London really, but we're getting into it again slowly, I guess? It's the right way of putting it. I don't know. It's all a bit tentative at the moment because COVID’s quite weird, innit so…
(00:03:45) [Is that Helly Hansen behind you?]
Yeah, it is. Well done! Fucking spotted. You can just tell from the house, can't you, basically. [laughs]
Yeah, I haven't heard Venetian [Snares] in a long time, you know. Fucking hell since Brownout[?], I think, was the last thing I got. So, yeah, hit me up. Stick a link in the chat. You're allowed. I think, unless Twitch stops you doing it, I don't know.
(00:04:28) “Current live set has evolved, if at all, since your first try at touring it before COVID?”
Well, with a long fucking story, I mean. Basically when COVID hit, I had a lot of time on my hands to rebuild a lot of it. So it's, yeah, it’s a lot of it you wouldn't even notice because a lot of it's just porting things to Gen that didn't need to be ported but just because I wanted a bit more control, and that led me off on loads of tangents because once you start building basic things like oscillators, you get a bit mad with all the options. So yeah, that happened and then I got heavily into MC, and then that happened. And then I built a lot more [physical] modeling stuff, and I did that scratching thing that we used on that Gescom thing that we've done about just over a year ago. And then did that and then, and then, yeah the set sort of grew out of all that tech basically. So sty listically, it's not that far off what we've been doing for the last few years because I think we're still in the same sort of place mentally. But, tech wise, the underlying, the kind of back end stuff is all fresh. So yeah. I don't know, I can answer in more detail if you ask more questions.
Cheers for that link, by the way.
(00:06:23) []
Nord modular, no. Not for me. I mean, I, especially since coming to Norway, but even before for probably about five, well since 2013 really. I've had a really small setup. It's basically just computer, controllers, speakers and interfaces. That's it. So, everything else, I'd give to Rob [Brown] or my other mates who were a bit light on kit and money. So like, the Elektrons are with Mike Williamson and my Nord Modular’s still in the studio but it hadn’t been turned on in years. Rob is running a lot of legacy computers to run a lot of this old hardware, and he's got a real, he's got a big setup now actually, because he's got most of the stuff that I used to have, plus the stuff he had. So, what Rob's doing, he don't talk much about it, if I'm being honest. He just keeps it all on the [down low]. So, it's all a bit, he's a fucking enigma, Rob. I've no idea what he's using. You should ask him, basically. See if he can talk him into going on Twitch, maybe. I don't know. He's not the type, really but you know.
(00:07:46) []
Yeah, no. There's definitely more layers. I mean, the, just before we've done the 2018 tour, which was only three dates really. It was just like Melbourne, Tokyo and Dublin, so just before that, we doubled the number of channels that the rig could process because the CPU was getting there at that point and it just seemed sensible. But we weren't really getting the most out of it. So, we were just sticking in extra little bits of layers, trying not to fuck the music too much by just cramming too many bits in. But with this set, it was written with both of us running 16 channels each now. So it's sort of, there's just more opportunity for having bits in there that are maybe textural or sort of. I don't want to say background because they're still key but, yeah, it's just a bit more flexible basically. And it means that I can do more staging of things so it can be more mutated, which I'm quite into at the moment. I'm into things that don't seem to have beginnings and endings, that just bleed into each other for ages and having more layers makes that a bit easier.
(00:09:04) "Sick ringtones?"
Yeah, you know what? I've got some sick ringtones in my phone. I should just share them. Maybe. I don't know, did mine? So, you know.
(00:09:21) “Any plans to release your live sets from the 90s to early 2000s?”
Yeah, so we've got a bit of a mixed bag of recordings from 2010. So, some of them were ones that Jamie [Harley], our sound guy, done with his little mic set up and then mixed with his soundboard recordings and then some of them are his soundboard recordings. And then we started just traveling with a Zoom or a little TASCAM that Rob's got and recording our own so that's why everything that's been released since has just been our own recordings. But we do have and we've got a very, very spotty archive of prior sets, but most of them have leaked now. So they're, they were gigs where, because we were recording stuff early on. Other people would do it, like the venue or the promoter secretly record it, and then later on we'd get given a DAT and because we didn't have the originals, you know. They've leaked eventually, because somebody's been good enough to throw at an Archive.com or whatever so. There isn't an awful lot in the old archive that isn't out there already. I think the Sankey's set from ‘94 isn't up, and that's quite a good one and there's probably a few others, there's probably like five max. But they're all sets that are up there, they're just different versions of those sets so you know.
I've got to scroll back here a bit. Wait.
(00:10:56) “Oversteps and Confield shows would be amazing.”
Yeah, you know what, I don't know if there's any recordings other than that Lee's Palace one, which is pretty good, but it weren't the best set on that tour at all. I think the best one was in this tiny little black box venue, I can't fucking remember where it was now, cause I think it was it might have been Columbus, Ohio? That place was fucking amazing. The sound in there was mad and it was like, yeah, I was able to get pretty forensic during the set, so. That was my favorite gig on that tour, I remember it really vividly. And the Princeton one was pretty good, and there's a sort of shit video of that kicking around. But yeah, the, we haven't got recordings of any of them other than the stuff that's leaked already.
Thanks for all the props by the way.
(00:12:03) “Are you considering releasing any of the live sets from 2022 this year?”
Yeah, I mean, if we get time, but we like to put them out in batches, so, and it gives us an opportunity to kind of standardize the feel and the recordings a little bit because obviously they're a lot, they're all a little bit varied because of the venue, and so levels have to be a bit different and stuff. And there's a certain degree of post-production. I mean literally, just like topping and tailing the things and making sure that there's no clipping and, you know, little things like that so there'll be tiny micro edits just to get rid of any kind of horrible glitches that might have happened so, I like to do all that in one go and then. So yeah, I don't know if this year, because we might still be doing this set next year depending on how it evolves and mutates because obviously we're changing it all the time anyway, so. So yeah, I'm, it, probably basically. But not, I don't know if it would be this year, might be next year, probably next year, the way things are going.
Oh fuck, I've lost the chat. How'd you get it back? Right
(00:13:18) []
“Sankey's set.” My goodness, yes. [laughs] No way, someone was there, yeah.
Yeah, Flutter, fucking, we did a really kind of slow burnt out version of Flutter in that Sankey's set and it's pretty good. It's, like, quite different to the other ones. It's like playing it at 33 except the sounds that's a lot down, you know. But yeah, that was fun. But yeah, I've got a DAT of that somewhere in Manchester, so.
Yeah, it's washable. You know, I'm not, I, no one's asked me where we got that sample from, but I don’t really want to to tell you anyway,
Yeah, cheers for all the props, nice.
(00:14:05) []
[laughs] I'm not naming gear anymore. I've give up, I've give up. I can't do it. But yeah. All right, your DX11 is called “Harold Mika.”
(00:14:24) []
Remixes? Yeah, fuck, I had a request recently off, what's her name, Mike [Paradinas]'s girlfriend? Meemo Comma. But yeah I, was a bit busy with getting the set ready, so I didn't do it. But, I don't know. Maybe I'll do that down the line if she's still up for it. And then. I don't know, I got some other bits like requests. I had one from these Austrian electro guys. Fuck, I can't remember their name now. They're good though. They're fucking really good, they're on Trust. Don't know if you check that Trust label in Vienna. It's fucking high-end shit. But yeah, like, there was, there's a few requests coming. I'm always too fucking busy because there's just so much going on. But usually just me farting around with patches though, to be honest. So, I don't know if anyone else would care.
(00:15:30 ) []
Beyond Max? Ah, this is [vapes]. You know what, there's so many more interesting technologies that come along that you can plug into Max and use within Max that I don't bother checking other stuff out. I'm really slack and I've never been like anyway. I'm not like one of these people who knows every synth, knows every bit of gear, I just tend to, like, buy one thing and then get really into that because I'm quite obsessive actually. And, you know, I don't know I, sort of it's like with artists, I do the same thing with music. I, like, find an artist and just obsessively listen to one artist for a year which is, I know it's not normal, but it is what it is. But yeah, so I tend to do that with gear and Max is a bit of a bottomless pit. So I haven't got bored with it yet. But at some point, I probably will and then I'll probably just dump it and just not use it at all for a bit because that's just the way I am with stuff. So yeah, I don't really, I don't have favourite synths and stuff like that really, I just tend to get stuff and then I'll find good stuff within anything really that you put in front of me. But with Max, there's just no end to it. Especially with Gen because you can always slightly incrementally improve the thing that you built two years ago. So, you might just rebuild things quite a lot. I spend a lot of time doing that. I'm quite into refining things at the moment, getting them optimum and getting them as efficient as I can and, you know, yeah.
(00:17:13) “How do you consider a release an EP?”
It's, yeah, so. Albums tend to have a kind of, PLUS should’ve been an EP, and it should’ve had two, three tracks removed from it, but I was being greedy, but that's what we should’ve done. PLUS was basically it should have been an EP. It felt like an EP when we were compiling it. Normally, that kind of thing would be an EP, so we'd do the album and then we'd have a bunch of other tracks that didn't really fit on the album because, the albums, we don't design them to sound a certain way, they just sort of, they just grow. You know, like, you sort of find yourself noticing as you're doing it that there's a thread and you follow the thread, and then eventually, you might, towards the end of it, you might do a couple of tracks to fit on the album because you've got an idea of what the thread is, but, you know, at the beginning, we're just doing scattershot stuff. We're just trying out loads of different things, and then the thread just, kind of, reveals itself. So EPs don't really work like that. There's a rule we tend to just find the tracks that go on the EPs from what's left from when we did the album. So I won't say they're like off cuts, but there's stuff that just wasn't part of that thread. So they'll be like good tracks, but just not, they just don't fit the album vibe, you know.
(00:18:49) “What sound textures?”
I'm a feeling, I can't answer questions like that. They're too weirdly vague. Yeah, it's a bit like asking me what my favourite colour is. I just don't, I don't fucking know. Like, anything that sounds good. I mean, it's too, there's too many things that I like. Too poly.
(00:19:17) “Is a new album in the pipeline?”
Yeah, new album's always in the pipeline, but how far down the pipeline is, I couldn't tell you at the moment. It's mainly I've been working on this live stuff, but it's, again like, albums tend to grow out of the same machines that are doing the live stuff now, and there are various parts of the rig. Like, I've got my version of the rig. Rob's got his version, which is a, it's been mutated so much it's not really the same rig anymore. And then there's a version that’s ported to [Max for Ableton] Live before we did SIGN and PLUS and all that was very different because there's not as much recursion in it. It's a kind of top-down, kind of, control hierarchy and I'd say both of them are good systems, but they're very different the way that the rig works in Max, when we're running it in Max is that everything's real-time. So, everything's informing everything else and there's a lot more cross-communication. So, there is no hierarchy as such, it's more of a web of interactions, whereas the Ableton stuff is very hierarchical. It's, there's a kind of top layer of control information and then everything else responds to that, and that's how SIGN was done, and I'm, I got a bit bored with it, if I'm being honest. It was like, it's good, but I prefer the web to the tree. Just more interesting for reasons, so yeah. So, album wise, I don't know, it'll probably grow out of this stuff that we're doing and I've been recording loads. Some days, I'll just record like an hour or two. A lot of days actually, but it'll, you know, be the same few patches working with each other over the hour, and it'll be just me jamming with it for a bit and that might end up being like a 5-10 minute track, so. Just depending really how much good stuff there is in there and on everything else like flow. So yeah, it's a bit hard to say when an album will be ready. I don't know when I can be bothered to put it together. I'm more interested in doing the gigs at the moment just because it's been so long. It's been like, is it four years since we were doing gigs? So I was pretty keen to get back out, you know, as you would be, I guess.
(00:21:56) “EP7 and Move of Ten, L-Event are considered EPs?”
Yeah exactly. So, Move of Ten. PLUS is like Move of Ten basically. Same sort of thing. It’s like, no, it doesn't quite fit together as a release but everything that's on there, we wanted to put out. So we just kind of bundled them up. It's like a kind of pick ‘n’ mix, you know.
(00:22:18) “Planning to mix on our tracks? ....Acts[?].”
Oh, right, yeah, the DJing. Yeah, I mean just, fucking know, when lockdown happened, I just did that out of desperation actually more than anything. Just wanted to connect with loads of people because I knew what was coming. But after a bit, I felt like I’d kind of whittled it down to a small crew of nutters, and I was like “well, I'm just in this room with all these nutters now so, time to stop.” Obviously, I love you all, but you know, nothing lasts forever. But yeah, I'd probably do some more streaming in a bit. I've done a radio show actually for a little web radio project. The person called Lucy runs, but I don't know what happened to that. I did that ages ago, but I'm sure that'll surface at some point. But yeah, beyond that, long Mixlr things could do. I mean I sort of feel like people know my record collection pretty well now and, you know I mean, a lot of it's old because that's what happens when you're old, you've got a lot of old music. You don't throw music away just because there's new music coming out, so. You know, it just tends to, even though I am buying stuff obviously, I still keep up with stuff, but it's just obviously, the majority of the music that I own is old and when it comes to putting playlists together, I don't rule things out, so I'll just be picking from everything. In fact, the only time we've really done that is when we did that Dekmantel thing because they specifically asked me for an electro mix and I thought oh I wouldn't normally do that because I don't like cutting the options down too much with DJing. But yeah, maybe. In the future, a bit of Mixlr streaming. I mean, the last few streams that I did during lockdown were all just from iTunes, so they weren't prepared or anything, it was just, you know, it's just me farting around with iTunes, so. They weren't really mixes as such. I prefer doing mixes and spending a bit of time on getting everything right. I mean, the live mixing is fun, but I quite like doing bits of it prepared and then mixing them up live, so. Yeah, I don't know, it takes time basically, and I don't have a lot of time to do that kind of thing lately, so.
(00:24:50) "Music obsession?"
I'm, I don't know this year, you know. Been enjoying Patricia Taxxon quite a lot. I went through a Henry Cow thing a few years ago and there's a lot of Henry Cow, you know. That's quite a lot of stuff to digest, so that was probably, like, for about three years. That was basically they were the only thing I was listening to, sort of, around the time we've done NTS [Sessions]. Lately, I quite like r beny, if that's how you say his name. I like his stuff a lot, it's really deep. Yeah, I don't know, I don't like naming people because I feel like I'm not naming the other people and I ain't got my iTunes and always forget names, but next time I come on here, if I do, I'll have a list of artists that I bought lately that I've liked because I'm always, like, rating stuff on iTunes but it's just my library so. I don't share that with anyone, really. Maybe I should. I don't know, I’ll think about that.
(00:25:56) “You play video games? What are some of your favorites?”
Tempest. Centipede. I mean, I'm old right? So…
(00:26:08) “Do you reuse a lot of Max subpatches? How old is the oldest part in your patches you're using?”
Oh, that's a question. Yes to the first part because they're tools ultimately. I build tools now. I didn't used to, I used to make like a one patch per track thing and the track would be the patch but it's more challenging to build tools that you use more generally. It's a lot more difficult to do that and so I find that more interesting personally. So yeah, I do.
(00:26:43) "How old is the oldest part?"
[coughs] I'm vaping too much, sorry. Not dying! So how old is the oldest part? I don't know, I don't, I don't know. 20 years, 25 years? Probably still using bits from when we've done EP7 because that was the first release where we properly used Max. It's the first release work, in fact I think it's the first release where we use Max at all, yeah, it is. So yeah, there's bits because that original, I think the first track I did in Max was Liccflii off EP7. So that was, and there are bits of the way that that works, or the idea behind the way that the rhythm works in that that I still use now, and it's just part of the vocabulary of our program rhythm in Max so. But I don't know if you could strictly say that it's the same patch. It's not, it'll just be like part of the funk, the way that the patch works with metros and delays and stuff like that, so. Yeah, it, and things get revised so often you just it's like Ship of Theseus style stuff where you don't really know if you're dealing with the same thing anymore by the end of it, but it's, sort of, got the same name and it's just got a new version number, so. The rig itself is like that now as well, just the basic underlying architecture that means that we can play all the channels at once and everything has changed so many times, but, the key, we just give it version numbers. I mean, at the moment, I'm running, like, I'm still on version four of the rig. The rig that I'm using is version four but it's like, I think, the last update that I made was a thousand and, no, it's 1100, 1102 or something, so. That's how many versions of it they've been. It's just, yeah, it's quite a lot, so. I keep them all because they're tiny, aren't they, so.
(00:28:50) “Live set’s so great for using my rowing machine!”
I used to have a rowing machine. It was in the garage when I was a kid. I think my dad had bought it and he didn't use it. It's one of them classic middle-aged “I'm gonna buy a rowing machine,” you know, then it just sat there in the garage, and then eventually he let me put my decks in the garage, so. I used to just sit in the garage, like, doing mixtapes and then listening to them while I was going on the rowing machine, Fun days, right.
(00:29:17) “Are there any soundboard recordings of the [tri repetae] tour?”
Yeah. George Robey, but it wasn't the tri rep tour, but it was the same set, so. There's a George Robey. There was one from, I think, Cork? Ireland? Yeah, Cork, I think there's one from there, somewhere. And there's the Flex gig in Austria, which is, I think, the same set. You know I'm not, I ain't got a perfect memory, so. “I think so” is the answer.
(00:29:59) “Vividly remember your Glasgow set on that tour. It's my favourite gig of all time.”
Thank you.
(00:30:04) “Live albums almost sound like albums in terms of flow.”
Thanks. Yeah, I mean, honestly I think that the live stuff is probably where I put most of my attention these days. I was, when we were doing the 2015 set, originally which was 2014, I was thinking ‘right, it's this, I'm treating this like an album, really work it and not it just be like a kind of hardware thing’ that because I think before that, before we built the rig, we didn't really have, you know, we did the studio tracks but it was clear to us that there was a big qualitative difference between that and what we could do live with patterns and loops and stuff, and I'd moved quite a way away from using loops just compositionally during the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, and it just wasn't really possible to do that kind of stuff live. So when we built the rig, we kind of, we were attempting to build something that we could use to make albums with at first because it wasn't really possible to do the transitions because we couldn't figure out how to change 68 patches at once because that was a little bit too difficult for computers, for hard drives basically at the time, and there were bottlenecks and it would jam up and stuff. So when we did Exai, that was what we designed the rig for, but we kind of, we knew that if we could just nail our transitional bits and make it work properly, that we'd be able to use it to do, effectively, live albums like that. So yeah, that first tour in 2014, which was just when we got it to work, we just got it to do the transitions, not totally neatly but neat enough to be able to do a gig, and that was the first attempt at doing that and that was, we were trying hard to make it work like an album, you know, but, you know, be flexible enough and rough enough and chaotic enough to feel good and live and not stayed and kind of too worked and sort of have all the life sucked out of it, which is how albums feel quite a lot of the time. Not our albums, obviously, but you know. A lot of albums, you get that feel, don't you, like someone's worked on something too much and I don't like that, I like, I prefer the kind of immediacy that you get with live stuff, so. Yeah, it's about, kind of, having the amount of detail and sort of depth that you would get in an album but have the immediacy and the kind of rawness of a live set, you know, that's kind of what, that's the sweet spot for me, that's what I really like. When we started out doing tracks, most of the good ones were done in real time. They weren't, we didn't have planned out arrangements, we'd just kind of do a few versions of the track live, where we were doing different pattern changes and then just, kind of, either select the best one or do as few edits as we could and that's kind of how I like working the most. I never really like DAW composition or, you know, I've got, I got into trackers for a while but they're not really a great fit for me. Having lists of things, it starts to feel too static and, like, there's a kind of, there's an element of being perfectionist in there that I don't, it just doesn't work for me. I Don't like that kind of thinking. It's kind of cryptofascist bullshit, so, you know, anyway.
(00:33:44) “Either excited to cross the [English] Channel?” “Do you plan to some day extend Mixlr mixes due to the pandemic itself looking ahead?”
Yeah, I've been asked that already, I might do. Depends on stuff.
(00:33:57) “Which track should have been removed? [from PLUS]”
From, are you asking me about PLUS there, I assume so? Yeah, the, sort of, the more mellow synth ones. I probably would have pulled off and just kept the beatty ones on there and then the mellowy synth ones that are just thrown out as little one-offs in different places. So it's just about context and it's not like I wouldn't have released them, it's just that, as a compilation, it was perhaps a little bit hasty to call it an album, but you know, you live and learn.
(00:34:29) “You ever felt tempted to start teaching techniques and your discoveries in a Skillshare course?”
Oh fuck, I’d just be such a bad teacher. I'm so kind of, I'm such a, kind of, not, I'm not a very organised thinker in that sense. It's what my dad always used to, my dad, you know, my dad used to drive rally cars when he was young and then he was, he'd done, like, pursuit driving. He was a fucking good driver but he'd never teach my mum how to drive because he was afraid that she'd pick up his bad habits and something like that with me, you know, I just, I'm a little bit like “well, can't you just figure it out for yourself?” I kind of, the thing I like about Max is that it lets me try out lots and lots of different things and then figure out which ones work and I think that's quite a productive way of working. It's not, a lot of people think that you have to have this kind of, you know, strong conceptual idea that you then realise and that makes you creative, but I don't, I don't think that being creative should be the goal actually. I think that making good work should be the goal. Quite often, just doing a lot of random shit and then noticing that something's amazing can produce better work, just, that's what experience has shown so, you know. I'm not saying it would work like that for everyone, but I don't do the kind of having a way to do things and then doing the things, it's just too boring for me, So teaching people, it's a little bit antithetical to what I like doing. I like having the freedom to just try out loads of different shit and I think that's what Max is good for and I feel like if people want to learn it, you know, they should learn it on their own and do their own thing. I think it's really important that everyone has their own voice and does their own thing, you know, and not learn how to do it from some fucking so-called expert which I'm definitely not, you know. There are people on the Max forum with 10 times the knowledge that I've got. I don't know whether they're making good work though so, you know, but that's down to taste, right? That's a purely subjective thing whether you think a piece of work is good, so. Yeah, it's a can of worms really, but I don't, you know, I didn't go to art college, I didn't even really like music, like, music tech engineering college. I didn't even really like that, you know, there was still too much of people saying “that's the right compressor. That's the right way to do that job. That's an expert drum miking technique” and I just used to think “oh, fuck off man, like can't you just find your own way,” you know? So, yeah, anyway, that. Find your own shit, Do your own shit. Do it your own way. It doesn't matter, there is no right and wrong, you know. Make your own mistakes. Learn from them. Mistakes are really valuable. They're like the number one valuable thing that you can have is to make mistakes, so do that.
(00:37:44) “You've recently watching the HD version of plyPhon visualized?”
Yeah, I like that! So, okay. So like, the plyPhon video, I like, it's very fucking derivative of Alex [Rutterford]. That's why we didn't work with that guy ‘cause I just felt like it was too close and I'd rather work with Alex if I was going to do something like that again because I like Alex. His sense of everything, he's just got brilliant design sense. He's got very good taste, Alex. That's the thing that gets overlooked I think, but I think the plyPhon vid's good and it's definitely not shit or ugly or anything like that. It's just that it's a little bit too, it felt too familiar. It's like hearing somebody do, it's like listening to Wisp and thinking “well yeah it's good, but it's just like it just sounds like somebody who really really likes Aphex [Twin],” you know. So it's not that it's bad, it's just, yeah, it's just it is what it is, right? So, and I feel like it's someone else's voice. It's like singing in someone else's voice, which is something that I would never do
(00:38:51) “Use of reverb's always been inspiring.” "Designing reverb in songs"
Yeah, I mean I sort of, a lot of my reverb… Wow, look at this bug! Oh, it's flown off. Fucking yeah, a lot of my reverb is like tuned, so. Because this was always the thing with 80s reverb, I love 80s reverb but there's like, you could always hear a good producer in the 80s because they would, like, not just arbitrarily shove the reverb on something, it'd be somehow in tune with the other elements in the track. You get it more in hip-hop than anywhere else. You get it where somebody's laid the beat down and the reverb's in the mix already, but then the MCs come in. The MCs got the reverb in his cans and somehow it's informing the pitch of what he's doing. He's sort of in tune with the whole tuning of the track and I don't know how much of it people are aware of when they do this stuff, but I just think that they do it anyway. They just do it naturally, right? So they just find the tuning. It's a bit like if you write a beat on a [Roland TR-]606 and then you go to write a [Roland MC-]202 pattern over it. You're gonna write something that's in tune with the snares and the hats for it to sound good. You don't just, sort of, arbitrarily, because I've never done that. I've never thought “oh these are rhythm elements and their pitches are unimportant and these are the, this is the songwriting,” you know, I can't think like at all. To me, the whole thing is music, so, and I think good producers, this is what makes good techno producers a lot of the time is that they've just they've just got a knack for picking up that natural tuning, and it's the same way that you might pick up the natural, the types of rhythms that work at different tempos for example, you know what I mean? So, and you'll have the types of tunings that work with certain drum machines, if they're not drum machines you can tune. I mean you can tune a 606, I guess, if you get the back off, but a lot of people don't. So yeah, so, I think with reverb, that the sort of 80s reverbs a lot of the time, they had a very definite tuning. They had the sound that some people had described as metallic and inharmonic, but you always got a sense that there was some sort of key coming off it, sort of [high pitched decay] or [low pitched decay], you know, different notes and so I quite often use very simple reverb topology, but like, I have a handy influence in the tuning of it, so depending on what the chords and the melody are doing. The reverb's tuning will be different and it'll change over time, that's the key thing. I think, if you want to get that “Autechre reverb sound” but again, like, I'm not telling you how to do it that way, that's just what I like. I just like those shitty reverbs from the 80s, the [Alesis] Midiverb and the Quadriverb, you know. The topologies are seriously fucking useful and very very low on your CPU and give you that sound, and if it's that sound you're after, which in my case is just down to experience of having had those machines for years and just loving them, because I've had them for years, you know what I mean? I've just grown to love them the way that you love your dog or something, so, you know. It's like that for me and I'm not saying that they're the best type of reverbs, they're definitely not, you know, There are some modern convolution reverbs that are just beautiful, that thing Zynaptiq did, whatever it's called, that's a seriously gorgeous sounding thing but it is what it is, right? It does what it does, so, and you know, quite often I'll use other techniques that aren't reverb at all. So I'll have like lots and lots of delay lines and all-passes, but not set up in a normal reverb topology and just explore different topologies because there's just so many ways you can connect all-passes and delays and combs that you can make anything almost any of those combination of those things is going to be a bit reverb like, but you might find that it might make more interesting tones or sounds than you would get from a reverb that's been designed to be an all-purpose reverb, if you know what I mean so. Quite often that the smaller shit of topologies can sound more interesting, so, and there are no rules with reverb. When you start researching different types of reverb design over the years, you realise that there are no hard and fast rules. Everybody's just doing different shit, and some of the more, most effective topologies aren't necessarily the most complex, you know. Getting complex results doesn't rely on building a complex machine. This is a really important thing to know, you know, that sometimes the most simple machines can give the most complex results and the most pleasing results. You might not even be after complexity, you know. It's something I like but not everyone does, but yeah. Just experiment, basically, but that's just general advice. I'd say always experiment.
Yeah, not anything commercial. I had it on my phone for a while. I love it. I think it's a beautifully built piece of software. It's a lot of fun to use but I'm just not into trackers enough to get the most out of it, but I would absolutely recommend it to anybody who is because I think as a toolset it’s phenomenally powerful. And I think, and I mean, you know, I have huge respect for the thought process underlying it in both in terms of the interface and its functionality. I just think it's a great, great piece of software. It's probably one of the best trackers out there and it seems to be totally unused because I don't hear it tracks and think “Wow, SunVox! There it is,” you know, so. Everyone goes for Renoise. I love Renoise. I think it's beautiful, it's, but, you know, it's big now. It's like iTunes, you know. It's big. SunVox still feels slick and, I don't know, apples and oranges. What, I don't know why I'm saying that really, to be honest.
(00:44:52) “Do you feel the urge to release music anonymously outside of the well-known?”
Money, because we can't contractually, at the moment because our Warp deal literally says that we can only release music under the name Gescom if we don't do it as Autechre, and we only choose to release stuff under the name Gescom if our mates are involved or if it's a project where it's for our mates, so. Yeah, the answer is, the short answer is we can't at the moment. Do I feel the urge? Yeah, I mean, all the time, you know, set up some random Bandcamp and shove some stuff out and not have the pressure and not have the expectations, yeah. That seems fun or produce some records for people that are like, you know, not the type of thing that people would expect from us and not have to deal with the fallout of the criticism for having tried something new. Yeah, you know, those are tempting things, but they're not so tempting that they're gonna make me go and do them immediately. I don't know if our Warp deal run out. I'm not sure that I would immediately start producing hip-hop records or anything but maybe.
Got bees there, you'll have to excuse me. So.
(00:46:10) Do you think I'll always be making and release or music?
As long as I can, you know. I mean, if I went deaf or something, I'd have to stop one night, so. Although I'd probably still try and figure out a way of doing it. Like, if it was me here that went [deaf], I'd probably use bone conduction or something because that works. Did you know you can hear up to 60 khz with bone conduction? It's crazy, right? That's what I heard, so.
(00:46:38) “How do you not burn out by putting out so much stuff? What keeps you in the loop of creativity?”
I don't, I mean, I see this, I see people talk about this burn out and, you know, when players work, it doesn't work like that. You don't burn out when you, I don't have, I mean I say to people I'm working if they're like “oh, are you coming out?” I'll be like “no, I'm working,” but I don't really mean working, what I mean is “no, I'm playing with my toys,” so. It, I don't think you can burn out doing something like that. I don't think it's possible and I like routine because, you know, I'm neurodivergent, so, it, I like routine. I like things to be in the places. I like to do the same thing every day. Those things appeal to me so I don't think, I think burning out, I mean, you know. I'm more likely to have a meltdown if everything suddenly becomes very unpredictable and weird. You know, COVID didn't put that much pressure on me because it was the life I was living anyway, so. It's just like “oh well, now everybody's doing what I'm doing except that they all are complaining about it,” but okay.
(00:48:00) “You don't seem to communicate much on stage.”
The rehearsal, or is it? It's an intuitive thing. We don't rehearse at all, but the rig, we do share, so, you know. We've, I've got bits of Rob’s stuff. He's got a fully up-to-date version of what I'm doing all the time, so he gets nightly, almost, builds, yeah. So, that happened. I think he can run my rig in his house so he knows exactly what it'll do, but he doesn't know quite how I'm gonna play it on the night and so I'll be doing surprising things with it and it'll be reacting to him with his controllers, so it's a kind of, yeah, it's very much an intuitive thing. We both know what the parameters are that are available to us but we don't quite know where the other person is going to flex it and we'll react to each other and he does occasionally say things like “that's top” and so I'll just stay there for a bit, you know, and work it and I'll, but you know, I've already thought it myself usually. I've thought “wow, that's top,” so, you know, because I would just find some weird little pattern or something and be like “ooh,” you know, but when I hear him doing it all the way through the set as well. So it is purely intuitive, yeah. I think you don't, we don't, we didn't really talk about stuff a lot anyway in the old days. We would just know when things sounded good and I mean you just, you know when you hear a good bit in the track when you're out with your mates, you sort of turn to one of your mates and you go “ooh,” you know. You don't say “ooh” and then a sentence about why it's good, do you know what I mean, so. You just know, right? You just know when things are good.
(00:49:35) “Pandemic drones, will they be available somehow?”
The pandemic drones? What's that? Give me more information, I don't understand.
(00:49:45) “Have you heard the newest Ákos Rózmann on Ideologic Organ?”
Oh no, I haven't. Maybe I should check it? I've literally only been listening to Autechre for about a year. So, ask me any questions about other artists. I won't know the answers. Just doing my own thing. Living in my own funny little world.
(00:50:05) “I always thought you'd be more into foobar than iTunes.”
Yeah, you know. I quite like iTunes. It's quite, it's good for, it used to be good for organising a lot more than music. So I used to have all my video playlists and shit in there. Video playlists, right? I mean, fucking hell. [vapes]
(00:50:31) []
I mean, don't burn out by not doing something that you, if you don't want to burn out, don't do stuff that you don't enjoy doing, you know what I mean? If you're like a hardware person and you hate the DAW timeline bullshit, don't do it! It's that simple. If you just do what you want to do, if you get bored doing one thing, using one piece of technology in one way, use it a different way or use a different technology. Buy something new. Change it up. Don't get bored, but basically that's the key to not getting burnt out, if, for me, but this, you know, I can't give general advice. I'm not normal enough!
(00:51:09) “Liccflii is an amazing track.”
Thank you.
(00:51:12) “The Max tools thing, you have a way of standardizing inputs and outputs so that you can plug everything into everything else?”
So, it's complicated. Yes and no basically. Yes, because it's Max and so there are three module types: there are, so there are sequencer modules and they output control data only, and then there are synth modules and they imp… they receive control data and output audio data, and then there are effects modules which technically do all of the above, right. So, the synths output control data as well, I should have said. So, the control data goes all the way down the hierarchy. The audio data starts at the synth and then carries on through, right, so, but, so technically an effect unit can be a synth and a sequencer as well and they are a lot of the time too, and yeah, the other key difference between our system and other systems is that we don't use keyboards so there's no on, no off thing. The notes are sent by duration, which means that the synths and the effects units know the duration of the event that's about to happen, so they know what to do within that time, because coming from a tape background, I didn't, I never liked how with DAWs you had your envelope on your synth and then it would always just be the same shape, right? So, because it had to be because it was sort of the attack portion at least and the decay portion would always be the same sort of length. I mean, you can vary with using velocity and stuff like that, but it's just really imprecise and I never really like that, so, and with tape you always know how much time you've got to fill ahead of doing the edit right? So, you know you've got an eighth note to fill, you've, you know what you can fit in that or you know you've got three eighth notes or whatever it is, so, or not notes, just seconds, milliseconds, whatever, So you sort of think differently when you compose with tape and I grew up doing that. That's, that was the first stuff I did, so. So I build my synths in that way where they know ahead of schedule how long the note is going to be so they can make something more appropriate for that length of time, if that makes sense, so everything has to be able to talk to everything else and that means the effects units also have to be aware of things like note duration and pitch and also the other available pitches, the other pitches that the other instruments are playing, so all the sequencers know what the other sequencers are doing at all times. So yeah, I mean it's standardised but it's very flexible, I mean in so far like the effects units are the most flexible because they receive audio and control data and they output audio and they add control data to each other, so they can effectively they can do everything, so you could just build your whole track inside an effects unit if you wanted. So, it's as flexible as Max ever has been really, but it's just that by having these kind of layers of control, it means that I can be a bit more, I can think a bit more like somebody using hardware so I have, that's why I have discrete sequences because I sort of, it's just conceptually a little bit easier to work with for me, coming from a MIDI background and a hardware background. So I have, you know, synths, effects units and sequencers because they're the elements I'm familiar with, but obviously in Max it's nothing. Nothing is what it seems, so. Yeah, I thought that makes sense.
(00:54:54) “Do you listen to other Warp artists from time to time, not just Aphex, Squarepusher et cetera?”
What's the et cetera, I don't know? I really like Tom [Jenkinson]'s thing that he did for NTS, that live acid sort of drum machine, that was fucking so good. Yeah, I don't know, like, no, probably, but I don't listen to much stuff like in that sort of area anyway. I don't really listen to Aphex and Squarepusher that much, to be honest. I probably should do because they're my mates and contemporaries but I just, it's just not on my radar really musically. Richard [D. James] used to be, but I kind of drifted away from that whole mindset quite a while ago in the late 90s.
(00:55:47) “That rig have a graphical UI?”
Yeah. I mean because it's Max, right, so, but it's pretty minimal. I mean it's mostly, like, the slots, the slot names. I don't know, I'll have to show you and I can't do that right now because my phone, you know, but it's pretty bare bones. I don't really use a lot of display of data. I just have like a little, I have a spectroscope and a little oscilloscope and an XY phase scope. They're the only consistent interface elements. All the sequences and effects units and stuff, they're like mostly just lists of variables and, sort of, the occasional function, so, and, yeah, that's kind of it. They're pretty bare. I don't really like having a lot of visual stuff going on. It just makes the patches not work, so.
(00:56:42) “How do you feel about people cheering, ruining the intervals of silence during the last mome[ment's of the Melbourne show]?”
Yeah. Well it's just Pavlovian as fuck. It's just like, big chord, wait, big chord, you know. So it's a bit like, [laughs] this is sort of funny but weird, yeah, you know. It's a bit embarrassing. It's a bit cringy, innit, but you know.
(00:57:05) “I feel you keep forgetting... Any interesting stories from being on tour?”
I need a piss, so I'm going to end this and come back in a minute. Bye.
Part 2 of 6
Yeah sorry, I just needed, it's just basic human stuff, right? I mean, I'm scrolling back. Wait, what's happening here? All right, fucking, all right I’ll exit. You're alright, I'm fucking… God, you've posted loads of shit, fucking hell! [laughs] I must’ve been talking for ages, shit! Erm.
“Do you feel lost sometimes?”
No. Wait.
“Do you have a favorite record you've made?”
No, do you, were you, well prob, I mean, every day, yeah, maybe a little like a daily favorite, you know what I mean, like today I really like this, depends on mood right, so, depends on what mood I'm in. So no, basically. I cite the favourite colour question. I can't answer questions are that weird.
“Were you playing France soon?”
Maybe? Don't know. I had a Paris offer. Might do something with GRM actually. I don't know.
Mari Hamada, yeah, right, that, honestly we did that track. We sent it off to her because they'd sent us the vocal for the Mari Hamada thing, and it was a bit rough around the edges but it was good. So, we'd done the track around the vocal and then sent it to [her] and then they said “oh no, we want to re-record the vocal. That was just a guide track,” and I was gutted because I'd mixed it and all that. So then, they did the mix and they put the vocal really loud and put a load of reverb on it and it sounded weird. It was just, it was not at all the way that it sounded originally. I think the original is much nicer but it's not out there. So whenever someone says “oh I really like that,” I always feel a bit weird ‘cause it don’t feel like it's totally my work but you know, anyway.
“Please ask if the sets will share a common theme through to the Barbican set.”
I don't know because that's in October, so, probably, yeah, I mean some, they will share elements and the probably, I mean in all likelihood it'll be mostly similar material but there's a bunch of material that's not aired yet. That's because we've had too long to work on this fucking set, right, so. Least my part of the set is, I don't know, like three and a half hours of stuff, so I don't know how much of it will end up using. Hopefully some more than, anyway.
“Do you feel lost sometimes opening your own Max patches?”
No, I don't comment my code. The patches are their own comment. They, I can tell looking at it what's going to happen. Sometimes I need to stare at it for five minutes to figure out exactly what's going to happen, but I can usually just tell looking at it. I don't make spaghetti patches anymore. I’m much more organised. You've got to be, really, if you want to get a lot of stuff done but I don't comment it. I'm really shit at not commenting code. I don't say “oh this bit's doing this” because I quite often don't think in that way. So, I just have to look at the signal path and figure out how to control. Whatever.
“Do you ever look through r/autechre?”
I've been on Reddit for a long time. Yeah, I mean, I've looked at it. I'll say that.
“I could see the last 20 minutes of your set, but kudos to the live set. You're amazing!”
Thanks guys.
“Is there a time of day when you feel most creative?”
There used to be. I used to be a real night guy. I used to just work at night, you know, I didn't like the hustle and bustle getting in the way of my mindset. All that stuff, but not at all anymore. I'll get up really early and just start working and I'll just work all day and then I'll work until I can't really think anymore, and then I'll just watch some crappy TV so that my brain will slow down enough for me to get to sleep and then I'll sleep, so real fucking basic.
“Any TV shows you'd like watching?”
You know what like, TV shows are weird because they don’t fucking resolve, like I prefer films because there's an ending. TV shows don't have endings and usually even when they do, they're just shit, right? I mean.
“When it was the last TV show you saw that had a good ending?”
Probably Preacher. Preacher ended pretty well, but a lot of other series just don't, but yeah I watch loads of shit TV and it's all shit. It's fucking like, I like Twin Peaks, you know, but that's kind of obvious right? I thought Severance was okay. I think Shining Girls is okay, you know, but I'll probably just forget them in another year. I'll forget that I even fucking saw them so, you know. That's recent stuff, I mean, I don't know older things. I mean, you know, I don't mind The Expanse. It's pretty good, it is what it is. It's a little bit like, yeah, there's something about it that's a bit wrong but I sort of enjoy it, like I quite like it. Yeah, just like, I don't know, I'm trying to think if there's any good TV. I don't know. You know, Black Mirror is all right. It's a bit fucking miserable innit, but you know. Yeah, I don't know. Some things are alright. TV's a bit weird innit because it's soaking up all the money but I don't know if it's producing quality content really. You know, there isn't arthouse TV, is there, you know what I mean? There's like arthouse films but there's no arthouse TV, so it's almost like taking all the, there's no sort of interest in things you know what I mean?
“Where'd you get your ideas from?”
That, that's not a thing. I don't think that's a question. I mean, what is an idea? Tell me what an idea is and I'll answer.
“Amazing output. Over the years Amber was an inspirational listen when it came out.”
Thank you.
“Do you ever create tracks with a particular story in mind taken from the real world?”
Yeah, so not taken from the real world but I do have kind of, I do have, sometimes I have narratives in mind but they're quite abstract. They're not, you know, man goes into room, does thing, the thing happens, interaction occur, you know. They're not like that. They're like feelings of moving through spaces a lot of the time and events taking place, but they're quite kind of abstract and it's, I don't think I can put it into words very well and I wouldn't even if I could because it just, you know, it's too much information for you lot. I think, really, you should just have the tracks and just figure it out by listening but it's nice that you have, so. Thanks for saying that.
“Have you done many collabs with :zoviet*france: before?”
Yes, work with [them] three times or four times back in the 90s. Yeah we, so we quite, we've done gigs with them as Gescom but it was just me and Rob and :zoviet*france: and that was like a full gig that we did in Newcastle. That was really good and then we've done other gigs with them where we've played our set and their set, but in-between, we've sort of mixed the two things so it becomes like a big blend of stuff, like, that worked really well, like really well, and then there was one time when it didn't work very well. I think Ben [Ponton] didn’t like what I doing, messing around on the [Boss] RSD-10 too much, and you weren’t having it. So after the gig he was like [*angry noises*], but I like that about him because he don't, you know, he'll just fucking tell you if you do something shit, so that's, me and Rob are a lot like that, so. I've always really liked them too. I think they're really fucking easy to get along with and work with and all that and it was an honour that they said yes to do that gig, so I'm really looking forward to it. It's been too long really because I haven't seen him for at least 10 years.
“Did you ever use any Dave Smith Sequential stuff?”
No, but, you know, like, I mean, obviously I'm a massive Mantronix fan and Mantronix was all over the Studio 440, so I've got a lot of love for that way of thinking and I think the Studio 440 is sort of a little bit of an unsung hero in production terms. People don't talk about it the way they do the [Akai] MPC and all that, and this probably should, you know, and I was just buying the record, so I had no idea what that was at the time. I just used to buy the records. I've only found out since how it was done and, yeah, I mean that shit's fucking good, like it is really, really good. Well made shit. I know Richard's got a 440 and he's got drum tracks and some other bits, but yeah, I've never owned any of that, so I just enjoyed music by people who did, so. [vapes]
“Have you ever heard of de wunge punge[???]?”
No, and no. It don't matter that you put a trollface because I can't be trolled by some I don't understand.
“Do you have access to soundboards from the 2000s or even the Oversteps tour, and can we ever expect to see them?”
Oversteps, yes, some. I'm just too interested in what I'm doing at the moment to actually get around to putting them out, but you know, maybe? Maybe? Probably at some point.
Relationships advice. Yeah exactly, ask me some fucking questions then! So, I’ll exit. So.
“Please new live date in Lyon, France guys!” Are you doing alright though, Alexa are you doing all right? You can just tell me. “Please new live set that I ain't…” I won't see it for a bit though cause I'm scrolling.
“Have you seen the new synth music tech thing that's really interested you lately?”
No.
“Any more European live dates in the pipe?” “Have you used the expression evaluator on GoldWave?”
I don't know what that is. Tell me.
“plyPhon made with Max/MSP?”
No, plyPhon was, I think it was MPC. It's Rob’s, so you've got to ask him.
“Someone who would open up your tune patches. Is your guys’ tech made of bpatches, abstractions, random doodles? Is it like a combination of everything?”
Yeah, I mean, so some stuff it just makes more sense to do in Max than Gen, so like I use GenExpr for a lot of the kind of bare bones stuff. My oscillators are all GenExpr filters, but there's FM stuff I'll do in there, but like a lot of stuff it doesn't make any more sense to use GenExpr than any any other way of doing it. I prefer patching with cables, if I'm being 100% honest. I like writing code. It's good. It's more efficient for some things, but, you know, with branch prediction and everything, it doesn't necessarily make sense to have a ton of functions waiting in a bunch of if statements to call them, because they all get fucking called anyway, so. So yeah, it's sort of, and a lot of the time I just, it's just so much faster working with cables for me, it's just, and I can see what I've done. Like I can just see it. I can just look at the patch and I know what it's doing, so. Yeah, it's just more intuitive and faster to work with cables and I actually prefer patching in Gen outside GenExpr then I do use in GenExpr, but there are just some things that make more sense to do GenExpr, so I use both basically. Yeah.
“Throughout the years, I've heard a lot of Hoptechre fans have taken a lot of information from the production of hip-hop.”
A lot of Hoptechre. Hop Autechre. Yeah, I mean that if you just, if that's just a typo, yeah, totally. Hip-hop production was really the only thing I was interested in in the 80s because I found a lot of other music production too wet, and hip-hop was quite often like the sounds were better and they were the, you know, the drum sounds were better in the production, in general was better. It just had the EQ was more me, like I did things that were similar, like you did bits of sort of industrial music, but the EQ would be like too bright or something or a bit weird, like it just didn't have that kind of thump to it. So I've got a particular taste in the way that things should sound and, you know, thankfully that sort of become more normal now, but at the time it probably wasn't. So if you were to just take a random sampling of, like, 80s music, that's not really what I was listening to, you know I mean? So, it's just that that's now, more music sounds like what I was listening to back then now, so it probably just seems a bit more normal, but hip-hop production these days is a different thing entirely. It's not at all what it was back then. It's just completely different thing. So is it influential? A bit, I mean as much as it could be because there's not much there, so. I mean, you know you're getting into funny things like how something's compressed or how something's quantised or, you know, like how two or three snares have been layered to get a snare, or it's sort of a little bit more delicate and technical like, I remember hearing the Jaylib album, and thinking like “my God, this sounds expensive,” like, this was, it was amazing but it was a totally different thing to what I'd grown up thinking that it was, but yeah. It became a lot more about refinement in the 2000s and I think nowadays it's more about grit and kind of atmosphere, so. So, I love Griselda. I love Daringer. I think it's fucking great, but, and I love Roc Marciano because they're so atmospheric and they're so kind of, they sound so remote and distant and ancient, you know, and that's really appealing, but it isn't really, there isn't a lot there that I can take in terms of influence other than already liking those atmospheres and that kind of ancient distant feeling that you get from that stuff, so, but yeah. Vibe is fucked, alright?
“Have you ever looked into rapid composition tools like Synfire or Orb Composer?”
No, I don't know what they are.
“In your records, there seem to be areas of techniques that give everything a distinct character. Ever think of reintegrating any of that old gear with the new stuff or is it onwards and forwards only?”
Yeah, I mean I tend to do that shit for remixes because it's an opportunity to fart around and do something a bit silly and work with something that I wouldn't normally work with, and so because it's all already been sort of invaded by someone else's ideas, right, because it's a remix, so you know, all bets are off at that point, so yeah. I would do for remixes, but I don't tend to do it in my own stuff much, but now and again, but then again, when I use an 808, no one fucking notices, like there's an 808 in elseq that nobody ever comments on. It's a really obvious 808, but it's just got a different production to a lot of modern 808, so you just wouldn't really see it, but you can hear it on marhide. I mean that's, I guess that's pretty obvious. Yeah, I mean, occasionally, we'll fuck around with something old and do something new with it, like there's a[n Oberheim] DMX, there's DMX drum sounds in that first AE_LIVE 2015 stuff's got some DMX drum sounds in, but nobody ever comments on them, but I don't know. To me, they're like really obvious. Like, I'll put those things in as reference points and no one ever gets them, so, you know. So yeah, I mean onwards and forwards only. I don't really do that. I just kind of do things until I get bored with doing them, and then I do something else, and we've never been very, I mean really, even in the old days, we weren’t using modern gear, you know what I mean, like in the early 90s, we were using early 80s gear that was cheap, and in the late 90s, we were probably using a lot of early 90s gear. So we've never been very cutting edge in that way. It's not, we're not about that really, but yeah. I tend to use things until I get bored using them, and then use something else, so, you know. Yeah, I guess in that way forwards.
“Is Max worth checking out if I have next to no coding experience?”
Absolutely, yeah! I mean I had BBC BASIC experience, which was of no fucking use whatsoever using Max, so. Yeah, you don't need any. Just dive in, but make sure you kind of get a grasp of the basics. It might help if you've used a little bit of modular gear because plugging one thing into another is kind of, I mean with me it just came from having used hardware. Basic hardware. So I didn't even have experience using modular synths, I just came from using basic hardware, but the idea of cabling two things together and this is outputting this and this is expecting to receive this and will output this. As long as you understand that, you can do it. It's just like plumbing, you know, it's just, in fact plumbing's a lot harder than using Max, so.
“Who would be a good fit MC wise?”
Can I not say, because I don't want to narrow it down. I've said, I already say too many MC names and it's bad. I mean obviously like [Kool] Keith. I love Keith but, you know, he says some shady shit sometimes, you know what I mean? So I don't know, like, I'd have to really like it and I'd have to be able, whoever it is, I'd have to be able to tell him “No! That was shit, mate! Like, what the fuck is that verse?” like, and there's a lot of MCs won’t want to fucking hear that at all, right, because they're, there's a lot of ego in the rap world, you know? No, I mean we're just as bad, I suppose. Okay so.
“I can't see the questions he's answering.”
I'm sorry, fucking hell! I'll read them but they're like my old, they're years ago now. It's just, there's too many and I'm trying to do as many as I can, but if you want, I'll just fuck all these questions off and just do the more recent ones. “The rest, a while back, but he's taking time to answer.” No, I'll just do every few. Like, most people just ignore most of the questions, right, and just do the ones they want to do, because they don't like the awkward questions. You don't get that with Autechre. So, it’s.
“Thanks for the Max info. So is it ‘show just the one Max setup with the three modules’ or are new versions loaded?”
Yeah, so like those three module types are arranged in channels, So like each channel has like, I think, six slots, yeah, it has like a sequencer, a synth and then four effects units on every channel, and there's 16 channels, and they're constantly changing and there are four bus channels as well that don't have sequences. No, sorry, that don't have synths on, but they just have sequences and effects units. So they have the four effects units in the sequences and there's four of those bus channels and they can be routed into each other and stuff, so that's it. So in total, there are 68 slots. Yeah.
“Have you looked into touch control surfaces for controlling Max or Live Studio use?”
A bit. I use the iPad for some stuff. I use multi-touch. Very useful. Used Mira. Multi-touch is great. It's like, totally unexplored, I think, yeah, anyway.
“Best stream ever!” Damn straight! “Have a nice piss, mate” Fuck off, hang on, was this then? Shit, so this is all pre piss! “I want to know how the stream started because there's only about 12 people after three minutes.” [Laughs] “Piss memes.” Is that it now? Is that what we are now, piss memes? “Can you resend them?” “Whoever asked about new album, please don't.” Yeah, Cavity Job. “Am I blocked from this chat?” ”For what? LOL” “Did he talk about more live dates?” Read it. Demo. Demo. God, you piss memeing cunts! Right, wait. “Do you ever create tracks with a particular story in mind taken from the real world or otherwise? Some of your tracks give this impression.” Oh wait, so that was ages ago. So I must have scrolled up way too far, fuck. Sorry!
Shoebills, I love them! They're fucking mutants, right? They're like weird dinosaur birds. They're like, are they aggro? I imagine to be quite aggro like a cassowary or something, you know. I love all them weird birds, honestly. I think they're amazing. Anything a bit like a dinosaur and I'm in there basically, so yeah. Fully, love shoebills.
“Do you like the new Mac chip situation? Is it any different to work on compared to the old CPU?”
Yes. So my patch was using about 75, 80% towards the end of last year or the year before, whenever it was I got it, and then, yeah, I got the M1 and then it was just flying! 30%, just flying! Just absolutely insane! So there's no turning back now I'm fucked because I'm filling it up already. Loads of Live physmod things, and things that were a bit, you know, expensive. So yeah, I love it. Just amazing, kind of a little bit too much if anything, and the disking out speeds are amazing. The transitions are all super tight. The timing's super tight. All the control rate stuff is super tight. So yeah, I think if you're using Max and you've got an M1, you're basically living the dream at this point. it's just insane.
“The drums / percussion sounds on Under BOAC, sampled or synthesized?”
A bit of both, I guess? They, it was originally a pen going down the side of a radiator, then it also [imitates action], and then it was taken into ReCycle and then it was cut up into bits, and then there was some kind of, I can't remember what I did to it. Yeah, there was some kind of spectral, what did I do to it now? Frequency shifting. So, there was frequency shifting on it and then it was taken into the [Ensoniq] ASR[-10] for the ASR’s, and then there's a bunch, it's like a sample bank, and then there was all the compression and everything is in the ASR, so you get them transients because the compressor in the inside the ASR is just absolutely nuts. That's the thing that we used to do the Stereolab remix and anything that's like that where it's like super fat sound but like the attacks on the sounds are just mentally like tight. A lot of that stuff was ASR, so repping Ensoniq, always, so.
“You think you'll get someone else in The Designer's Republic to do your graphic designs?”
I don't know, maybe? I like DR. I get on with Ian [Anderson]. I have to get on with people to work with.
“Favorite Depeche Mode 12” mix?”
The 12, so by 12” mix, I assume you mean, kind of, extended versions? Probably Get the Balance Right (Combination Mix) because that break in the middle, where it's just a little melody and then it kind of comes back in, that's beautiful.
“Not all films resolve anymore either.”
Touché. True. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, I think people have got, they don't like things to, they don't like endings. I don't know what the problem is there, but it's true. [vapes] I'm just reading.
“I have met people from The Expanse.”
No further comment, okay! Tell me, tell me about them, please, you know. I like it. It's nerdy but I like it. I do like it. I do like The Expanse. It's good. It's nice to see something that fleshed out, you know. There are just a few things I'd want to tighten up if it was my show, you know, but I think they know that and I get a sense that the fans love it, warts and all, right? So, because I feel a bit like that. I feel like I need to cut them some slack because at least they're fucking trying, you know what I mean, so.
“The Warp Tapes are really good,” thank you, “surprising great quality recordings for their age.”
Some of them are. The ones that were recorded on 244 are good because the 244, TASCAM 244, is just beautiful and if you're just recording two channels onto it, because it runs at double speed, then all the noise is, like, out of the way and they're just, it's just really good analog sound. It's really surprising. You can get sound like that out of a cassette, you know. So yeah, all the tracks that were recorded on that thing sound great, and all the stuff that was done straight to normal cassette sounds, well it is what it is, you know. “Did they need much remastering?” No. I mean, there weren't, there was no mastering at all. It was just, the tracks were taken. Rob did new dubs of a lot of those tracks which were just literally just getting the line and the levels correct, and then just putting them on a digital and at 24 bit, I think, and so we had, we did, he'd done them quite a while before like a good 10 years before we did that. I think it was around the time that we were recompiling, because we had to rebuild the Lego Feet thing when we did that because we didn't have the masters for that. Just time, and had gone missing, so we had to rebuild that. So the version that Skam released later isn't the same as the version that came out in ‘91. That all the tracks sounded different, I mean, we tried to rip, do, you know, replicate it as close as we could but it's, yeah, in the same, so. So, anyway we had them newer versions and they're just a bit cleaner. They're just better digital copies, so, but there was no EQ or anything on any of it or anything like that, it was just as is, so, and then, yeah. Just to, just kind of mixed as, you know, like mix together, the tracks or whatever, but like not really. There's no mastering or anything, so. I think we were just lucky, really. I think when you're not using much equipment, if using a very, very basic setup like just a drum machine through a DJ mixer into a tape deck, you can't really go wrong, you know, it's gonna sound good. That's the beauty of that shit and we were blessed, really, to grow up at a time where that shit was the only shit we could afford, you know. I think if we'd have had a lot more money and we'd have had bigger studios, you know, like an early Mac maybe or, you know, things wouldn't have sounded quite so correct now from back then. So we were just sort of lucky not to have any equipment, I think, in a lot of ways, and you don't make as many mistakes in your mixing and everything because there's nothing there to mix, you know. So yeah, we were just lucky.
”Three neurons rubbing together [is an idea].”
Yeah, exactly. What is it? Tell me, what it is, what's an idea, you know. Ooh, [laughs] I don't think anyone knows.
“Sounds super moody.”
You know, not intentionally, no. I mean we weren't inspired by anything, really, it was just where I was emotionally at the time, I think. So yeah, probably was feeling a bit moody. I don't know, I'm not talking about why that was.
Yeah, I saw the piss comments, okay. “pisstechre,” right. “So funny that we still can't see his name here, say his name here.” Oh, you can't write my name, can you, it’s done, fucking hell! [laughs] I shouldn't have, yeah, I should’ve turned all that off, sorry! I'm on my phone at the moment so I can't really. I'll do it in a bit but I'll be off by then, so.
“What’re your thoughts on SOPHIE and hyperpop as a genre?”
I think genres are always weird, but I appreciate that they had to do that in order to carve out a space, you know. I've been there. You do have to do that. It's annoying and it will fucking come back and bite you in the end, because people will get sick of you fucking catch all genre brand name, you know, Unfortunately we never did it to ourselves but it did happen to us. In fact, thinking about the Warp Tapes, you know I mean, the main reason them tracks never came out on Warp was because they were fixated on this brand, on this thing, you know, this electronic listening music thing, and those tracks, remembering at the time, just after Drexciya 2 came out. So we were, towards the end of compiling Incunabula, and I just did, that was the first Drexciya record I heard, Drexciya 2, and so I went to Rob Mitchell at Warp and said “Have you heard this Drexciya shit, it's fucking fire! It's, like, amazing. We need, you need to sign them, you know. They're fucking really good. I don't know where they are or anything about them, really.” And he was like “No, it's too retro,” and that was the problem was like it did, a lot of the Warp Tape stuff was the same sort of thing. “Yeah, it's good, but, you know, it just sounds a bit old,” and so we had this weird thing with them early on where we were trying to do what we just thought was good and they would be like “well, yeah but it's not really what's happening at the moment” or something like that. So that's why Incunabula took two years to compile and why when we did Amber, we just kind of knew what they wanted at that point. So we just kind of did the tracks that we knew that they wouldn't turn down, you know, but I think, yeah it.
So yeah, what do I think of hyperpop? That's what I think of it. I think it's a genre, right, so it comes at cost, but SOPHIE was a really fucking great artist, like really seriously good artist, and it's really difficult to kind of get normal people to like shit that's as weird as that is, you know, and that's the fucking, that's the main thing that she achieved there. Or they, is it she or they? Don't know. It's hard, right? I mean it's like, but yeah, I mean, is it, do, what do I think of hyperpop in general? I mean I like A.G. Cook, like SOPHIE. I don't know much else. I've heard bits of, like, things that have been Hannah Diamond things and what have you. I'm not like, I don't know who does what in that scene at all. They're probably all just working with each other all the time anyway. I understood it conceptually, immediately, you know. There were loads of things I understood though, like about it before it happened, so I kind of, it and it was that hyperplastic, hyper kind of real, hyper sort of, almost like fashion turning itself inside out. Made a lot of sense to me. It was a little bit like watching a kind of fashion show but having taken loads of acid, you know. It was sort of, it was so far that way that it just become, the artificialness of it had become totally weird, like surreal, and, so yeah, you know. There are things about it that I find super, super relatable, you know. It's strange stuff, but it, I'm not sure if I'm seeing it from the same angle that they're seeing it from, if you know what I mean. So obviously I’m quite a lot older and I think my kind of psychedelic associations are probably a little bit different but maybe they're not. I don't know, anyway.
“Any ideas / things you go into building a track with definite structural or conceptual ideas then try to create them?”
No. Never.
“Or let the machine throw out sounds that spur the creation of the structured concepts?"
Not that either. No. What I tend to do is work with a very basic idea. Everything's drafts. It's drafts all the way down. So it's like you do something you think, “is this good, yes or no? If no, what's wrong with it? What do I change to make it good?” and you keep doing that and then at some point you say “Yes. Okay. That's good. Okay.” “So what does that then suggest, that I put with it and then you might have what you might call an idea?” So you might think “Well, I could try this or I'll try that,” and at some point, you hit on something that works. So it's just then grow, the tracks grow based on me saying “Is this shit or not?” basically. That makes sense.
cEvin Key. So no. You know, I mean, there's some bits of early Skinny Puppy, Russell [Haswell] likes early Skinny Puppy, he's always prep, he's always kind of played us bits of early Skinny Puppy. I remember like, me and Rob was sat there with Mantronix Baseline on it and he was going “Stairs and Flowers, Stairs and Flowers!” and I was thinking “what the fuck Stairs and Flowers’s like? I don't know that.” and he played us it and it was a bit like Bassline by Mantronix and I was like “Oh, who's this?” He's like “Skinny Puppy” and I was like “Yeah, it's alright. He's sort of a bit weirdly mixed,” and I've always sort of felt that about that stuff. It's like, it's alright. I don't think it's shit and I think it's, there's probably a lot of fans of Skinny Puppy who think that it's basically the same as electro, but to me it's always sounded quite different. It's like coming from a different place, but yeah I think it's okay. I think it's pretty good. It's all right, but that Killing Game thing. When we got sent that because I'd only heard that kind of old Skinny Puppy drum machine stuff. I heard that Killing Game thing and I was like “Oh it's not my kind of thing,” but I think the way I should approach this is as if it isn't and I've put the CD in the machine and and I'm thinking “What's going on here then? What's, what is this,” you know? So yeah, the remix was a response to the track really, and I don't know, if I was to work with him again, I think I probably actually did make the right decisions doing that creatively and all that, but it was coming from a very different position and to what it probably sounded like it was, so. I don't know if I'd do the same thing again, but yeah. I mean, you know, I'm up for remixing people a lot more than I am for letting them take control of anything, if you know what I mean, so yeah. Probably find that easy, but I don't know if I'd want to work with them because I only work with people that I get along with really, so.
“When using Max you go cutting edge and update as soon as they release versions, or you tend to stick for years?”
Yeah. So we're different, like I'm quite different to Rob. So like, I tend to update things immediately and then iron out any problems that come up. So I'm, I love finding that they've updated something, it's broken something crucial and then figuring out the workaround. I like the challenge, you know, and it's, but it's like being on ground that's constantly shifting so, and I can see why that'd be upsetting for people, so, and Rob doesn't like it. [He] doesn't like it when things get updated and all this shit suddenly doesn't sound the same and he's very kind of, so he's always a little bit behind me in terms of updates, but I'm always trying to fix the problem so that I can get ahead of it and take advantage of whatever new features there are, and like in 8.3 recently, there were some very kind of subtle under the hood timing improvements that I've asked him about and there have been no changes to the way that scheduling works. So whatever it is is something to do with my patch design but it's improved, and so it was worth coming up with workarounds for all the issues that then fixed in 8.3.1. So I already had workarounds for all that shit by the time that update came, but I know a bunch of other people were tearing their hair out because their shit's not working so, but they weren't hard things to fix like there was a thing with the phasor phase that was just a matter of adding, like, a plus and then a modulo, so, you know. There's always a way around it.
“Have you ever been in Italy on holidays?”
No, but I've been there loads. Good! I’ll exit.
“How’s to you?” Been doing all right. Damn you, “Sorbian,” fucking hell! “You read any good book lately?” Well, you don't have to stay, you know what I mean? “GoldWave studio live for catching recordings, it's brilliant for effects.” Alright, I'll give it a check. “Old people read books, real people read fanchats, let's go!” “Are you having a nice Sunday?” Yeah, see what you did there, yeah. Yeah. [vapes] A lot of sun’s gone, so.
“You working on any videos?”
No. Yes, sort of. Rob's farting around with Jitter for ages. Well the thing was I sent him all the Jitter patches that I'd used, which was some of which were is originally, so he'd done Jitter patches. When I came to do the Twitch streaming, I was like “Give me Jitter patches.” I then made new Jitter patches based on his Jitter patches. I then sent him back to him afterwards and then he just got lost for about 18 months fucking around with gl shaders, so I don't know what he's doing now. Probably something good though, so like.
“Which of your releases would you recommend to start with to introduce your music to someone?”
I'd asked, I'd just try and figure out what they were into first. I mean, I don't know, if they were into metal, I'd probably play him Confield. If they were into, like, electro, probably playing Bike. I don't know. Fuck, it's just depends on the person.
supremesimonn: “do you play video games? If so, which ones?”
Not lately, like not any games that a young person would have heard of, so, you know. No, probably. Not much. It's just, it's not that I don't like it, it's just a fucking massive time vampire, basically. I've got too much of a shit that I like doing, so.
ivanooze6: “do you like modern hiphop, have you heard the latest playboi carti”
No.
“I was listening to the Strange Things in the 80s.” “Conductor Williams beats.”
Yeah. Yeah man, Roc Marciano, not exactly. Right.
“What's your favorite programming language?”
Rust. Well, you know what, I only like fucked around with Python and GenExpr, so I'm kind of, I don't like Javascript.
“What's your live setup nowadays?”
Two Macs, and these Kenton Killamix things, and a couple of interfaces. The Killamix is much better than it looks, you know, like it's got all these layers because one of the problems with controllers is getting enough actual parameters available to one, in one go, and the Killamix weirdly, it's like ahead of all the others because it's got so many layers. So even though it's only eight knobs, it doesn't look like much, but that thing's a beast, and if something better comes along I'll probably upgrade to something better, but I haven't found anything yet, so. If anybody knows any controllers that have got as many available parameters as that thing. Oh and it helps that it's got clicky knobs because a lot of my variables are integers, so I kind of like to know how many integers I've moved the knob and I can feel that with those knobs. There's a tactile thing there, so. That makes them really good, but I wish the buttons were a bit softer because they're a bit [click click,] you know. You can hear them.
((HYPERLINKS NEED TO BE ADDED BELLOW))
Favorite Coil albums? I mean Love’s Secret Domain, because that's the first one that I bought and had the most impact on me, and then the subsequent albums around that, so like Stolen and Contaminated Songs and there's another one around that time as well with similar material and bits and bobs and remixes and then Unnatural Histories and then, well I'd just be listing all the releases. I think Black Light District is quite good. There's sort of one that people don't talk about much but I quite like that. I always liked that album, thought it was really nice. Time Machines is fucking great. It's like really good. That's a proper grower though, but yeah I don't know like beyond that, I mean I do like Musick to Play in the Dark, I do, I like both of them. I like Moon’s Milk. I like those releases, but I was always more interested in the instrumental stuff because, taste, you know, and my way into it and that but I do like the vocal tracks a bit. Like, I love that Broccoli track and I like that, is it called Red Queen? That to me, that's hip-hop, like that “what are you gonna do?” That track. That's a hip-hop track, man. I mean, that's like, that's not singing, you know? That's rapping.
“Had any hardware performance issues while using Max/MSP?”
Yeah, all the time! I mean, it's always about, it's always like a, it's a constant battle getting the shit to work at all, you know, running 68 different patches at once and getting them all, and being able to switch them all, and all that is hard. It took a lot of different experiments architecturally to figure out, but you know, I'm not the best [coder], I'm sure you could easily do it if you'd written it all in machine code or something, but I'm just not, I'm not at that level. So, I'm stuck with what I know.
“So if this has been asked before, but if you or both of you consider streaming some Max stuff? Maybe not showing off your tech, but just doodling?”
Yeah, I have considered that. I thought it might get a bit boring. We did that anyway for them early Twitch streams. That was pure doodling. That was pure me just farting around streaming it, but, you know, I don't mind listening to the same patch for eight hours because that's what I do all the time. But I think for an audience, it's a bit of an ask, you know? Maybe, especially when it isn't developing very much because I'm trying to fucking hone down some little detail in there and trying, you know, that stuff I don't mind if it's taking over while I'm doing that. Whereas, to a lot of other people are just, you know, clock watching. So I don't, I think in that sense, it's probably not a great strategy to do that, but maybe. I don't really like these, kind of, you know “hey, here's an introduction to my system!” or “I'm gonna do a tutorial now on this technique,” you know? I don't like watching stuff like that myself, so I'm probably not gonna do anything like that, but I find it quite boring to be honest, but…
Have I used Max on the Apple M1 chips yet? How was it performing? “Very, very fucking well” is the answer.
“What kind of thing are you're listening to at the moment?”
Just my own shit because I'm boring and honestly by the time I finish working all day, I don't really feel like listening to any tune, so I don't look for inspiration from music. It doesn't really work like that. Hasn't for quite a long time, and when I do listen to music, I tend to listen to stuff that I could never make. So that's why I went on a Henry Cow binge because it's about as far away from my skill set as you can get, you know, and like Gorguts’ Obscura, I caned that album. Absolutely love that album because it's so far away from what I can do. It's also fucking amazing, right, so and Portal, that Aussie metal band, well if you can call them metal. Yeah, like Baring Teeth, there's another one. I got into, because after Henry Cow, I got into loads of Fred Frith’s weird things like that Massacre thing, and a load of other things that he'd done, and I started really enjoying them. But yeah, I tend to listen to stuff that's not very, well, not very contemporary or current because obviously, you know, that's the other thing with my taste and what I'm doing in my work and all that is that I tend not to, I tend to get sick of things quite quickly or, you know, I get bored of things. So I listen to, sort of, new music for a bit, but then once the thread, the sort of common thread, that's running through everyone's stuff at the time has become apparent, I'll kind of lose interest in it and so I'll have to go off and listen to something that isn't around that nobody's doing at the moment, and yeah, Henry Cow with that for a while because there was nobody making music remotely like that I was hearing anyway, you know. So yeah. Plus the drumming on Henry Cow is just off the charts good. It's just so good.
“Pencha and 19 Headaches, related in production method?”
Interesting question, yes. Both Nord, mostly. I think Pencha is completely Nord. Actually, oh no, the drums are Yamaha RY30. Yeah, RY30 and Nord. In fact, they're both RY30 or Nord. So yeah, basically yeah, they are, and Logic [Pro] Environment, sort of pre-Max patches, I guess you could call them.
“Still got love for the ASR-10?”
I won't sell it. I don't used it in forever. I love it though. I mean it's just beautiful, innit? It's just a really, really beautiful machine. Everything it does is amazing. It, you know, it's, there's so much creativity buried in there. It's just, that's the thing with music tech you start to realise, well you probably realise quite soon, really if you're smart, that, you know it's, there's just so much fucking creativity in there. I mean, it's just, like they're, like you're buying a box of creative decisions ultimately and the ASR-10 is a great example of that and the Kurzweil as well, which we don't talk about much. But yeah, the K2600, K2500. They're just absolute beasts. Just like amazing, amazing things. Where are we?
“Have you seen that after the easter egg thing someone joked and what, it was Rich Devine that leaked the info about it, and that's how it's gone down. it's the real lore on Wikipedia.”
You gotta love Richard Devine, aren’t you? Fucking right.
“What's going on with Skam?”
I don't know what's going on with Skam. I don't know. No, I mean, honestly, like Andy [Maddocks] got into a new house, so he's been setting up a bit of a room, so I've heard. I've not been over there for a bit because I'm in Norway, so. But yeah he's like, you know, he's getting his mates around. He's having little sessions. He's doing stuff. He's got some gear set up. He's messing about. Is he going to put some releases together? Yeah, probably. I know he's like, he did the Afrodeutsche thing didn't he, and I don't know what he's done since then because I haven't been in touch much, but I'm out of the loop. So I'm not the right guy to ask about that.
“What do you think of the finished ‘08 set recreation?”
It's astounding. It's like, it must have been so much work. I kind of, I had a feeling someone to try something like that, but I didn't think they'd be so anal about it. It was crazy. I felt a bit weirdly humbled by it, if I'm being honest because, I mean I guess people really wanted to hear it, and that's about as close as you're going to get because we didn't record them, and I wish we had because I would have fucking released it if we had because, you know, it's good shit I think. But yeah, just really, kind of, just yeah, I felt humbled, is what it is, that somebody's put that much time into doing that, you know, amazing. Just like, thank you for doing it because I've now got it and I can hear it, so.
“When you make a track, is it always a collaborative effort or do you guys have solo tracks sprinkled?”
I don't know about sprinkled, more like fucking poured all over, you know. I mean, it's, a lot of our shit is solo tracks, like a lot of it, and we've just got real similar taste. There's a big enough overlap for you not to be able to tell what's what, you know. We're not Lennon-McCartney where you immediately know who's done what. That said, we know, like immediately but sometimes we do impressions of each other, you know. I do things that are heavily inspired by Rob’s stuff and he, vice versa, and we try and, sort of, battle each other a little bit as well. So all that's going on. But yeah, I'd say like I mean, these days the majority of it's soloish, but it's sort of hard as well to say what solo when you've built the tools together or where you're using each other's tools to do the track. So if I'm using gear that he's built and I guess it's a collaboration. Which puts the whole hardware thing in another light, doesn't it? Because you sort of realise that I'm collaborating with, you know, Alesis, and then Ensoniq, and these people over the years, right, as well, and Roland, you know. They're all collaborations really if you want to get into it. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, but yeah, in terms of tracks where we both work on the track and we both had to some input on all of the elements of the track. Fuck, it's really difficult to say because, you know, sometimes we just use each other's sounds or we use each other's patches or you know, sometimes we just do a little bit of editing or gating on each other's tracks and, or maybe we remix each of his tracks, you know, and so it's sort of, it's all really fucking fuzzy and difficult to pin down exactly you did what. So we just 50/50 everything splitwise, writing splits and production splits and then we just do what we want. It gives us full freedom. That way, we don't have to worry about who's contributed what to what, you know. This becomes a moot point really.
“Got censored because you can't say the group name or the other guy in this duo. LOL”
Yeah. Sorry, that was ages ago because when I was doing the first streams, there was just so much “Sean pls” in the chat. I just thought “nah!”
“Any news on the whereabouts of [Boards of Canada]?”
No. None whatsoever. No news. No BoC news, and even if I had it, I wouldn't tell you lot. So, [vapes]. Why is that highlighted? I don't know, I don't understand Twitch!
“My first sampler is Ensoniq Mirage”
Yeah, nice!
“What's the joke behind Eggshell and O=0?”
There isn't one.
“Please shut the fuck up about BoC, and BoC and…”
Yeah. No, I don't care if people ask me about BoC, but I'm not going to give any BoC info out because, you know what BoC are like. They don't want me dishing out their info. Even if I did have it, which I don't have any info anyway. So, you know, I'm not gonna dish out what I don’t have. But I don't know where they are. They’re probably in the future somewhere, worrying about why it isn't like the past, so…
“Do you like Death Grips?”
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I do. I also get why I'm not supposed to like Death Grips, But yeah, Death Grips were alright, you know. It makes some sense. It is for American teenage boys. Let's be honest. I could never really understand things like Rage Against the Machine when I was a kid, you know, I used to see that stuff and be like it's so alien to me as a Brit. We didn't have anything like that in the UK and I feel like Death Grips is in that tradition, you know. “[raspy voice] I want to shout! Rah!” So it's like a man shouting which, you know, it is what it is. But I do like it. I think it's got energy, you know. I like Guillotine. it's good, innit? I mean, it's just good. It works, but it's a bit silly as well, so.
“What do you feel when making your early music now you've questioned, I know, but would you put it in somewhere uncanny? What does that feeling mean today? How does that compare?”
This is a weird question that I can't quite wrap my brain around. “Basically, I'm trying to ask what should your mind go through today to bring you into a similar hype?” Just be critical. Just be like “what the fuck is going on with all this shit music? Why isn't it like what I think it should be like?” because that's where my head was at the time. So if you want to know, that's what the vibe was, like “why is everything so shit?” That, you know.
“You said in the past that you find your old work cheesy but are there any standout moments you like to listen to?”
Yeah. So, I mean I think at the time that we said that, I mean, I remember where we were in, and we were doing an interview with a guy who just tried to get us to shoot a lot of computers in his back garden or something, and I was like “Well that's just sounds totally shit. I'm not doing it,” because he was trying to, he was like “Oh yeah, we'll take pictures if you're shooting these computers with a rifle in the back garden. They're all broken computers,” and I was like “No. Everything about this is wrong.” Like, you know, I'm like, “I've got so much legacy hardware. The idea of shooting up a load of computers because they were out of date, it's just so fucking alien and weird.” And so he was pissed off with me because I'd said that and I'd said, anyway, “Guns aren't really associated with good things” and then he misquoted me saying “[serious voice] I don't want Autechre to be associated with guns.” So I was just like “this guy…” and then like, and then, yeah, he'd played me a bunch of V/Vm tracks taking the piss out of Aphex, which I just thought was a weird target because Aphex was taking the piss with a lot of his stuff anyway. So it was weird to be taking the piss out of another comedian in a way. It's not that Rich is a comedian, but you know, it's there in it, in his work and I was like “well, this journalist.” I just didn't understand or like this person at all. I just thought it was weird, and then he said to us like, yeah, so, you know, “what made you change from doing those early albums? What was the big thing that made you change?” and he was just winding me up. So I think, and it was Rob actually who said that, like, “well you know, a lot of that old stuff's quite cheesy really.” And I think at the time we thought it was we, you know, we thought, well I mean it was about ‘99, so we were about as far away, sort of, on our aesthetic trajectory as we could be, you know what I mean? We were kind of at the other apex of the curve of, the cycle of whatever it is, that makes you like things and we were sort of, you know, oh well yeah.
I don't know if I think of it as being that cheesy now. I do think that Incunabula sounds like a very curated album. It isn't the album that we would have put together. It’s the album Warp put together from hundreds of tracks that we had. Amber was trying to give him another one of those albums because we knew that they wanted an album like that, you know, and it took us two years to actually figure out what that album should look like with Incunabula, and I think that the whole thing of dealing with a label of them taking an active curatorial role in your release makes you question whether it's good or not. And I feel sorry for bands who have a very kind of hyperactive A&R man who is there doing the old you know, “no you, no, make it more sound, more like this” or like bands even on Warp. I know there were bands who worked with Rob Mitchell who used to have to keep re-redoing their mixes because he was critical of their mixes, and I think it just erodes your self-confidence, working that closely with someone at a label, and after that, after Incunabula was compiled and after we delivered Amber, Warp put us with Steve [Beckett] instead of Rob and because, they were just the two of them really, doing A&R at the time, and Steve's approach to A&R was very different to Rob. Steve's approach was “let me know when the album's finished,” which, you know, that's what we wanted. We wanted the freedom to be able to just make the album and deliver the album and just have it like that, so, and so, yeah, Amber was an attempt to win them over enough to make them feel like they could just trust us to deliver an album, and it worked and, but there's still bits of Amber that I really like. I think Piezo is really good. I think Montreal and Further and Yulquen are really good. Yeah, I, kind of, and Nil but, and yeah Incunabula. I like most of Incunabula, but like I say it's just, it spans such a long period of time that there were other tracks that I would have preferred that had got on there, but then they probably would have dated the album a bit. They probably would have pulled it back a few years to bleep techno or, you know, kind of late 80s hip-hop electro, [Latin] freestyle type things that at the time, you know, people weren't vibing on in the UK. So yeah, it probably was the right thing to do at the time, but it's probably not what I would choose to do now. I don't even know what I'm saying though really, because, obviously I wouldn't choose to do any of it now, but you know, anyway.
“Lost,” yeah, “The death of TV from Lost.”
Yeah, I do agree, brak, I think, like, the end of Lost was a lot like the end of Game of Thrones, wasn't it? It was like, you had all the promise of being resolved properly. They led you on so much to believe that they were going to resolve it in some kind of epic way, and then just fucked it. Just totally fucked it. Yeah, hate that. [laughs] I fucking hate it. It's like, why bother fucking leading me on if you're gonna do that shit, you know what I mean, like? Sorry, I'm fighting with some kind of bug right, so…
“Deckard’s Dream much on SIGN / PLUS?”
Yeah, first track on SIGN [M4 Lema], it's on there. That DekDre [Scap B], that's why it's called DekDre.
Yeah Brad, watch The Expanse, but bear in mind that series one's really fucking slow, and nothing like the rest of it. So first you're thinking “what is this kind of noir cop thing? I'm not sure I can get into this.” But then, it pivots and it's good, and it's all good. anyway, actually, you start liking the beginning of it once you've seen the rest of it. So, it's good.
“Do you make sounds in AE_LIVE stuff?”
I'm assuming you're talking about samples from the DMX? Yeah. No it's not modeled or anything, it's just samples, but the DMX is samples, right? So I don't have to feel weird about that. But yeah, it's a bit mutated as well. it's, being fucked with, so, in a cool way, so. But yeah, it's basically one track where it's just DMX kick and snare, and I don't know if there's a clap in there. I really like the DMX sounds. They're like, they just immediately put me somewhere. It's like there's a certain kind of like late night radio soul that used the DMX that was just massively appealing to us. I don't know why the DMX and not the LinnDrum was just the drum machine a choice for a lot of soul artists, but it just has that feel to it. There's only a subtle difference between them really, but I've always preferred the DMX. I don’t know.
hellospiral: “my friend has a bunch of unreleased tracks from 2012 that are apparently from a CDr you left at Hanal’s palce. He won't share them with us and we'll only play them from his phone at me so I can hear bits. He feels it's morally wrong to share them with us. Do you care if he does?”
I mean, I'll be honest, spiral, right? I don't really care if he shares him with you because you're gonna only share it with a few mutants, aren't you? So it's not gonna really get out there out there, but I know it will eventually, anyway, just because, fucking internet. So if you really, really bought it off him, well, I'm not going to tell you in a Twitch chat that it's alright because then you've got, you know, I'll just like, I can't even remember what's on it. I'm pretty sure one, at least one of them has been released because I know I gave one of them to Alex [Peverett] for that Japan thing. so, and I don't know about the rest. They're probably not very good. I know one of them ended up being used by the thing that we were supposed to do with Cyriak in America for some video screen show that I don't even know if that thing ended up happening, and then I've never got back in touch and I never saw the Cyriak videos. So that was ages ago though, and I don't know what happened with that. That was a weird situation, to be honest, so, and I don't think anybody knows about it. Never seen anyone talk about it. It's like it never happened.
Fucking mozzies, man. Mozzies in Norway, right? So.
“What do you think about [Ricardo] Villalobos?”
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not gonna, I don't have an opinion on Villalobos, if I'm being honest. Just don't really have an opinion. I don't know enough of his stuff. I sort of, I see his name about, and I know he makes some sort of techno and he's, and I know he props us quite a lot. I'm not going to say I don't like it because I can't just, don't have an opinion because I've not heard it. I don't really seek out that kind of stuff, so maybe I could check it at some point and have a more rounded answer for you. I always feel like if somebody's giving us that much props that they're probably, at least they're going to share some taste with me. So there's probably something about it that I would like, so, can I just leave it at that? I don't know.
Am I an Amiga fan? I never owned one, you know, a few mates of mine had them. I was, kind of not, I was out doing graffiti and fucking around when Amigas were getting big, so I weren't, like, a kind of tracker kid, Really. I got into trackers through Alex [Peverett from Team] Doyobi got me in, like, showed me Renoise in the late 90s and I started fucking around with it then, and liked it. But it was never like my favourite program, but I also being, coming from a tape editing background, there were things about it that I could really relate to, especially the note exclusivity thing which I just love, and I've always loved that. But it was a little bit, I found it a little bit annoying going from, you know, like having to work with samples that were just like numbered and catalogued in that way. I found it a bit limiting, but I'm sure if you've grown up with it and you haven't had a DAW that you probably think it's the best thing. I can hear what Aaron [Funk] does and I'm just kind of blown away. So yeah, and I've got mates who use Renoise and trackers like, you know, Sean Doris and Colin Anodyne, and you can't tell they're using Renoise. It just, that's, just like, sound like hardware records or whatever, so you just don't know a lot of the time and I quite like the fact that you can do that with Renoise, that you can use it in that way but I always used it just purely to cut up samples because I felt like that was what its strength was, so you get me. But yeah, I'm not like a demoscene kind of Amiga guy really. It was, that was a scene that was separate from what we were doing. We were drum machine kids. We were 80s drum machine electro kids really, ultimately at heart.
“What's it like having been the best part of comedy?”
No comment! Fucking hell. I don't want to talk about Kobe [Bryant]. Right,
“Your thoughts about the current situation in the world?”
[laughs] The current situation in the world? Yeah, it's, you know, it's great! Yeah it's fine. No, I'm not gonna say it. I'm not gonna come up with some pithy fucking sentence about the current situation in the world. It's bad to do that. So, world's complicated place. There's a lot of interests, and resources are dwindling and, you know, see what happens. It does out me outright that there's twice as many people alive today as they were when I was born. That's mad, innit? That's mad, right? It's just mad. Twice as many people. It's just mad. [vapes]
“Looking forward to hearing you, blah blah blah, any thoughts about [Iannis] Xenakis.”
Not really. I mean, you know, like I think GENDY and GENDYN are like that, they're fun. like, I like GENDY. I think it's cool, like it's cool what you can do with just a few lines of code, you know. I think it's beautiful. Then again, it is like [throaty screeching], horrible noise, so you know. Yeah, no, I like Xenakis. I think he's sort of a little bit, he's one of those people who it's cool to say that you like, especially if you're like a noise drone person, because it makes you sound cultured. But I'm not interested in any of that really. I just sort of go for whatever I like it or not and, there are bits of his stuff that I think are fucking amazing like that one, how did you pronounce it? Mycenae or Mycenae Alpha? That thing. That's got some amazing moments in it. It's also got some bits that are kind of horrible. So yeah. I mean, bits are good. He's a bit hit and miss for me, but you know, He's one of those people I feel like I'm supposed to like.
“What's the most profound thing that you've ever experienced?”
I don't know. What does profound mean? I mean like, wow, I've got, fucking ants, ants are cool, aren’t they're? Like, you see that little guy? Probably not ‘cause I ain’t got a macro lens. I like ants. Well, he's just living with me now. So like…
“Shit changed since ‘94. Some say it was meteorites hitting Jupiter.”
That's some 2001 [a Space Odyssey] shit, that is. “Changed the frequency of Jupiter.” What? You're gonna have to give me more information on this .
“What's it like working together in the same room versus remotely?”
It's good, I guess. We sort of, probably like, I mean it's one of them, it's two blokes hanging out together, innit, do, you know, getting blazed up and sort of vibing on tracks. It's fun. But it's also fun to be on your own with your headphones on a fucking mission. So they're both good, but they're just different things, you know what I mean? These days, I'd do a lot more of that, so you know, I like headphones and solitude and locked in and fucking, on course but I know that I'm going to be sharing it with Rob down the line and he's going to hear it in his house. So I'm kind of, it's like making a meal for someone, you know what I mean? So, versus hanging out with him and eating the meal. So I guess that's the difference, you know. I like both basically.
“How much acid influenced your music? Were you taking it at all and are you taking it up to this day?”
Yeah, I was. A lot. Probably more than most ravers were at the time because it was what I chose out of all the different available party drugs. It was the one, and mushrooms, but I preferred acid. They're quite different things, you know. Mushrooms always made me a bit sad. Acid was just like being able to see through everything. It was all my own associations, obviously, but you know, yeah. It made me cynical and it made me kind of, I don't feel like I've ever really, I think it rewired my brain permanently, actually. Probably just had too much of it over the time that I was taking it. I haven't had it in a while, though. Would I enjoy it now as much? I don't know. I feel like my experience has probably brought me to that level anyway, if that makes any sense. So not sure it'd be as useful now, but at the time as a kid, yeah, it was like a kind of, there's a kind of fast tracking into feeling like I've got how things work, does that make sense? Probably totally illusory, obviously. I'm not recommending anybody does it because that would be a bad thing to do, right? so.
“When will you release the Boards of Canada Chicli cover?”
I've only got it on cassette. So I can't release it. So if you want that Chicli cover, you're gonna have to get Warp to get Boards to give it to them for some fucking anniversary release or some shit like that, because that's the only way it's ever gonna come out, I think now. They would’ve had a chance to do it when Warp did that covers album, and they probably just decided not to for reasons. So I think that sort of chance’s passed already. I don't think it's likely to.
“A hype train i…,” what is this? I don't understand any of this stuff. What is this, some Twitch thing?
“How did you draw a line between fucking around with production and writing a decent tune when you were starting out?”
We didn't have much gear, so we just didn't, look, there weren’t a lot we could fuck around with. We fucked around as much as we possibly could, I think, given the constraints. I mean when you've only got a 606, an RSD-10 or 202, and then a bit later you've got [a Roland] R-8 and a Juno, there's not, you know, there's some things you can do and we did all those things. But, you know, you kind of, once you've read the manual back to back and you've tried every function, you kind of “that's all you can do, innit?” So I know it matters what notes you use and what order you put them in, but I didn't give a shit about any of that as a kid. I just, you know, it was just like what sounds good. so I just used to do what sounded good.
“cEvin might be hard to get along with. Dwayne [Goettel] was the cool one.”
Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure. look, I'm sure I'll probably get along with him because I'm as opinionated as they probably are. So, you know.
“That Tron Giorgio [Moroder] remix sounded a lot more like a straight up track of yours at the time.”
Yeah, that was a weird one because I was kind of, I had, there's a time constraint and I only had my Max stuff with me at the time. So I just kind of got Giorgio’s bits and figured out the tempo and then just wrote a load of stuff that would be in key with it and then layered his bits over that in a DAW once I'd recorded the stuff from Max. So I had to work knowing that there was this kind of constraint and I didn't really expand on it much further than that. But you know, it was for Disney. So you know, didn't have to be good, did it?
“You do more DJ mixes in the foreseeable future? Those you've done in the past were top.”
Yeah. I mean, I'd like to. I enjoy doing them, but like, I say I mean, I've played most of the records that I own already about 10 times, but yeah. I can do it again if you really want.
“Will you release a remix compilation? “Some of your remixes are hard to find.”
Yeah, I'm not doing it. It's just hard for licensing, getting the shit licensed is hard work, so I talked to Warp about it. They didn't want to know. they were just like “No. Too much.” And the problem is, you know, you've only got to miss one off and then that, my fucking Autism starts going. I'm like, what, we've got, we need all of them, you know. We can't work like, we can't have all of them? So it's weird a one. Like, I'd like to, but I don't know. We'll see. Maybe. [vapes] I mean, “26 Mixes For Cash,” yeah, someone's mentioned that, but like, how many remixes had Aphex done at that point? It was probably more than 26, right? I would have thought so. I think we'd done about 50 by then. So he must have like, they must have just picked the ones that he liked or something. So yeah, maybe we could do something like that. I always feel like it'd be a bit of a compromise. Anyway, I mean, you can just go and download them all. I mean, can't you? I mean, just go on Soulseek. I mean, I'm not helping you do that. I don't have any need to make money out of it or anything like that, so, other than making it more convenient for you lot. I mean maybe one of you lot should just collate them all, do some nice rips, 16 bit 44k rips of all the CDs, put it all in a folder and put it on Soulseek. I mean, I'm not advocating for that because obviously I don't own any of the work, right? So the labels and the artists own the work, don't they? So you know, ask the artists.
“Do you hate Max's [human interface] design compared to Max 6?”
No. Oh, human interface design. Yeah, no, I don't. No, I like it. It's like, it's kind of neat and tidy and everything's square and flat. Max 6 was all rounded corners and mistakes and they quickly rectified those mistakes. So I'm not going, I don't want to go back, And I like, you know, I mean, I'm a Max 3 guy, really, you know, that, so yeah. But I like rounded cables, I like curly cables as well, which is controversial and I've got loads of mates who just switch that off and I like it because you can get them in and around things easier and you can also see where they terminate a bit better just by looking. You can see where the end of the cable is, a bit easier, right? So you can tell if it's going past something or if it's going into it, sort of thing, so, you know. There are sort of these subtle changes, they actually make the workflow a bit better. So even though it might look a bit not quite as techno or something that makes sense.
“Did anyone ever approach you about doing a more conventional record or collab with someone mainstream?”
I don't know. I mean, if they did, I can't remember. So probably no.
“What flavor is the vape?”
It's like, it's just a [nicotine] shot. There's no flavour. It's just nick. It's just a nic shot. [vapes] And I'm supposed to mix it up with flavour, but fuck flavor, man! It's just, who cares about flavour? It's just annoying, innit, if you're on a train in somewhere and some con starts pumping air freshener at you, so. This way I can vape anywhere, no one says shit because they can't even smell it, so.
Iceboy Violet, Space Afrika and Blackhaine? Don't know any of them, but I'm going to check them all. But you know what, I don't check music because it's local. I hate that fucking civic pride shit. Especially in Manchester, you know. This thing about liking things from Manchester because if, in Manchester, fuck that! Fucking hell! The one thing about the Manchester scene growing up was that no one fucking liked each other. Everyone thought everyone else was shit for good reasons, you know, because it's a city full of independent thinkers, so. That's the way it should be. Fuck civic pride though. Fucking love 808 State and [A Guy Called] Gerald, you know, they're where it's at, but like I'm old, so what's that worth? Nothing, right? So, you know.
Yeah, the MiSTer thing. Yeah, FPGA MiSTer. Yeah, so I thought about getting one. So obviously, I like MAME and all that. Yeah, maybe down the line. I probably will at some point, but I haven’t opened my MAME library in ages and you've got to maintain that shit, you know? So a lot of it don't work now, and I ended up getting some, I think a torrent or something with just all of MAME up to a certain point, but then I can't quite get it to work and I just, it's just sitting there gathering, losing bits on my drive at the moment, so. Maybe I'll get there.
“Who would you rather fight in a no rules fist fight: Stockhausen or Xenakis?”
I wouldn't want to punch Stocky, you know. I think he'd, it’d like, he’d recoil, wouldn’t he sort of, you know, I don't think he'd really rise to the challenge. I think Xenakis would try beating the shit out of me though, so, you know. Probably lose, but you know.
“Tried SuperCollider recently?”
No. Nowhere near it.
“I don't like Javascript, and I've never seen anyone who does.”
Fucking right on. Oakly, right.
“Any chance of you guys playing Zurich again soon? Also about to ask about Python music, if you set it up at all?”
No, but it's just like if you're going to use Max for Live, you end up needing to know a bit about it, because it's basically Max for Live’s just the kind of, I'm not going to get into this. That I am too closely associated with these people to start reeling off comments about it, but ultimately it helps to know a bit of Python.
“So strange, I literally just started listening 15 minutes ago, and there's an AMA going on?” “Griselda is pretty dope for new hip-hop.”
Yeah, I love Griselda but I don't know if their sort of flavour has become a bit more 90s boom bap, but there's nothing wrong with that, right? Because there's a lot of haters now. You just want that slow Daringer shit, and I like all of it, if I'm being honest. That one with Slick Rick on, can’t, Good Night. Oh my god, like, but that was an album [WHO MADE THE SUNSHINE] a lot of people considered a bit normal for Griselda, I mean. But yeah anyway. I'm not a fucking Griselda reviews channel so fuck this.
“Still in contact with Mick Harris?”
No, I've not heard from Mick for a long time, like a long time. But obviously I still got a lot of respect for Mick. Mick's done a lot of amazing shit, you know. He managed to get such a hard sound out of such a small amount of stuff, you know. We had, we bonded over gear use. He was the first person I talked to who really fucking got live Ensoniq use good back in the day. Yeah, I mean Mick’s Mick, you know, you can't not like Mick because he's kind of magnetic, but he's also sort of, like you know, as a magnet, he can be quite repellent as well. so, I think, you know, just depends on your polarity, I guess.
“I just want to say a major thanks for Primavera.”
Thank you.
“Griselda’s good but what'd you think of SoundFonts?”
[laughs] Yeah, what do you think of SoundFonts? It's weird, you know, when you hear trap or like drill and they've all got like [*shing*] snare, like that, little [*shing*]. I quite like that little snare! But it's just everywhere innit? It's just mad. It's like mad how many drill beats just use the same beat! It’s just totally mad, but you know, I guess boom bap was like that as well. Really, if you are objective about it.
“What's the process of collecting or creating a tracklist as big as NTS? How do you decide to flow the album?”
You just do, I don't know. I've been doing long mixes for a long time, so I'm really into planning out these long sessions. I used to do mixes for just acid sessions. We used to use DATs because that's, you could get like four hours on a tape back in a day, so we'd do these big long fucking mixes and you'd know at what point the drugs start working and at what point you're gonna start getting trails and all that, so. That was just that, you know what I mean? But I'm saying yeah, I mean long term, long mixes for long periods of time, I've always liked that. I always liked Mixmaster Morris sets, you know, he could play sets all day. He would just play a set all day and it, and you'd still be with him by the end of the day. He'd still be able to keep you interested and I always admired that about him because he's got such a kind of, you know, encyclopedic knowledge of music history that he can keep pulling him out the bag as it were. I feel like he doesn't get enough credit as a DJ, to be honest.
“New Elektron gear, Digitone, Syntakt, and Model?”
Not used any of them.
“Broccoli is amazing.”
Ooh, this is what I was talking about Coil. Oh my God, I'm so behind. Fuck, I'm so sorry. Like this must be really frustrating for you lot.
“Who made the D-Breeze remix on Mask 500?”
Which one is that? Is that the Crazy one? It's both of us. We did it in Dazzy [Darrell Fitton]'s studio because he had the tape reels with the vocals on, and we used Dazzy’s gear, but we used our R8 to trigger, not to do the drum, that I think the drums were actually on the R8. So it's a funny thing where, I think we just, I think when we did that was just when we'd done Cavity Job? I can't remember. I think it was just after we'd done Cavity Job or around that time because we did, we had to, we’d covered Cavity Job. We'd done the track and we'd sent that off to the label Hardcore, and then they'd, the guy who ran the label said that he wanted a cleaner version and we didn't really have the gear to do that because we'd done it on the TASCAM. We've, and we hadn't even had a proper sampler when we done it. Like, the drums on Cavity Job originally were the kick and the snare, which we took off a record and then we'd played that on the Casio SK-5 on the pad onto a tape for about a minute, just playing the same drum loop and then we just took the bar of it that was the tightest and we looped that on the RSD-10. So it was like really fucked by this point, you know what I mean, but good, but a special kind of like, lo-rez. And then, and loads of the track was made like that where it was just kind of everything had been put through everything and there was a bit of filtered bit that sampled the chord off, it is what it is, with its rhythm was on there towards the end, like sampled and then played through like [a Roland] SH-1 with the filter going. Sort of envelope filter thing, and yeah, there were, there was a lot of that kind of stuff on there, and it would have been quite hard to reproduce. So we went in Dazzy's studio and we just took the samples and we tried to remake the track in Dazzy's studio and that took a while. It was like a week and we did the same for Accelera.
So the original versions of Cavity Job and Accelera don't sound like the versions that came out, and the originals were the ones that we used to play on IBC and then we DJ with, and they were a lot rougher and different. In fact on that Sweatbox video, where we're supposedly playing live, but we couldn't because the guy got panicked about was plugging a synth into a PA because he, apparently, according to the guy who run the venue, the synth makes a perfect square wave and a perfect square wave will break a speaker, which, you know, obviously I have since learned he's just completely wrong! But he just believed this so he wouldn't let us connect our synths to the, to his club PA. So we just played tracks off the four track and kind of messed around over it a little bit. And so the version of Cavity Job that we played during that gig, if you can call it a gig, was the IBC version. It was the original, so it sounds quite different. You can't really tell because it's recorded off a camcorder. So you've got another layer of dirt there but, and anyway, so we had that new Cavity Job version and then we, afterwards, I think, to pay Dazz, he asked us to remix his band. So we did that, basically for free for him in his studio using his gear. So that was a little bit like using someone else's setup but it was cool because he had things like vocoders and we didn't have any of that. So you know, that's why it sounds a bit ahead of the shit we were doing at that point, you know. In some ways, because of Dazzy’s gear basically because we just didn't have that much gear.
“Do you ever bump Analord?”
You know, not for a while. I mean, I kind of, there were some tracks on there that I really liked. I can't remember names. Yeah, there are some tracks that I really like on Analord and I don't know names of them, and I can’t just, I've just got a vague memory of what they sound like now. But yeah, I mean it was beautifully made. I mean, I remember thinking at the time like some of the high hat patterns on that shit were just so sneaky. They're so kind of different and they still work, you know, and I like that. I always like that about Richard, you know. He could do things that you weren't really expecting somebody to do, you know, and it'd be quite odd things like “Why’s he put a closed high hat up there?” But it really works, right, so, and I think there are things about those records that are quite subtle that have gone under the radar for a lot of people. I think it's too easy to just say “Oh well, it's just bog standard acid techno.” No, it isn't. No, it isn't. It's, like, subtly different and if you know that kind of music, you're gonna know that it's sort of different. So yeah, there are things about it I really like. I haven't played it for a while, you know. Respect where it's due.
“Has being high and analytical thinking for coding a balancing act, or does it in fact work well together for you?”
It helps me focus, so I don't need it. I've been without it for a while now. I'm working harder than ever. I'm doing, I think, I'm doing more shit complicated that I'm finding it easier to keep track of than it was. The advantage with Max versus a lot of other coding methods is that you can see it all at all times, so you don't forget what you're doing, so it's harder to lose the thread, if you like. For GenExpr, I wouldn't like to get too stoned because I'd bitch to spend my time having to review the code constantly and that gets annoying. Whereas Max, I'm presented with something visual that my brain just finds it a lot easier to keep track of. So yeah, I'd say for Max particularly getting stoned is fine. I'd say for other types of coding, it might not work as well, but I know that, I know people who've grown up coding, who love coding stoned, right? And likewise I know people who love coding pissed [drunk]. I can't really do that. It doesn't work for me, but I know people who can code pissed, right? So, it just comes out the fingers. It's just that kind of intuitive flow state thing for them. But, you know, my particular neural setup means that I get distracted easily and sometimes weed can be good for blocking out those distractions and keeping on with the task at hand, but, you know. At the same time, the fact that I'm distracted easily is what makes me have the ideas that I think are actually worth pursuing, and I've only learned that in retrospect because I feel like if I get distracted and I want to go off on some tangent, then that always ends up being more interesting than whatever I'd set out to do to begin with. So being distracted is a positive thing. Not necessarily a negative thing, and weed can block out you maybe distracted too much to actually get anything completed. So yeah, it's a balancing act, I guess not having it as much as it is having it, so you know. And it's an experience thing as well. I think if you always, if you like blazing all day every day, you know, you're gonna find it easier to work in that state than you would if you didn't have it at all. So yeah, I think it varies basically and everyone's different right, so.
“Someone else who likes Portal.” “Portal is killer. Have played shows with them!”
Nice! Portal’s fucking great. They're like really great, fucking hell! That The Swayy track, fucking hell! Yeah, they're proper good.
“Have you ever got into Miles Davis’ electric period? Stuff like Bitches Brew and beyond that, On the Corner?”
Yeah. I mean, I like them. They're good. They're really good. They sort of put me in a certain frame of mind as well. I feel like I'm kind of chasing someone around New York or something. It's like a weird vibe that put me in. It's a very particular vibe. Do I like it? Yeah, a lot. I mean, it's, his name’s Jack DeJohnette, the drummer. Guy’s just phenomenally good, like yeah. I mean it's like, almost too good. It's sort of, it's such a particular vibe though. It's almost like I feel like I don't want that to be my reference point because you'd only end up sounding like that because it is that. That is what that is. It's so particular. Actually got introduced to a lot of that by Tom because Tom Jenks, for a while, was living with Rob in Sheffield in the sort of mid to late 90s for a few years like, I think, two or three years, they lived together. And so he was around us all the time and yeah, we used to play each other’s shit. I'd play him like on my weird 80s hip-hop shit and he'd be like “that's all right”, you know, and then he played me Miles Davis and I'd be like “yeah, it's all right,” you know, so. But I ended up liking it quite a bit. He's good like that, Tommy's like, he's another obsessive listener, you know. But he was kind of like, really like “this is the best music ever,” you know what I mean? That was totally his thing, and there were some fucking elements of it I really wasn't prepared for. I remember first hearing Bitches Brew and thinking “Why’s everything's sliding out of sync? What the fuck is going on here? What is this? Is this on purpose? Is this how it's meant to be?” and he was like “yeah yeah” and then he told me about a lot of the other jazz people just hated it. They just thought he was totally wrong, like, it took me, there was another one who took me ages to get into. Sun Ra, and I only got into Sun Ra probably about 10 years ago because for ages, I just thought it sounded like a mess. I was just like “what is this?” Just like, fucking cacophonous. And then I was in some weird emotional state once, and I put some of it on because it was the only thing that I could listen to. Don't know if you fucking really, if you're feeling really spun out or depressed and then you play Sun Ra. It fucking finds its way in and then I was like “wait, this is amazing!” And then I had this total epiphany, like I love it when it happens but, erm…
“Do you feel about the differences in expressive harmonies in, say, your older albums, and your newer live sets? Is it a more minimalist or maximalist approach?”
It's neither minimalist or maximalist. It's just a different, I got bored with keyboards, is what it is, you know. But for lots of other reasons connected to the bottleneck of note length information within electronic music. I think pianos, keyboards were never the right choice of input instrument for electronic music. They were never the right choice, but we stuck with it now. I don't know what the right choice would have been either. Can't say string instruments because we just don't have that kind of technology, so. But it should have probably been something other than the piano, you know. And yeah, I mean, you know because I didn't learn about modes for a long time. I used to do a thing with, back in the day, so I'd, like, transpose the channel that I was writing my melody with to some arbitrary number. And then find that and then just play the white keys, right? So, and I didn't know that was what I was, I didn't know that was just fine, you know, choosing a mode and working in that. I didn't know that’s what that was, but I could feel that it sounded familiar and right in some odd way, and so there are elements of that thinking that I've maintained to this day because they sort of make some sort of sense. And, you know, even in the rig, I have something that counts the intervals, right? So I have the five numbers, sorry, the six numbers, you know, with the intervals counted and so I can see which type of mode I'm using. If I'm using one of those more consonant original seven or if I'm using some fucking weird one. And, you know, I have a thing that tells me what mode I might be using if I'm using any of the scales. I have a list of all the possible scales. So yeah, it's kind of, and it tries to tell me if I just select notes arbitrarily, it tries to find if that is an existing mode or a scale so that I have some context for what I'm doing.
Part 3 of 6
So yeah. I got more awareness of that stuff now, but I don't think it's, I'm not thinking about it that much. I'm sort of thinking about, I'm thinking about what sounds good most of the time, so.
Right. I need, what is this hype train shit? What is that? I don't understand what any of it is. Right. I need a piss. So, I'll be back soon
Part 4 of 6
[vapes] Yeah, sorry, I just needed to empty my bladder. So where are we? Who's spamming the chat? Right, okay. I can only scroll up a bit. It's not letting me go any further than this. So I'm just going to start answering from here. So I probably missed a load of questions. So, sorry.
Did I enjoy ATP [All Tomorrow’s Parties]? Yeah, of course. I mean it was a bit, obviously, it was a bit, there were some issues with production and it was a bit shit. Like I had Sonic Sum, didn't, nothing worked and they were really fucking act off and I went up to them to say “Yo, thanks for coming.” because I loved Sonic Sum, you know, I loved their album, Sanity Annex, and I was like I just, I don't know, I wanted to say something but they were really off with me and I was like, I just felt really bad because it was like obviously, I'd just, all I done was fucking put their name on the list, so you know, but they'd had loads of issues, so. Not like what you can do though. So whatever, it is what it is. Where we are?
“Any mods to the 606?”
Multiple outs, mainly. It's the only one I wanted. I mean you can do other shit to it, but yeah. One thing I like about the 606 and the 808, particularly the 808, is the chord that the hi-hats are. It's just a chord. That's super interesting, and it's the reason the 808 sound a bit nicer than the 606 ‘cause the 606 ones, weirdly it's more inharmonic, so it sounds nastier sounding. So I suppose you could maybe change the pitch of those oscillators? I've never actually tried to do it. I don't know if it's easy or possible to do that, so.
“Would you consider the stuff made during and after elseq more electro influenced than the stuff just before that?”
Yes, short answer. Yeah it was. There's a sort of return to some sort of, yeah, some sort of aesthetic ideological base position, you know?
“In the 1415_LIVEs, there's a mad accordion head job era[?] bit around 10 to 14 minutes. What method did you use to sequence that?”
I don't know, because I don't know which bit if, yeah, I don't know. I'd have to, you'd have to give me an audio example of it and I'll try and explain the algorithm. They're all pretty simple. I always find that like, the more, I'm more interested in very simple processes giving complex results than complex processes to achieve complex results, you know. I think it's more fun to get a lot out of very little, you know? It's kind of, yeah it's just fun. It's just more interesting and fun and I've got the feeling that in life, a lot of things are like that, you know? That a lot of what we think of as being complex phenomena and processes are actually like, underlyingly extremely simple, like very simple. That's just an intuition though. So yeah, a lot of our algorithms are very simple basically. It's the short answer. They're very simple and they always have been like, you know, since early days. Because I like that feeling of getting something plugged in that's it, you know, you've got two quite simple things and then they interact and then something comes out of it and you're like “whoa, what's happening there?” It's like the first time I ever saw camera feedback was by accident. I hadn't seen any examples of it that I knew about. Obviously I'd seen, like, the intro to Doctor Who from the 60s, or whatever. I'd seen things like that and I, but I didn't know what that was, and I'd seen whatever disco videos where they used it. So yeah, so you know, I remember first putting a camera on a TV and thought, I'm just thinking “I wonder what happens if you do this,” and then just going “what the fucking shit?” like, “what's happening now?” There's just all this detail and beauty in there, and I was just like “this is the shit!” Like this is, I felt like I discovered a whole universe, you know? And obviously I wasn't the first person to do that but it was just do, you know, having that moment at home like I'm not that interested in getting to a result before other people do but I love discovering things. I love that feeling of like “what's going on here? I need to know what's happening because this is weird. I didn't expect that result,” you know. So yeah, a lot of what I'm messing around with it, Max stuff like that, where I'll just have these occasional, I'll do a lot of stuff that isn't very interesting and I just have these occasional moments of “what the fuck,” like I didn't expect that. But it's just my own naivety really that lets me have those feelings, right, because if I did all the studying and I knew about all these techniques beforehand they wouldn't be interested, so I wouldn't have those moments, so it'd probably be boring, you know.
Do I still use MC-202? I haven't used it for a while, like a long time. A long, long time. Yeah, but it's good. I mean it's like, really, the thing with the 202 is that I came, because I came from a tape background and with tape, I've said this earlier like, you'd know ahead of time how long the thing is the you've got to fill and you’re only thinking, you’re thinking in terms of how many events you've put down. So whereabouts you are like. You've got to keep in memory all the time, like whereabouts in the bar you are. So you getting your next snare you know, with pause button, so you're getting your next snare and then it's like you know, that you've you've been recording for like a whatever it is, an eighth or a 16th or whatever however long you were between pressing pause and pressing it again and so, and because you're keeping that in mind, it sort of trains you up. So when I came to use the 202, it's the same thing where you have to keep in mind whereabouts in the bar you are, so you know, because all these notes are going to append to each other and eventually create a whole bar. So yeah, I found it quite intuitive, but a lot of other people are like “oh this is a horrible nightmare! I don't want to have to know whereabouts I am,” and you know, and like a lot of Rob's 202 programming was mad. He'd just do like the shortest little notes and some bits where like loads of notes, you know, but really quick and then it just requires a certain mindset. I think you know, it's totally the opposite to using a 303, and I think they're quite good in that sense for, sort of, getting you trained up and thinking about duration in a different way, you know, because I don't think most people consider that. A lot of people think about where they are in the bar as being related to a sort of grid that exists somewhere. So whereas the 202 doesn't give you that luxury. It just lets you think in terms of it like serially, so you're thinking in terms of what notes preceded it, you know, which is a different way of looking at it, so.
Alright. I'm getting bored now, so I'm going to do a few more and then I'm going to fuck off.
My favourite production techniques with [the Ensoniq] EPS-16+? I don't know. Like I don't think I had any favorites. Obviously, the Waveboy stuff was pretty ahead of its time in terms of it was giving people a few DSP type granular, sort of granular-esque processes ahead of everybody else getting them, but like that I wouldn't say they were favourites. They were just a bit like, “ooh, you can do that,” you know. I mean the first thing that, I think that, yeah so, when we did Amber, we did a thing where we took a bit of a vocal, what track is this on? I think it's on Nine. So we took a bit of somebody talking off something, arbitrary, and then looped it but a very tiny, tiny loop position and then was scrolling the loop position with the mod wheel. So from the beginning to the end of the mod wheel was the beginning to the end of the sample, and just dragging that around. I used to like doing that. I mean I remember when we first sort of found that and we were like “ooh that's nice” and that's pretty common. I mean you can, everybody does that shit now. It's not that weird, but at the time I was just like “ooh,” you know. And I kind of realised later on that there was a bit on Newbuild that's a bit like that, and I wondered if they'd actually done a similar thing, Anyway, so we might not have even been the first people in Manchester to do that, so.
“How is the flanging sound in the first track of Amber, Foil, made?”
I think that's EPS. Rob did that. I think it's EPS. If you mean the [imitates lead sound effect], that bit, I think that's EPS. Yeah, I think it's, but it might not be, ‘cause the one in Montreal, that's just after it, is the trigger flange in the Quadraverb. So we were really into those type of effects at the time, but I think it's actually, I don't think it's a flanger. I think it's the chorus in the EPS, but I'm not totally hundred percent sure about that. Foil I mean.
Fucking mozzies! Sorry, there's just mozzies everywhere! Right.
“What do you think of the psychedelic trance scene up to, a la…?”
I don't know anything about psychedelic trance. Don't know. Don't know a thing about it. I just know I used to turn on in the late 90s, I'd turn on the radio and it'd be some like, Pete Tong or something. It just be this like the same thing that I hear now, right, with these sort of arpeggiated rezzy sort of sawtooths. I don't hate it. I mean it just is what it is. It's just sort of strange to me that it still exists because most things from that time don't, you know? So I guess it must, somebody must really like it. It must just have some kind of enduring appeal. I guess there's some drug you can take where it's just amazing and that's the best sound for that drug, right? So, it's weird. I mean like, obviously I prefer the sound of a 303, but I just think it's more kind of vocal or lyrical or something and not as kind of [*fizzes*]. But I also, like, don't mind using that type of sound with other things, right? So I quite like that rezzy fizzy sawtoothy thing. You can hear it in bits, even on that Warp Tape stuff. There's a couple of bits where it's a bit like that. And it's not a sound that I dislike necessarily. It's just that I don't know if I just want to listen to that all the time on its own, because it might be a bit weird. Sort of, I think it needs other things to balance it. Bit like using fluorescent colours really, you know. You don't want to just have everything fluro. It's better if you have fluoro against something a bit muted innit, like a grey or, you know, a muted green or something nice.
“Modern artists who you see as having influence with your musical output? It's like Tim Hecker or Oneohtrix Point Never, or do you seek their [?], or similar music is very different from what you've made in the past?” Both. I mean, you know, I don't see Autechre influencing Tim Hecker, right? I don't see it. It may be there. I've met Tim Hecker a couple of times. He's a nice bloke. I don't, he never said to me “oh wow you've been such an influence” or anything. I don't think it's there unless he talked about it in interviews. I'm not hearing it and I don't have any sign that it’s there, so I don't know. Oneohtrix, yeah, I know that he's listened to us. I feel like he's very much like SOPHIE actually insofar as he's, he understands the fundamental reason or the fundamental thinking behind what we're doing. Which is a bit more about being fresh, not necessarily like because we've heard everything and we know that we're doing something new. It's not like that. It's more like we just want to do something that we think is new, right? And I feel like he's doing that and I think, you know, I think because I see people, a lot of people have opinions on Oneohtrix, and I think it a lot of it comes down to “I've been listening to electronic music for 40 years and he's just a kid. So I'm going to use that as basis for criticism!” and I think that's unfair. I think really what he's doing is he's asking questions that somebody his age would ask and he's not that fucking young anymore either. But I think he gets it and I think he's critical and I think he understands that, you know, he needs to do something different. He can't just copy people. I think he could probably copy us if he wanted to but he doesn't. He chooses not to because I think he gets it, you know? I used to think the same thing about SOPHIE as well. Totally doing their own thing and if we've been an influence it's in so far as maybe we're doing our own thing right so, and that's probably a good thing.
Glitchtrauma: “does happy hardcore make you laugh?”
It used to, right, because we'd be tripping in like ‘92 or whatever. We'd gone fully, we'd got bored with sampling by that point, could, partly because we didn't have a fucking sampler, because we didn't have the money for an Akai, so, and we didn't have the Ensoniq at that point. So we were like, we got the Ensoniq in ’93, so just right towards the tail end of doing Incunabula. so the only track with an Ensoniq on Incunabula, I think Autriche’s got it because we sampled the 606 on it, and then Eggshell was done with that. But everything prior, everything else on there is, it was pre us owning a sampler and we were using it only to sample our own gear, right? So, which was a thing we got off Mantronix because he used to do that. He used to sample his drum machines. I always thought that was quite fresh. He wasn't just nicking shit off records, he was just using it as a production tool, you know. And the bands that I'd like growing up like Art of Noise and Depeche Mode, I thought worked with samplers well. We're using sounds that weren't off records, they were just sounds that were around, you know. They’re just bits of found sound and stuff and I've always found that a lot more interesting. I mean, I suppose Art of Noise sampled a few records, but mainly not, you know. And, so I had more that attitude to samplers early on and, yeah, like I kind of, I mean we because when was growing up in the 80s, there was a soul show in Manchester. Guy called Mike Shaft and then about ‘86, it started being done by a guy called Stu Allen and then, and we just always listened to Stu Allen, right, because he was like the main guy playing hip-hop in Manchester at the time. And then by about ‘89, ‘90, he'd kind of, because he was the first guy playing house music on the radio in Manchester, he started that in about ‘86, no, and then because he had his House Hour, he had the Soul Hour and then he had the Hip-Hop Hour, right? So the House Hour and then, the House Hour, by sort of 1990, it morphed and it was no longer really a house hour. And you had things like Shades of Rhythm and Meat Beat Manifesto and these early breakbeat things popping up, right? So, and he was ahead of everyone. He was playing all that shit and then hardcore happened then, you know. By, you know, when he'd been doing, he'd done all the bleep techno and all that. He'd been through all that and, but like ‘91, we'd kind of, we'd been raving for a bit and we was doing the IBC thing and then we've got a whiff of those in Middleton. Jay Wearden and Moggy were playing a lot and they were good nights. A lot of hardcore. A lot of really dirty, dark, disturbing, kind of eastern sounding modes and all that. You know, like that kind of like, sort of, it's all dark. It's disturbing. It's scary. It's aggressive. It's, you know, everyone's fucking going for it. It was heavy and Thunderdome and Conspiracy, before that in 1990 where we used to go. Same sort of vibe, just really dark and disturbing. And then, yes, something happened in ‘92 and it just all changed. It was just all these sped up vocals. I remember we were all tripping inside because we'd stop going. We'd stop raving in like late ‘91 because it had kind of run its course. By ‘92, it slightly changed. It was, it just was a bit shitter, basically. And then, and we'd started staying in and doing loads of trips and just fucking arsing around with gear. And then, and but occasionally, it'd be like Saturday night, we'd all be off our heads and we'd, or Sunday night or whatever, and we'd fucking turn Stu Allen on just to see what he was playing and it just be this cartoon music. We’d be just like “the fuck is this?” Like, this isn't, no, this isn't hardcore. This is something else. It's like joke music. It reminded me of that scene in Threads where the kids get to get like a video recorder and they're watching kids TV, but it's all fucked up. It's like, you're so far in the future that you haven't quite got a grasp on what the past is. It's all been mangled by some process, you know. It reminded me of that. It's like these fucking vocals from these tracks from years ago, though. They were just all wrong. Everything was wrong, you know, it was all fucked up by the future and the fact that nobody understands context anymore just, you know, it was weird. It was like somebody with, “yeah, it was like somebody with Alzheimer's“ but, no, I mean it sort of was, but…
Corvidaes: “do you use bird samples? i’m fairly certain theres some in tankakern and the…”
Yeah, that's true. There is, I think there is in Tankakern because Tankakern was an oil tank in the garden, or one of the sounds was. And yeah, there were birds in the garden. So I've used that old tank on a few things. It's on Tankakern but it's on the Skeng mix and a few things. Still got them samples. I think the first track we used them on was Tangle Ill?
“Any chance of any more dates getting added or is the stuff announced a lock for the year?”
Yeah, I don't know. There is a slim chance but I don't know if it'll get fleshed out that much. I've been trying to keep it a little bit far apart so that if we need to quarantine in between that we don't miss any shows. So that's why they're like a month apart because it just makes it easier to get past COVID there's any COVID issues. Yeah, okay, so…
“Did you like Primavera? Did you hear me let out a whoop?”
I mean, maybe I did. Teb, I don't know.
“Do you wear night vision goggles to watch as all nerds?”
No. I just had these stupid things on, which I have to wear all the fucking time now because my eyes are failing. Because, you know, I'm old.
“I just wanted to say quickly that it was so awesome seeing the part in the late 2020 magazine interview where you and the other member were asked what album of yours you'd give a 15 year old. So I was 15 and I turned 17 recently.”
Okay. yeah, I don't know what I remember, what if I remember, what we said though. I'll probably just give you Confield because, you know, you're 15. You can handle Confield, can't you? Fucking hell. I'd probably like that at 15.
“Any chance you'd go on Jamie Lidell’s podcast?”
I might do? I don't know? Like, I don't know? I've not heard Jamie Lidell’s podcast. That's, so that's a thing is it, Jamie Lidell's podcast? Right, so what does it entail? What?
“Do you ever try to top NTS and do a 16 hour album?”
I mean if it became something that people would never expect us to do, then I might do it. I mean, I don't know whether anybody expected us to do NTS, but I think, you know, I don't think it'd be out the realm of possibility for us to try and top it. So if, you know, if it becomes predictable, I'm not sure it'd be worth doing. Maybe? I don't know?
“Do you think new artists should release on vinyl considering how bad things are regarding waiting time?”
We've been talking about this. So like, you know, with regard to my thinking, I knew that if I was to do an album now, it'd be probably 18 months before it got out. You know, even with Warp being big and it's just by that point, I mean, by the time SIGN came out I was just like, I was so past SIGN I didn't even have any thoughts about it. I was getting asked to do interviews and thinking“what do I say about this thing I'm kind of, I'm over it already. I'm in a different zone now. My life had completely changed as well. I'd moved out here. Everything was different, you know. I didn't really feel like I could say much about it. I wasn't in the same place at all. That's the problem. So you're trying to promote these things and you're just another person, you know. Like what do you even say about this thing that you did back there? This is just really hard work and then you’re meant to tour it and promote it, and if you're a singer it's even worse, right, if you’re in some band and you've got to, like, sing with the same emotion, the same song that you wrote like two years ago. I mean I always think it's weird that bands played tracks from their whole repertoire. they're doing it for the fans ultimately, you know I mean? It's a performance. It's acting. It's not really expression at that point. And I, you know, I've always swerved that kind of stuff. I don't really like it. I just like doing what I'm into. So I'm fortunate at the moment we're doing this live set and I was working on it even last week. I was working on it, so, you know, it's new shit so. And that's probably what I like doing. So yeah, we talked about releasing these LIVEs and that's the next thing we're gonna do. I've worked pretty hard on this stuff. Yeah, so that's where my focus is at the moment. I'm not really thinking about albums. To be honest, I haven't been thinking about albums for a while, you know. SIGN and PLUS happened by accident because we basically had only ported, I'd only made the Ableton port of the system in order to do remixes because I was getting fucked off because we'd just done that Moroder one and I'd done it in such a sort of halfassed, sort of, haphazard way I thought I wasn't good enough. And I was doing otherwise, I was doing these kind of DAW remixes for people that weren't using the rig. So I was sort of caught really not able to work with long sound files in the rig because it just doesn't work like that at all. It doesn't have a timeline or anything. So yeah, I sort of built the Ableton version of it and then to get good, I did all sort of SIGN tracks and all that and Rob had the same thing going in his studio and we just tried to get skills up using that new setup, you know. So then that became SIGN and PLUS was the other tracks that happened during that time that didn't quite fit the thread. And then that was it. We'd, and then we did the SOPHIE remix and didn't even fucking use it because I'd got bored of using it by that point. That's how long that took, So, yeah, so that was all weird and then, yeah I had to wait a year to get it out and by that point I've been working on the live set for way too long because the gigs had all fallen apart and we had, you know, we missed our opportunity to get out there. So it was, we ended up with a kind of weird period of time where I had a lot of, I had time to fill and not sure what to do and the live set was pretty much complete so I just started to kind of undo it and like rewrite all the kind of backend fundamental parts of the synths and everything to be a bit more efficient and get it all tight and get it just work on refining it for ages, and then work on the set a bit more. And then extend the set and then work on the extension. So there's enough material in there easily to knock out a couple of albums, but I think I'd rather just do the live stuff. It's more fun and I don't have to deal with shit being two years old when you release it, and then if we want to release these live sets, we'll just do that down the line. But you know, will I do another album? Yeah, maybe. I mean like I say, SIGN and PLUS came about a bit by accident. Warp really, really wanted us to do an album for obvious reasons and because it means that they get to do proper distribution licensing. It's just better for Warp if we do them. But for us, not necessarily. So yeah, we'll see. I don't know. I'm a little bit, you know, albums, bit boring anyway. I'm not from an albums world, you know. Albums weren't the thing that we grew up listening to much, you know? I used to listen to 12”s, mixes and stuff.
“Do you reckon y'all ever post MSP material like you did with Quaristice tour stuff?”
Oh I see! [vapes] Maybe when we stop using it, because it's just, it doesn't matter if it's out there then.
Can I find a bigger backpack for my next gigs? You know what, I actually did start thinking about that because I'm trying to avoid baggage. Going through baggage because it's just a pain in the ass. So actually, I'm thinking about buying a bigger backpack, Tub.
Did we modify the Roland R8? No. Actually, Richard sent me those cards that you can write your own sounds to, like the site that's doing them cards now, so you can like, you can burn your own, kind of whatever chips, cards, and that's fairly appealing. I just found the kind of tuning on R8s to be a bit weird because it's in, what is it, in like tenths of a cent or something weird or like tenths of a semitone? I can't remember, it's some weird fucking tuning. So it's a bit, it's a bit stuck, like you can't really do weird EDOs [equal division of octaves] and stuff in it. you're just stuck doing scale detuning, so it's kind of cool but it's like, a little bit, yeah, it's a bit limited. It's weirdly limited. Not limited in a very nice way, terms of whatever harmony.
“Have you ever heard the album made by someone combining the AE_LIVE16 tour tracks by stitching each bit into actual cohesive tracks?”
Yeah. No. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's like YouTube of, yeah, no I haven't bothered to play it because I just thought it'd be weird. But I should probably check it, but it's probably weird. I would definitely, definitely do it differently. I can say that not having heard it, but that's probably a bit weird for the person who did it for me to hear me saying that, but I just know that I would do it differently. I have a very, kind of, specific goals when I'm doing editing, so.
“Has nature affected the themes on your records throughout the years?I love the fish plant references and some of your titles.”
Nice! So yeah, a lot of people don't pick that shit up. They just think it's all random words. So, you know, I don't like to draw too much attention to what things are about and where we get ideas from. Nature's always been inspiring. I mean, it can't not be. I feel like a lot of people are blind to these little details. I mean, I used to go camping with my parents and I just like, I'd just fucking sit there staring at the grass and watching the ants and all the little bugs because they were fucking amazing! I mean, they're amazing little things, they’re like little robots! They're so fucking cool! So yeah, I kind of like, I like nature, but I like how, kind of, I like how technological it is, you know? It's like, I don't want to go off on meaning shit like self-organizing, you know, complexity theory shit, but you know it is like, it is quite amazing when you think about what it's doing, and what thing, you know what we, because when we obviously have a very kind of anthrocentric whatever way of looking at purpose and reasons for things and, you know, how things fit into niches and exploit that and all that. So we think in terms of utility and purpose and these are very human ideas, I think to begin with. But it is kind of amazing when you look at it through that lens as being a human, you know. You look at these little things and you think “fuck, they're so well engineered! They're so well designed.” They're neither of those things, are they? But you know, but they seem like they are, you know, and that's very inspiring shit, you know I mean? It can't not be, so. And I just like the aesthetics. I mean, look at birds. Look at waxwings. They're so fucking cool looking. They look ridiculously cool, you know. Like how can you not like that? Like that's, it's just so perfectly well designed and looks amazing, you know. Owls, I've always liked owls. owls are so fucking cool. Just the way they're moving, everything, they're so fucking dope, you know. So yeah, I find nature endlessly inspiring and kind of, it's where it's at, basically for me. Yeah, nature and geology to some extent. Rob's a big geology fiend, just talking about rocks, you know. Yeah.
“How was Norway treating you mate? Ever considered doing a gig there?”
Yeah, well, yeah and I love it. I fucking love it. It's brilliant! Amazing! It's just a country full of people who are a bit shy, you know, and stay in and kind of, but they're really friendly. I like the low population. I like being out the way. I like being able to work all the time. I like people not sitting next to you on the train, you know. It's just fucking cool, right? It's fucking cool. It's a country full of people like me. I feel like there must be a high number of neurodivergent people in Norway, you know. It's, yeah, it's a great place to live. Love it. And people are super nice. There's a kind of warmth in people that I haven't experienced in the UK since like the 70s. It feels a little bit, in some ways a little bit behind and in some ways very ahead, so, it's a kind of odd blend to get used to. Takes the post ages to turn up but at the same time things work, like trains work, you know, things work. So some things work. some things don't. It's very socialist, but you've also got this kind of, it's quite corporate at the same time because obviously there's not that many small businesses. So it's a bit harder to survive if you're self-employed. But if you're working for some bullshit company, you won't get fucked over. So yeah, pluses and minuses. But I think for society in general and people's attitudes and stuff like that, it's better. It's probably going to get worse because everywhere's doing this slide into American “fuck you, I got mine” kind of hypercapitalist bullshit, but it's resisting better than a lot of other parts of Europe. So yeah, I do like it a lot.
“Have you considered doing full on modular sets or pieces in the future?”
I mean, we used modular stuff. I mean we had a big rack of analog systems gear that we used around the time that we were doing Draft [7.30] quite a bit, and then Rob took that. So he's got that, and he still uses it occasionally. There's a couple of bits on Oversteps using it, and I think he still uses it to this day, but the, you know, there are issues using modular gear that, you can only have one patch in at once. It's quite often monophonic. Not that there's anything wrong with monophonic, but it just, it's just a lot of work to get anything layered and stuff, so. Yeah, I mean I prefer using computers. I get more done is the short answer, basically. I haven't got anything against modulars and we can talk all we can talk about maths and filters and things like this if you want. But usually I just need to, I just need it to be good enough to get the job done because I think that that's more important and I'm more interested in fucking around with computation these days, you know. Just to say I don't mean maths necessarily, I know computers are mathematical in nature, but I more mean computational processes, you know, specifically, so. I guess what computers do, you know, I find that more interesting. So yeah.
“Have you considered…” Oh, I've read that. “Do you have good relative pitch?”
I mean, yeah-ish. I always find myself slightly flat. I'm kind of, Rob says I'm flat. I think I'm flat relative to 12-TET and 12#-TET. So, fuck the haters, right?
“Norwegian autumn makes psilocybe mushrooms.”
Yeah it does! No shit! Noticed, just there, just there! Not bad, ey? Don't have to go far, so.
“Which rapper would you collab with?”
I'm not saying, Tub, because, you know what would happen, right? I'd work with them and then fucking five minutes later, they're getting cancelled for raping someone or fucking trying to kill someone. So I'm not going there, you know what I mean? Fucking dodge it! Right and they're all, I love them all, but you know, they, they're all dickheads and all so.
“Say something about architecture.”
Something about architecture. Yeah, I got boring as I got older and discovered functionalism. Which, you know, I think the best architecture in the future is going to be grown, not fucking built. I think we're going to be genetically designing architecture. I think it's going to be about, like a harmony with nature where we make sort of modifications to the DNA of plants that mean that they can, we can grow our own houses. So that's my comment on architecture.
“Do you guys stick with 12 tone equal temperament usually? Do you work with other tuning systems?”
Yeah, my rig’s like, can do any EDO. It can translate scales from one EDO to another EDO, So it maintains the pitch positions, but just gives you different note values. So the note values will all change according to whichever EDO you change, and then you can select new hard note values from that EDO. So you can have mixed EDOs within the same scale and it's a very flexible system. Yeah, so yeah I do fuck with it. Most of the shit that we've done, especially around Oversteps, are just scale detuning. So it's just take 12-TET, detune some of the notes according to some criteria and then work with that so, and a lot of, but this is just, because of the limitations of DAWs and programs like this where you have to really deal with 12-TET at some stage while you're doing your track, and I find that shit super annoying. I don't have to worry about that in MAX at all. Note numbers can be arbitrary, so. In Max, you can have any EDO basically so, and I quite often will start with an EDO and then detune parts of that. So I'm still doing the same thing effectively but just in a more free way. But I'll still, more often than not, work in 12-TET because it's easy. It's convenient. It gives you what you want, and you can do things that are familiar to people. So, I have no issues with 12-TET. I know a lot of microtonal geeks get kind of snobby about 12-TET being shit. I don't think it you need to be like that. You know, it's useful, you know. It's bricks and mortar. It works. It does what it says on the tin, so yeah. Meaning two edged.
“Ever seen Category III movies or Ebola Syndrome?”
No.
God, I'm sorry about being so far away in the chat. It’s just my phone battery is low, by the way. So at some point, it's just gonna die and I'll disappear off the face of Twitch. I might get a power pack if I'm feeling generous. “Did you hear the album,” oh God, motherfucker, why am I getting the same questions coming up? Is someone just spamming the same questions?
“I have an Autistic friend who's bought up every available Quadraverb in the Melbourne area, Victoria.”
Good! What, is that to stop competitors from using them? That's some fucking next level gorilla shit though. Yeah, Quadraverbs are just amazing. You can do so many weird things with them. I mean beyond the reverb algorithm itself being a work of art, they've got loads of functions. They've got loads of MIDI input. You can do crazy shit with them. They're totally worth getting and exploring and spending a lot of time with and you can do cool shit.
“It's kind of a weird AMA. Some moderators should do their work here and select ambient questions 2022.”
Why is it a weird AMA? It isn’t my fault, is it? I'm, hopefully I'm answering. I'll answer any questions, so it wouldn't be an AMA if people couldn't ask what they wanted, would it? It'd be an AMS, so.
“Do you talk to your wife about the sounds you made that day and then mimicked them to her?”
Yeah, I ain't got a wife, but I've got a girlfriend. I don't make sounds to her with my mouth often, but I do sometimes. But she works with sound as well so, she's sort of, I just have to play her stuff. I just play her stuff. It's good, we dig each other's shit, so that's nice. I'm probably her biggest fan.
Where are all them laughs at? What did I say? What was that? Shit, I wish I was up to date with the chat. “Hear the album that was combined from AELIVE_16 sets?” Not you again! Is it just the same question over and over? I've already answered it anyway!
“How cool to find you watching in 2019, the onset with the pandemic, the new live set was ready then? Obviously, everything remained frozen. What are you playing live today? Is it the set from two years ago or is this a long period that continues to transform and refine it?”
Yeah, basically that. It started out quite different. So, you can hear a bit of ecol[4] in the set, ecol4 that was basically like the ecol4 that's on PLUS when we started out. So it's all changed brutally and everything's, yeah, it's just, it keeps going through revisions. I'm constantly remixing things and changing them, so it's a different thing now to what we started out with. But it's been through a lot of phases.
“Does the new set represent today's AE or have you been working on different things in the meantime?”
Yeah, it's modern. It's current. It's up to date.
“Please guys, make it possible to take pictures with you at concerts in Greece and Finland. I can’t fucking get them from another country. ”
Yeah, there's not really any good pictures, but the problem was with Primavera, they were trying to get rights for everything, right? So they were trying to get broadcast, they were trying to record it, you know? Obviously we're thinking about releasing them, so we didn't want to okay it. We ended up fucking up the recording anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered. But we still don't want it out there until a few people have heard it in venues because context, it's important and this was made for listening to in venues first. So I want to give people the first chance. I think if you've paid whatever it is for a ticket, you might as well have some exclusivity in the deal, right, so. But they'll come out eventually anyway, so. Even if we fuck up all the recordings, we'd just do a studio one. So we'll make sure you get to hear a decent rip of it in some form.
“What's your opinion of Stranger Things? Does it remind you of your youth being around with Rob?”
No, what Stranger Things reminds me of is watching films from that era. It doesn't remind me of that era. I don't think it's based on that era. I think it's based on fiction of that era. So yeah, it reminds me of Goonies. It reminds me of Explorers, you know, which are good. Do I, what, I don't really have any strong feelings about Stranger Things, you know? As a teenager, I read a lot of Stephen King. I watched a lot of his stuff. I watched, you know, I watched every John Carpenter film, watched every [David] Cronenberg film. You know, I had pretty standard kind of 80s teenage interest, so you know. So yeah, I mean I guess in some ways it appeals to me because it reminds me of TV that I would watch when I was a kid, but I'm not American, you know. I didn't grow up in a film. So, it's not that familiar to me. It doesn't feel like reality.
“Do you still think that your old stuff is cheesy?”
I think that everything's become more like that anyway. So it sort of doesn't seem as cheesy now. But yeah, it probably is. I don't know, what is cheesy? I didn't say that. It wasn't my quote, so.
[vapes] Oh fuck. Okay, so this battery's gone now. That’s annoying. Right, so where are we?
“Have you heard the 16,” so I might have to get some power and then come back, but I'm gonna be so far up the chat. I think I might have missed a lot more questions here. I think I've been doing this too long already. Hang on.
“Did you get inspiration from artists outside the music scene and if so could you name a few?”
I don't really get, you know what, not most of my influence isn't from artists. It's just some shit that's around, right? So I kind of, it sounds shit when you say it, but it's just true. Like, I get more out of looking at the land and looking at the animals and kind of weird, mostly from insects and small weird things and birds and things that seem a little bit unfamiliar in some way. Birds are weird, right? They are weird. They are real, but they are weird, like their fucking weird little legs. How the fuck are they even standing on them from like that? They're, like weird, like who thought that what, like they're just weird and they're weird the way they can't move their eyes. So, they have to kind of, and then the weird way they move around and the jerkiness and everything about them is just weird, you know. But I rate them. But yeah, things that are unfamiliar and a little bit strange are more interesting to me and I think the problem with a lot of film and art in general is that it's not strange enough. There are way stranger things that just already exist, you know.
Anyway, I think, you know, if I'm going to go there, I mean, like, I do think some of Refik Anadol‘s stuff is a little bit mind-blowing. Like when I see stuff I'm like how the fuck are you doing that? Like, that's just mad, and I know he's just, whatever, he's just using processing or whatever he uses. I don't know what he uses, actually, but you know. But yeah, it's so liquid. This just doesn't seem that he could, how does he even do that in real time? What kind of computer is he using to do it, you know? Shit like that. So there are some things where I'll see it and I'll just be like “how is that even done?", like, and “is this really visualisation?” because I don't like a lot of visualisation and sonification in these things. But if that is really what that is, it's really high-end because a lot of what I see when I or hear, when I hear things like sonification, it's just terrible, you know? It's just not, it just doesn't sound good, you know. So I don't want to name my girlfriend as one of the people who inspires me, but she does. Her shit's amazing. I don't know. I don't really, there isn't a lot of art that I get impressed by, or that I find sort of moving in some way, and I think art unfortunately, a lot of art these days, it's just become this thing that's supposed to sort of impress you or make a point or something like that, and I don't, that kind of stuff doesn't appeal to me. I'm, in some ways, I suppose I might be a little bit traditional because I quite, I want things to appeal to me aesthetically. I want it to kind of reach in and touch me in a way that's not possible to put into words. So I think that's why nature's probably more, it's easier for me to get inspiration from than, it is from other people's work. So yeah, you know, I used to like film and things like that a lot more, but it's because my life was a bit more limited, and the outlook was probably more limited back then, and there were some things that were harder to access. I think nowadays, you can just get anything anytime you want and it's just too easy to get your hands on it, so I don't find it as interesting, but it just might be an age and experience thing, I'm not sure. I don't know, it's hard to answer that really. I don't like naming lists of artists, music artists or any kind of artist, you know, visual artists. I don't like listing people really, and I probably shouldn't have mentioned Refik there, but he's you know, his shit is quite mind-blowing, though. He's quite kind of like, “how is that done?” But he's another one, he's just doing NFTs now innit. So who fucking cares? Right, so.
“I've heard you listen to Basic Channel. Have you ever thought about collaborating with Moritz [von Oswald]?”
I love Moritz. I just got an immense amount of respect for him. He's got brilliant taste. He's phenomenal. You know, I used to like Palais Schaumburg. I like Holger Hiller. Actually know Holger a little bit. A huge fan of his. I was a big fan of Holger before I really knew Moritz’s stuff. I got into Moritz as well. Yeah, I mean I like those guys. I think they all get it. To be honest, I like a lot of Sky Record stuff as well. I like a lot of stuff from that sort of, led up to that, you know? So I kind of, and I feel like they're sort of, even though it's only tangentially, they're sort of connected to that a little bit. So yeah, I don't know. I mean if I'd work with Moritz, I don't know because I'd sort of feel like we could cramp each other's styles a bit too easily, but I'm not sure. I think he'd probably feel the same way. He wouldn't approach us, I don't think, but I'm sure there are aspects of what we're doing that appeal to him, but I'm not sure that we'd gel very well. Maybe we would. I think Moritz is better off working with people who maybe can use his skills a little bit better like musicians and people are. I'm not sure, you know. Maybe I could get him to play drums, you know. Maybe?
“I was busy with Mr. Oizo when Confield came out.”
Really? Was Mr. Oizo around then?
“I don't think there were any interviews for PLUS.”
No, I don't think there will.
“ecol4 is such a beautiful, off-kilter ghostly stir with bells. Did that feature an oil drum too?”
No, that’s all Max/MSP.
My favorite Rephlex albums? I can't remember, you know. I don't even know what albums were on Rephlex. I mean, most of the Rephlex stuff that I would have bought would have been prior to meeting Richard. So probably sort of, ‘92 sort of, Caustic Window things, them sort of things. I got a few bits on Rephlex. I think I've got, like, a Mike Dred album somewhere. I haven't played that in a while. Yeah, I don't fucking know, probably Feed Me Weird Things right, because that was on Rephlex, so can I say that?
“Jamie Lidell's podcast is a production geek out session. He had Richard Devine on there not too long ago. Just hanging out and talking about gear production and stuff like that.”
Yeah, I'm not that interested in talking about gear, you know. I don't find gear that interesting. I mean you can talk about it, but it's sort of, I mean I love using it. Yeah, maybe, I do, I don't mind talking about it. I'm not sure, maybe I'd do that. I don't, this podcast is weird though, aren't they a bit weird, right? It’s like it's a fucking podcast. Maybe, I don't know Jamie well enough to know whether I'd get on with him well enough to have a conversation with him about gear. Especially given I’m so deep into what I'm building at the moment. I'm not sure that I could say anything meaningful about it. That's why it gets a bit weird when we get us to do gear tech interviews because, I mean you'd have to literally show somebody the way the patches work and the way that it's built, means that you have to see a whole lot of the system before you can really get a handle on what how it's doing, what it’s doing so. And even then, you might not quite understand it in the same way you might not understand, well, any simple process that comes out with a complex result. It isn't necessarily that easy to describe it. You just have to run the process, right, and show somebody the result. So it's a bit like that. It's so, it becomes much easier just to put the music out there than to talk about it in a tech geeky sort of way. So I'm not sure he'd ask the right questions. Probably wouldn't, you never know. You know, he'd probably say things like, you know, “do you find that using computers…” He asked me once, right, he said, Jamie, right, asked me in an email if Kyma would make him too much of a sort of shut in geek. Like how was, how good was Kyma? Would it turn me into a shut-in geek, like a kind of, and I thought, “well if that's what you're worried about, maybe it's not for you,” you know. I mean.
“Do you keep up with artists' music that is big on the internet and on sites like Rate Your Music?”
No, fucking Rate Your Music? No way! Jesus, fucking hell. Why, though? I don't care about other people's opinions about music. I mean why, I mean the internet exists. I can go and listen to the music, so why am I going to read somebody else's opinion on them? Why would I do that? Like, give me a reason to do that. Like, do people still read music magazines? Right, you remember you used to read music magazines? I used to do a thing right, years ago where I'd read like a music magazine. I'd find some arbitrary review of a record that I'd not heard and read the review and then try and make something that fit the review, right? So the idea for the track would come from the review. So they'd say “oh it sounds like an industrial hammer,” and, you know and it is, you know, “in it but there are these bleak overtones of eastern mysticism,” or whatever the fuck it said. And I just like, think “right, okay. I'm gonna make that.” And then I'd make the track and then I'd go and listen to the track that they'd reviewed, and it'd be fucking nothing like what I'd made, you know? So I have this theory that, like, you know, music reviews are basically, fundamentally, just absolutely useless at describing the music. So I don't understand what the utility is. I don't get it, especially now that you've got internet and you can just log on to, you know, the artist's own site or a Bandcamp or something. Spotify, whatever if you use that. I don't, but you know, and you can just play the track. So why would you read a review of the track? Why would you need to know what somebody else thought of it? I don't get it. I actually don't get it. So I don't understand why anybody reads that stuff to be honest, because you can just get the track, so.
“Do you think Rate Your Music is the devil?”
No, it's not, I don't think it's bad, you know? I just like, don't need it, you know what I mean? It's like crutches. I don't think crutches are bad, but I don't need them. So, well not yet.
“May I ask what you were listening to when you were a teenager?”
Yeah, I mean hip-hop mainly, hip-hop. Bits of soul and early house. I guess ‘86 that came up. So I'd been 14. But mainly hip-hop, almost all hip-hop and electro and freestyle and things like that. Yeah.
I'm still, I am, I don't know if bored is the right word. I'm just, sort of, watching my battery and my vapes run out. So I'm gonna have to go in a minute. But I might come back if I can get power for my phone.
“Go in.”
Because I don't mind doing this a bit. There's just so many questions to get through. That's the thing.
“Does the rig have a visual UI layer? Is it just a mess of raw Max stuff?”
Yeah, I mean it's mostly Max. I mean, there is a front end. If I've got variables or if there are like functions and things that you can play with. Plots and there's a few plots. There's a lot of functions. There's a load of number boxes and a few dials because sometimes I just get a better sense from looking at a dial. But it's always in the pie slice style and it's always 360° so I can see when something's at, you know, 90° or whatever. Yeah, so yeah, so there is graphics, but it's pretty, I don't know, it's pretty bare bones. I don't really like having a lot of graphic stuff in there. It slows it down. It gets in the way. It's not that useful. I don't need visual feedback. You know, I don't like timelines either. I don't really like to have a lot of stuff to look at. I think that's why I used to, one of the things, anyway, I used to like about using hardware was most of the visualisation is just in your head, so, and it's just nicer that way, you know. I think one of the problems with computers that doesn't get talked about much is just the sheer amount of visual feedback confusing you, you know.
“How much time it took to sequence Flutter with the R8?”
Just like a day. Not long, just played in. You can do the rolls with the pressure on the pad and all that, right, so. And yeah, the pitches. You can do with the slider so you kind of, you know, you write in the pattern first and then you do the pitches with the slider sort of thing. You do it a few times until it sounds good and then I say it's done right, so. It's very fast and that's partly why I used the R8 so long because it's just so fast to write on. It's like much faster than doing those kind of rolls in Cubase. We had to draw them in. You just do your hand on the pad like the pressure. Just change the pressure. You can do it on an MPC, you know, same thing so.
“Do you code stuff outside of music?”
Not really. No. I'd only do as much as I have to. It's mostly GenExpr, so I don't really code much in Python either. I just do a bit. So, it's the only language other than C that I've fucked with. So, and I don't fuck with C at all anymore. Can't be bothered. Don't have to, so I only do what I've got to do. I don't really enjoy coding as much as a lot of people, but I do, I'm, you know, I'm proficient enough to to get stuff going. GenExpr is a weird language because it's quite hard to learn, so you're just sort of on your own, really, with it, so. But I quite enjoy that strangely.
“Is there a possibility of streaming live sessions?”
Probably not.
“There is actually a website named Rate My Cock. I've just Googled it.”
Well… why?
“What's your favorite cheese?”
Okay, now. Depends on mood really, you know? Like, I really like goat's cheese. Like, quite a lot. There are some good ones in Norway, but I can't remember the names of them but I know what the packaging looks like. I like, kind of, I like really tangy cheddars. Like, Canadian reserve cheddar is really nice, but it's Canadian so it's a bit not very environmentally friendly, but it's super nice. I quite like Cornish cheddars. I like rubbery weird ones like Jarlsberg. I really like mozzarella as well, even though it's a bit nothingy. But I like buffalo mozzarella as well. Mainly I like, sort of, tangy weird ones. I like Stilton, like any kind of blue cheese really. I don't really like brie. Brie's a bit weird. Thinking about it, I just can't get down with. It's like too, yeah, a bit weird. But yeah, I like the sort of tangy, sort of acidic, sort of tasting ones mostly. Mostly goat's cheese. I like Feta as well.
“If you could nuke the USA, would you?”
What kind of a question is that? What kind, where does the question that come from? How do you even think a question like that? “If you could nuke the USA?” How would you even do that? How many nukes would it take to nuke the USA? What would be the result of it for everyone else? What, how would that work? Why nukes? Like if you're going to imaginarily do something that big, why would nukes be your weapon of choice? Like really, nukes? Have you thought about this much or you just started asking the question? I don't understand. Please, give me more information on why you, why nukes particularly, is the thing? I mean, if you were going to do something like that which, let's face it, it's not something that has occurred to me really.
“Anything you say about c7b2 sequencing sound engineering? It seems to have a lot of interesting reoccurring themes like the rumbling low end?”
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what to tell you about it. It's quite, it was quite a few different patches working together, that track. So, a lot of the sort of screamy stuff is sort of delays and something that's a bit like a phaser, but it's getting webbed around quite a lot. So there's a lot of, kind of, I don't know. I don't even know what it was doing to be honest. I'd have to open it all up again and have a look because, you know, once it's set up and saved, I don't really look at it so. But I know roughly which modules were getting used and I know roughly what they would have been doing, so yeah. “I don't know” is the short answer.
“‘Anything Complexity Theory’ is my name on Tinder.”
No.
Fucking hell, “ants and owls,” is that how far back we are? Right, I'm definitely going for a minute, but I might be back in a bit. so, see ya, maybe, in a bit?
Part 5 of 6
…because I need to eat, yeah. Got shit to do, so. Alright, yeah, we are, but not for long, like 20 minutes. As long as it takes, because then, I'm going to eat. So i'll answer a few quick questions now, and I'm not scrolling up, so. [vapes]
Fish and chips.
“Why don't you guys seem to invest in merch? Isn't that a big income for artists?”
I'm just not that arsed about. You know, all I need is enough money to get a laptop and do my shit every day all day, so, you know. Merch, yeah, I could probably cream off a bit more money for merch, but it's a bit of a hassle. You know, I'm not that arsed. I don't really think of it like a business, you know. I mean, I would if I had to, you know, I'm not totally like “I'm above all that.” I'm not like that at all. I just can't be arsed is the answer really. But yeah, I mean I guess if you really want some, we'll make some.
“Better come to Hungary and play this new live set. Otherwise, I would get angry and remake the entire thing in Max and rent a venue and play it myself!”
Fucking go for it man. Like, just do it if that's what you're into, you know, doing kind of ersatz versions of other people's things.
“Still got the Juno-106?”
No, Glynn has got it, my mate. So I don't know what he's doing with it. Didjit, he came with us. 2010 tour. [vapes]
“I want your face on a t-shirt.”
What about, kind of round head? Which angle would you do it from?
“Did you watch Morbius?”
No, should I watch that? It looks shit. Looks like a shit Marvel thing. Would I really watch that? Should I watch it? Tell me if I should watch it.
“What's the FM synths used on Oversteps?”
Mostly FM7. FM8 I mean.
“Question: did you do any interviews and if so how many did you do?”
Where?
“Sorry for the millionth artist question, but do you like Arca?”
Yeah!
“Do you have tinnitus? You've got any unique ways to deal with it?” “Do you use nicotine in the vape? What vape is it?”
It's a Caliburn, Uwell. It's convenient, what can I say? The pods last for fucking ages. I just vape nic salts in it so the pods last even longer because they don't jam up. I don't use any flavor. I used to, but people got sick of me smelling like whatever, cinnamon buns or whatever.
“Any plans to release more early stuff like the Warp tapes?”
No plans because we didn't have a plan to do that. It was just, we got asked by NTS and we had the stuff there. So we just threw the mix together and did it. Was a bit, you know, off the cuff. We haven't got loads and loads of amazing material from that era. We've got loads of material though, so I don't know. Maybe. I mean we even thought about doing a release based on that thing because that's a mix. So maybe we could just put the tracks out individually on some kind of format? I guess, if we could be bothered? It's a bit, you know, it's a bit like looking at your old school books, you know? It's a bit, you know, yeah, I'd rather be doing new stuff if I’m being honest. I don't find it that interesting going through archives. I've never really been one for archives. I don't really keep much archiving. I don't do a lot of thinking about that stuff, you know? It's just there and I get asked about it a lot. Which is why we talk about it a lot, but it's just the nature of doing interviews and being in the game for this long that people want to talk about that shit. So we know we're kind enough to answer the questions and not be funny about it because I don't want to be always like insisting that people talk about the new shit even though that is what I want to do. I don't really want to talk about anything, to be honest but, you know. I try, I'm thinking about the new shit basically. I'm not thinking about the old shit at all. So the questions are always a little bit annoying, but you do it because you don't want to be a dick and deny the fact that you've been around as long as you have because people might only like your old shit. They might not even like what you're doing now, so you gotta be nice, you know what I mean? So.
“Have you seen Geir Jenssen out and about recording fields?”
No. [laughs] No, I haven't.
“Come to Russia!”
Yeah. I'm, I don't think we've got time to talk about it right now.
“Will you guys let the fans have a picture of you?”
It's fucking stupid, all this Russia stuff. It's fucking stupid. But you know, you guys need to sort it out. We can't sort it out for you, okay?
“If you’d better to look to the left, slightly profile. slightly more mysterious. Especially if the sun is awesome.”
I don't really know. I think I look weird from all angles at the moment.
“How the hell did you program Flutter with Roland R8s? Which complex…”
It’s not, it's really not. You just have to get good on the R8. You just, you know, what can I say? It's just, do it. You only do it. You only get good if you do it all the time, so. I wasn't even start out that good on the R8. You can hear in the early Warp tape stuff. You can hear me getting used to using the thing, so.
“Do you remember doing that gig in the carpark in Shoreditch on Quaristice tour?”
Yeah, fucking do! Yeah, we had a really good rig that night. The guys who put it in were really smart and the rig sounded really good. I remember during sound check just thinking “Fuck, this is gonna be good!” and then everyone stood there freezing in their coats like a bunch of kind of dudes in North Faces, you know. It's like an army of people that all look the same. It was kind of odd, but you know, it was like they were really into it and I think the bass was just good. I remember Mark Fell actually, like, did a load of bass stuff that night because I think he was being a bit competitive or whatever, you know. That was fun. Yeah, the rig mainly, was my main takeaway from that was that the rig was fucking amazing.
“How exactly was the sound of nineFly made? Spectral stuff?”
Noise reduction. Just basic threshold fft shit, you know. So, really simple. It's not hard to do. It's like pretty entry-level fft stuff, so.
“Do you guys still use VirSyn CUBE?”
No. You know, only time we used that was on Untilted. But I like it. I think it's a dope little plaything. You know, convolution in general can be fun. It gets a bit, I mean I wouldn't use a VST to do that now. There are more interesting things you can do in just MSP, so.
Have I busted out the Machinedrum and Monomachine? No, because I've lent them to Mike Williamson, and he's had them for since 2013, so.
“You ever meet SOPHIE in person?”
No.
“Russia tour please.”
Wow, a lot of people want us to go to Russia. Look, we can't solve your problems for you. You're gonna have to do it yourself!
“Do you like Paul Thomas Anderson's films?”
I don't know. Probably? I don't think I've seen any. He's one of those names that I always see around and I don't even know what he's done. So I'm probably, you know I'm not really much of a librarian though. So I don't know a lot of things, you know.
“You heard any Moo Binga?”
No.
“Do you set aside specific time for Max programming versus music composition or those two pretty fused at this point?”
They're the same thing.
“Do you think electronic music has any fresh new artists or is it run by older people?”
It's always been run by older people. I mean what do you expect? I mean everything's run by older people, that's how the world works. You can't just run something when you're 12, can you? I mean, how would that work? [vapes] Well you can, but I mean the thing to know if you are young and you’re salty about this is there's nothing stopping you doing the thing at all. And I know this just because we did the thing, right, so you know. We were doing pirate radio. I was barely out of school at that point. I was doing tapes when I was in school. You just do the thing. There's nobody stopping you doing the thing, right? Getting eyes on the thing is a bit different. You have to use a bit more initiative like I say, I mean back then it was pirate radio. Nowadays, you'd do it online. I'd do it online. I'd try and do it online. Is it, you know, are the big institutions run by older people? Yeah, because experience matters. So you know, and connections matter and older people have more of both, so you know, yeah. You get yourself out there. You're competing with that. That's a thing that you've got to wrestle with and figure out an approach that's going to benefit you, right? So you might not be able to do the things that they can do, but there are things they can't do that you can do, so you're more adaptable. You're quicker. You can use different strategies. You can talk about different things. You can raise different concerns. Those are all things that you can do, so. Just because they're older and they're more experienced and better connected than you are doesn't mean that they've, you know, that they've holding all the cards. There are things that you can do that they can't do. So think about what those things might be and take an approach that's different, that marks you out, you know. Look at how Odd Future came up. I mean, you know, they weren't the least privileged kids out there but they weren't, they didn't have all that age and experience shit. They didn't have all the connections. Look at how they did it, you know. Look at how Death Grips did it. You know, think about that and those people have been really successful. Yeah, there are ways in. So, don't complain about the industry being older. That's boring. It's always been like that. It was like that when we started out as well.
“What language do you feel sounds the most interesting from a purely sound perspective?”
Probably some of the African languages because they use so many odd consonants like, yeah, probably something like Xhosa or something like that. Like they're quite unique sounding, I think. But you know, interesting, you know, there's a big overlap between interesting and unfamiliar, so a lot of it's about how unfamiliar it is. I also quite like, you know, like there are, like Can, I think it's Cantonese that's got a lot of unusual use of pitch, so. There used to be a woman in the Chinese [restaurant] near me and I used to listen to her talking to her husband and it was so musical. It's crazy but so different, you know, and kind of odd for my brain to kind of try and understand. So yeah, things like that, I think unfamiliar languages in general, you know. There's probably a lot of languages I've not heard that I'd find really strange and interesting, so, you know. Probably one of them.
“Where is Roberto?”
He’s in Bristol.
“Crinkle cut, waffle fries or regular?”
What are waffle fries? I don't think I've heard of that, waffle, oh wait! No, I think I do know what they are. Yeah! No, I mean just regular innit. Like chippy chips, you know.
“Do you have certain feelings or getting a certain vibe when it comes to making or producing music?”
No, I mean lots of feelings and it's all about feelings ultimately. It's a very intuitive process.
“Is there any artists that you're both inspired by?”
Yeah, I mean as kids we were both inspired by Mantronix, Marley Marl, a lot, you know. And, but also you know, Arthur Baker, John Robie, Man Parish, David Storrs, Matt Leggett[?], Chris Barbosa, Ted Currier, yeah, Knights of the Turntables, Art of Noise, Keith LeBlanc, [Adrian] Sherwood, Alan Wilder, Depeche Mode in general, Human League. Yeah, I mean, fucking hell, I could just sit here all day doing this, so it's boring. I've played most of them anyway.
[laughs] “Picture of you smiling?”
No, I'm not giving you a picture of me smiling. Yeah, I know about the ominous fan pics thing. It's just like, I think it's photographers, you know what I mean? They don't loosen us up. I find it easier talking to regular people than photographers coming at you with a camera, you know. Part of it's just fucking Autism, you know. Like it's not the easiest thing being photographed. You’re surprised.
“How do you feel about using AI in music?”
I am a little bit. Well, machine learning, you know? I mean what is AI anyway? It's too broad, really, a term. But yeah, I mean I use a little bit of machine learning. I find machine learning a little bit interesting, but you know, a lot of it is just translation. It's sort of, it's a bit black boxy for me. I don't find much of a way in there. It's just like you'd never really get to see the network anyway, so, but. You know GANs [Generative adversarial networks] are fun to play with but they're sort of, they, you need to give them such large datasets that it becomes a bit laborious. It's not the kind of thing I'm interested in. I'm way way way more interested in very simple, small bits of program that can generate lots of complex output. That's to me, that's much more interesting, like much much more interesting. Whereas, you know, with machine learning you haven't put in so much information in the beginning to train the thing that the output becomes a little bit predictable. You almost feel like you know what it's going to be anyway before it outputs it. So it's not really very surprising, if that makes sense.
“What new outfit do you like most at the moment?”
You mean clothing or music? I don't know.
“What's interesting about the shit that you would like to talk? What's interesting about the new shit that you would like to talk about?”
I don't talk about what's interesting about my own shit. That's weird. That's like when people are like “you should pay attention to this great thing that I did.” It's fucking hell, like really? Like I'm already asleep by that point.
“Are you coming to Poland this year?”
We got asked. I can't remember. Possibly. Don't know.
I'm at home.
"What's the shittiest job you had?”
I don't know, you know, because shitty jobs aren't necessarily that bad. Like me and Rob worked in a market store once selling slippers to old people. That was fun though. That's fun as fuck. [vapes] You know, doing all the banter and all that. It's just fun, innit. It's like being a market trader. No, I mean it's like people would think of that as a shitty job but it isn't at all. It's not at all a shitty job. I did four years of retail work. It was fun as fuck. We just fucked around for four years, watching MTV and pissing about. It was like mad. It's like we didn't do any actual work, but it was a shitty job, So on paper, you know what I mean? So I don't know. I don't think I'd really mind.
“How many Arc'teryx jackets do you own?”
One, two, three, including soft shells? Four. Well it's layering innit, so I don't think it's accurate to just give you a number because they're all different things, you know I mean? I might wear like four of them at once. Depends, right? So, a few. But I see what you did there. Asking, yeah, right, okay.
“What's your take on the loudness war?”
It's over! It ended! finished, you know. There was a ceasefire.
Yeah, I do. I'm sorry. I keep putting my hand over it. Sorry.
“Do you use a gamelan on Confield?”
Fuck. Yeah.
“Have you tried some stuff on Jitter?”
Yeah, a bit. I mean I use it for processing audio as well because you can do, you know, if you just like peek and poke. So doing a video process on something and then peeking it again like, yeah. I mean I've done quite a few bits of that. It's, I mean, initially I was thinking that it'd be good because it'd be more efficient, right, so I'll be able to GPU certain types of audio processes. So I made video processes that would do the same things as audio processes, but I don't know whether the CPU gain is much of a reason to do it, but it does allow you to do things that you wouldn't normally do, like being able to warp a matrix in a weird way, right? So, yeah, it's fun as fuck. It's good. I like Jitter but mainly I use it for processing audio. So I’ve done bits of video Jitter stuff which I was Twitching, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of doing, using it to do video stuff, and I see people doing way more cool looking shit than the shit I was doing. Like I think the shit Weirdcore does is fucking way ahead, but, so yeah. I'm not like, yeah I'm nowhere near that level of using Jitter but yeah. I mean using it for making basic audio processes is a lot of fun, yeah.
“Do you have all the additional sound cards with R8?”
No. I've got a few. I've never had the electronic card though, so, and that was the main one that I should have had really, because that was probably the one that I wanted. Daz used to have it. I never quite liked the way that the R8 handled things like the 808. I always thought that they sounded weirdly metallic. I think that they used a different chord to the actual R8, 808 I mean, so.
Wes Anderson I like. Yeah, because it's just such a fucking feast for the eyes. It's like going to a cake shop, you know? It's just like it's mad.
“What's your opinion on the industrial and Japanese noise scenes?”
Well that's weird, I can't have an opinion on a scene. I mean scenes are all the same. They're all shit. It's, there will be individuals within them scenes that I like, right? So yeah, I mean Incapacitants, I like alot. [vapes] Yeah, there's a few noise artists I like, but I don't like, you know what, I want to just stop. I'm not going to list them all because I think it would be weird and I feel like it wouldn't probably get my point across very well either. Yeah, I mean I don't really mind scenes. I find a lot, I find, you know what, I do find it weird that a lot of people say that, they describe what they're doing is experimental but then you listen to their stuff and it's just another noise album or another drone album and you're like “well, what experiment are you carrying out there?” This just sounds totally conservative to me. You've just done the same thing as all the other artists in this field. So where's the experimentation? I don't understand that, but I wouldn't describe my own work as experimental either. I just find it weird how many of them people do and that scene's been around for what 40, 50 years since Maurizio Bianchi and all that. So not sure you can really call it experimental anymore, but it is what it is, and maybe there's some artists in there that you might like. Obviously I'm a big fan of Hafler Trio, right, and a big fan of :zoviet*france:. Yeah, it's kind of weird. I don't want to say, like I find it with a lot of them scenes that people within the scene are relying on each other in the scene in order to exist at all, and yet they're all making the same thing effectively, so. I find it all a bit weird. You don't really get that in other scenes where there's a lot of self-similarity. You don't get it in the drum & bass scene for example. You don't get that, but you do in the noise scene. It's like they all need each other to survive like a big gang of people that all do the same thing. It's strange. It's, I'm too Autistic for that. I can't relate to group behavior like, I just can't. I think you have to be really neurotypical to be on a scene like. It's what I think. You know, it might not seem self-evident but it, that's what I think.
carefreedronal: “d.i.d. y.o.u. e.v.e.r t.r.y. t.o. k.i.s.s. r.o.b. i.n. t.h.e. s.tu.d.i.o.?”
No, no. But that isn't a question about my sexuality. It's supposed to make me feel awkward or something, right? So yeah.
“Do you feel an energetic transfer between you and a live crowd? Can you feel it when people are into it?”
Yeah, you do feel it. You can feel it. I think you can smell it. People are scared of smells now though, aren't they? They're weird. They try and cover them up. They're scared. They're scared of being human. Scared of being animals. Everyone wants to pretend to be an Instagram photo.
“Have you ever considered making music videos for your songs?”
No. Yeah, but not for long.
I haven't seen Morbius. Am I supposed to see Morbius? Why is Morbius in particular? This is like when everyone was telling me to watch Doctor Strange and I watched it. It was just a fucking shitty ripoff of a Cyriak video. It was terrible. I can't believe how badly they ripped him off. Cyriak should sue them cunts. Fucking mad.
“How did you make elyc6 0nset, and is it true you made it in one day?”
Yeah, but I don't know where, I don't think I ever said that to anyone. But yeah, it's true that I made it in a day, yeah.
“Any tips for creating clarity in a mix when using a lot of different sounds?”
I think all these sort of, you know, so there's a lot of received wisdom out there. It's like, “oh, you can't have clashing frequencies,” or “you can't have your transients not lined up” and all these things that you see online now, and I don't think having a good mix is about any of that actually. I think it's just about like does it sound good? Turn things down a bit, you know? Stop trying to make every sound equally loud, what the fuck, like that's not pleasant to listen to. That's not just not nice, you know what I mean? It's like making all the colours equally bright. Imagine if you just looked out from your eyes and you were looking at a scene and all the colours were just equally bright. Look fucking weird. That's not what things look like, you know. So think about that when you mix in. Think about like you don't want everything to be right in front of you. That's uncomfortable! If somebody comes right there, that's weird, so. You know, you have some things further away, right? So try that. Don't, you know, don't have loads and loads of sounds in your mix but if you do, you know, if you, if that's what you're trying to do, if you're trying to create a very layered thing, then yeah. Just don't have everything, you don't have to have things be audible. That's not that important. You know, you don't have to have things being separable. You know, you see this a lot in headphone reviews. It'll be like “oh it's brilliant! you can pick out all the instruments in the mix!” It's like, Who fucking cares man, does it sound good? Like, or does it sound like a lot of separate things, you know what I mean? Like why is separation what you want? Maybe you want your music to sound like it's all coming from one place or one machine. Nothing's correct. There's no “correct,” right? So you can just do what you want, so, you know. Don't think you have to remove all the bass from your reverb or not have your kick drum and your bass guitar overlapping or any of that fucking stupid shit that you see on YouTube tutorials. It's not about that. They're arbitrary tips and they only play in certain contexts. I'm not saying they never apply, but you know, be judicious. Use your ears, you know.
“Would you ever leave normal drum sounds out and make something really abstract like the end section of elyc6 0nset?”
Well yeah, because we did something really abstract like that. So yeah, we would.
“I think I want to get banned for the rest of my life.” “What's the first electronic gear that you acquired?”
Well, I don't know. I mean tape decks. So I had an Akai pause button tape deck. I guess that's the first thing, and then I got [a Casio] SK-1 in ‘86, so I guess that's the first, but before that when I was younger, like when I was about eight, I had one of those shitty Bontempi organs, but I never used it for any like trying to really make anything with it. So yeah, I think the first thing that I got, I said I bought it with my birthday money and my Christmas money combined, right. So it's my Christmas money, which I'd saved up from the [previous one] and then I saved up and then and sometime during August, which is when my birthday is, I went to get the SK-1 from Dixon's. So I had that from August ‘86. That was the first thing that I bought where I tried to buy something that was music related in order to extend what I'd been doing with tape decks at the time. So I was only young. I was like 13, 14 when I started doing that stuff, so.
“Why is it so rare for you to do U.S. shows?”
Visas and America just being dickheads, so. You know, don't blame me. Make it less expensive to come to your country to work, basically, and we'll talk then.
“There any place you would like to play that you haven't visited yet?”
Oh yeah, shitloads, like a really long list. Like of, like yeah. Most places I mean, most places that we haven't been. So, I mean, you know, we normally do in Europe, Australia, Japan, North America. So anywhere that's not that basically.
“How do you find a creative balance between coding and making music? I recently learned some coding but don't feel it gels well with my typical way of being creative.”
It does with me. I know everyone's different. I don't, I personally consider lots of realms in these fields to be creative. I think sound engineers are very creative people. I think people who design and build drum machines are very creative. I think people who write computer software, they're very creative. There's creativity everywhere. It's just everywhere. So pretty much everything humans create is, requires creativity. I mean, so yeah I don't think it stops you from being creative to create code. I don't, isn't that an oxymoron? Don't know. I know people are like “[American accent] Yeah but there's no vibe because, you know, you need the hard, that's why I use hardware! I don't like mixing in the box! Can't be creative!” It's like well that doesn't make any sense, does it? So, you know.
“Ever been to Bang Face?”
Ah no, but it's a bit, I get the feeling it's a bit like chaos rave, bright, fresh, flashing lights, retro Adidas tracksuits, middle class drop outs, ketamine. But I've never been. So I don't know. Maybe that's just my ideas of what it might be. A lot of day dayglo. Kind of, almost like comedy rave, I don't know. Raves in Manchester were dangerous. They weren't comedic. I mean there was some comedy in there, don't get me wrong, you know, but yeah, it was a bit more, you know, bleak. Celebrating the chaos and the collapse of everything rather than being like, you know, yeah, it was different. It was like we all knew how rough and dangerous it was, and that was the thing we were getting off on, if you know what I mean. It went about like dayglo and sped up vocals and stupid shit, but then again I've nothing against any of that, you know. It's just not really my vibe, you know what I mean? I'm a bit older than that.
“Terraforma Friday, Saturday or Sunday? I won't tell anyone else.”
Don't know, actually. I can't remember off the top of my head. I'd have to check my calendar, so. But I know we're in Greece three days later. So work it out from that.
“There's one video of Richard Devine with these gyro controllers.”
What are they, “gyro controllers?” Oh, I see what you mean. “Ever thought of adding that sense to your production?” I mean I've got an iPad. So that's got a gyro in it. I've used a Sixaxis quite a bit. So, still got that. Really good. Actually the, you know like, PS2, PS3 controllers rather, like super good! They're like super good input device. It's got loads of shit in there. I wouldn't use it on stage because it looks whack as fuck, so, you know. But I'm sure there's people who would and think it would look cool. So I'll let them do it.
“Who recorded that video with the Quirky gig?”
I don't know. It might be someone related to Tony Wilson because I think he threw it up. He's, it was him who drew my attention to it anyway, so.
“I like the picture of you both kicking snow.”
So do I! It's very nice. It's very wholesome.
“Have you owned a Roland TB-303?”
No.
“Favorite Dave Smith Sequential synth?”
Never owned any of them. Unqualified to say, but from where I'm sitting from the outside, I'd say that the Studio 440 was a work of art. But I never used one, so. I just read manuals.
“Am I still on good terms with Warp?”
Yes, they're, the staff are completely different people. So basically there are two or three people who are still there who were there when we were in Sheffield, and all that. So I still know them. I'm on good terms with them but most of the people that I work with who are on my team at Warp are different people, but they're cool people. Yeah, I've never met anyone who works for Warp who I didn't like, put it that way. You know, even if I'm not always nice to them.
“Do you use more simple Markov tables?”
Yeah, a bit. I mean like, yeah, I mean I've used prob a bit. I mean, I, you know sometimes, I used to have a thing, because I have like a device that can track control input, and then loop whatever was happening for the past x amount of time or measures or whatever. And I had a similar thing that was a Markov version of that, like a prob version of that. So it was just constantly monitoring throughput and then occasionally I could click to that. So whatever I'd been doing with that sequencer, it would give me a kind of ersatz, weird version of what it had been doing for a bit, and yeah, that's fun. Definitely like a good way to extend what you're doing. A lot of Oversteps was made in a similar way, actually. Where you'd start, we'd start off with very basic sequences and then just use prob to just generate like long Markov versions of those things, and then use a kind of, a scale based harmonic influence on that number stream to try and push it into different harmonies and stuff like that. So yeah.
“Favorite comedians?”
I mean I've got quite boring taste in comedians, and I don't check comedy as much as I used to in like the 90s. So my taste is a little bit stuck there? I do like Doug Stanhope. I like [Stewart] Lee a lot. I like Daniel Kitson. Yeah, I mean they're all old now, aren't they? So there's probably better people out there. And there are people I'm not thinking of. You know, fuck, I used to like Louis CK before he started getting his knob out, so. I mean, you know, I guess I still like him really. He's just like, he's just a sexual predator, isn't he? So, it's not very cool to say.
“You ever tried live coding?”
Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of, I guess I'd do it a bit in the studio, but I don't like hearing, I don't like people hearing me go through all the options. Like, the way I work isn't to have a great idea and then realise my idea, right? It's to try out lots and lots of different things and then pick the one thing that works. So that's why live coding is not really a good fit for me because it's almost a bit like trying on different outfits in public, you know, until you find something that works and then going out, you know what I mean? You wouldn't go out with like 10 outfits in your bag and then just start trying them all on and saying to people in the pub like “What do you reckon? What do you reckon?” because they're just like “Oh fuck off!” That's a bit what live coding is like really, you know. I'm not that interested in watching other people code. I just want to hear the shit, you know, I just want the work. So it's about the work for me. It's not really about the seeing their process too much.
“How'd you like to spend time outdoors?”
I guess you'd call it hiking or camping, you know? Like, I just like being there. I don't really like having something to do. Like I've not really, I mean Rob's a bit more into mountain biking and shit. I'm a bit more into just being there. I just like being there and checking things out and sitting there and trying to be quiet and letting all the little creatures do their things. Just observing them. Watched the frogs spawning the other week. That was quite mad and then realised it was two frogs fucking because that's how they spawn, right? But I didn't realize for ages that there was two of them there. So that was pretty cool. I don't know? I like to just be there and look at things. Don't really like activities, you know what I mean? I find it gets in the way of the being there, so.
“Do you think that talent exists or is it just a cop out?”
Does talent exist? I don't know? I think taste and experience exist. What happens if you add those together? Do you get talent? I don't know, maybe? I think these words, humans are a bit caught up in words, you know, we have to stop worrying about if words are real, you know?
“What's in your vape?”
I've answered that too many times already. Nic salts. But like a shot though, like a nic shot, yeah? Not like, not some flavoured juice that smells of air freshener. It's the esters, they fuck you up. Those esters that they put in the flavours. I know it's like “oh it's just water vapor.” No it is, fuck ”just water vapor”, get a clue! Fucking hell!
“Any funny stories you can tell about times with Aphex?”
Why? Why would I tell you about any of that? Why? Like give me one reason! I'm not salty enough, like…
“Fuck yes, he answered the Arc'teryx question!” “Have you heard the new Lynch release? Has it too neutral?”
Yeah, Rich. I don’t, I can't think of any funny Richard stories, actually. Yeah, I just can't think of any funny Richard stories. I don't know any. He's not funny in that way, you know? He's sort of, he's funny at a distance, you know?
“This. [*wags finger*] You love this. You love the finger.”
That's just weird.
“What you think of Monolake?”
I like Robert [Henke] a lot. Like I think he's really sound, and we did gigs with him. I mean we did it, you know, back when Monolake was two of them, you know, we did gigs with them and I always liked that shit. It was all so icy, you know, it's so kind of cool sounding, you know, and I got to know it through the Basic Channel, Chain Reaction sort of connection so, and it was quite different, markedly different to the rest of that stuff, you know? He's much more, kind of cool and kind of glacial, you know, whatever the word is, you know? Yeah, some good shit. I haven't checked him for a bit, though. I don't know what Robert's doing at the moment. He's probably, you know, aesthetically kind of there. It's always very clean, his stuff, you know? [vapes]
“Have you ever woke up in the morning and played what you made last night and think ‘what the fuck was that?’”
Yeah, a lot. I'm quite changeable, so you know, and I'll usually just shelve it and come back to it later, but it's not always good. But sometimes it is. Sometimes I get into it again later. So it just depends really. There's so many fucking reasons why I might not be feeling the same the next morning, but I do find it way better to check mixes in the morning after I've done them at night because if it's late at night and I'm trying to get that thing done, probably gonna not notice something that first thing in the morning. I don't know if it's the sleep or the having slept, right, so I don't know if it's like sleeping on it and and internalising a lot of what was going on during the day and then realising things and then coming at it, or if it's just that I was tired and I just wasn't able to, or maybe I was just too focused on one thing and I couldn't hear the other thing. But yeah, you need, sometimes, you need that gap and sleep is definitely the best way of having a gap, you know? There are other ways, like you can go in another room and get stoned and then come back in and it all sounds fresh again, but like sleep's better, I think. It's more thorough somehow.
I've lost my brightness. Wait a minute. What's going on here? It's like really dark! Anyway…
“How's your Norwegian?”
Jeg snakker no norsk. Yeah, I'm not very good.
Tebbisimo: “do you ever use fart sounds in your music?”
No, but I mean I use a lot of sounds that probably sound like farts, and I didn't notice. Like half of Draft, you know? Which, you know, it's quite farty, isn't it? But I didn't really think about it at the time I was…
Part 6 of 6
Back. I'm gonna watch it later, Morbius, and if it's shit, I'm gonna, well. I won't be doing any more AMAs, put it that way. [vapes]
Battery, battery, battery, that’s all battery.
“Don't watch Morbius.”
Right, yeah. Good! Probably shit, right? I mean why is everyone asking me about fucking Morbius? Can someone just give me a little one sentence about why I'm supposed to watch this? Morbius, what is it? Is it, is this stealth marketing? What is it?
“How important are delay units / delay processing manipulation?”
Yeah, I mean they're very, very important, but they're just very important in general from a DSP point of view. Like a lot of things are delays really. You know, filters and, yeah and I guess if you want to get really technical, FM, to some extent is going to require it, you know, in a digital system. Yeah, I mean, yeah delays, They're very important. I like feedback. I like delays and feedback. So yeah, I mean this. They're important. I use them all the time. I love them basically.
“It's a crap meme about how bad the movie is.”
Right. Yeah. I'm not watching the fucking movie, right. I'm not gonna watch it. Sorry. You're not gonna trick me into watching this shit film.
“Are there any movie makers like Shane Carruth that you might like?”
Like, I really like Shane. I really like, I mean I really liked Upstream Color and all. I think it was really good. It's, he's texturally really good and he's sort of, yeah, I watched the weird horror film that he acted in. I can't remember what that was called, Dead, the Centre, or the, what was it? I can't remember now [The Dead Center]. And I wanted that to be better than it was, but it was still pretty good. It was alright, you know, but it’s quite watchable. But yeah, like, I find his shit really well made and and it's not surprising to me that he wants to do everything himself and he's a total auteur.
So yeah, I mean filmmakers I admire. I mean, fucking hell, guys who've been in the game for a long time and maybe they're making stuff that isn't that remarkable, but, you know, it's actually quite good. Like, I think [Steven] Soderbergh is one of those people, a lot of people don't really, I think they don't recognise how good he is. He's very good because it's not that obvious. But, you know, I really like Cronenberg, like a lot. And every time he puts something out, I get excited and I go and watch it, and I'm like “yes!” So I don't think he's let me down ever, you know. I thought Map to the Stars was brilliant, you know, I think he's made a lot of very, very good work, Cronenberg, and it's, there are themes and there's things you can talk about that present in all this work. But, can you see these fucking mosquitoes man? They're fucking mad!
So yeah, you know. I don't want to just say Lynch, Cronenberg, Kubrick blah blah. But you know, that's what I grew up with, you know. And I really love Alien and Blade Runner despite, well, you know, I don't like everything that Ridley Scott has done, but I think he's, he was so inspiring back then that I gotta list him. You know, there are some aspects of [Terry] Gilliam's work that I like, and yeah I suppose like, newer filmmakers. Yeah, it's strange because there's just sort of, there's a few I suppose. Them two lads who did the two films that are related, that are not really related and I can't remember the names of them now. [Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead] Like, oh what the fuck is it called now? There's the one where the two guys are stuck in a house and one of them's chained to a radiator and he's drying out. And then there's the other one after it where people get caught in time loops and I can't remember the names of either of them, and they're like, but they're quite good, you know? They're sort of interesting and strangely made and I thought the time loop idea was a bit weirdly realised, but I quite, I kind of liked the way that the film unfolded. I thought it was quite nice, but you know, yeah, I don't know. I've got strange taste in films, you know? I tend to like getting drawn in by something and then tricked, so, and I like things where it's not that easy to understand. Like I think Inland Empire is one of my favourite films because it seems very obvious to me what's happening, and yet it's, it'd be very difficult to explain to somebody what that is because it's almost like a, well it sort of resembles dreams more than anything else. I think a lot of Lynch’s stuff's like that though. It makes me feel like I'm dreaming a little bit. Like I feel like I understand it at the time but then later on I'm like “what the fuck was going on there?” Like you can't really explain to somebody that you were just taken on a weird trip through your own emotions and this, it's quite manipulative in that way, I think. Quite interesting because I've seen it said about Lynch that he uses “the same few tricks all the time. He's just sort of, he's just doing it as a hack.” I think that's completely, it's a completely bad take actually. I don't think that's what's going on with him at all. I think there's a lot going on. I think it's just very difficult to talk about it, you know? Yeah, so.
“Otherworldly entities while on psychedelics?”
No, but I've not done DMT, so. And I don't think I need to, but I might be wrong. From what I've heard about DMT and salvia, like most of the entities are just, they're either like trying to waste your time or they're like “What the fuck are you doing here? Fuck off back to your own reality!” Which, maybe that, maybe I need somebody to tell me to do that, but I'm not sure.
“Does your sequencing tend to rely on more discrete events or manipulation of continuous signals?”
Yeah, I'm, I think I understand that question. So yeah, I mean, I'm more interested in what things are than where they are, if that makes sense from a sequencing point of view. So the shape of things has become something that I'm really interested in. I think a lot of people are thinking about note position because they're used to thinking in terms of piano roll or DAW sequencing or triggering of discrete events that are self-similar. Whereas I'm really not. I'm much more about generating events that are unique or that are context dependent. So yeah, it's a bit like both basically, but I think that the, because obviously you can't have one without the other, but yeah. The nature of the events is more interesting to me than the position, if you know what I mean. But yeah, that's, again that's just coming from a tape editing background because I started to realise what was missing from a lot of computer music or sequencer music in general, most electronic music was the dynamism within, you know, the fact that all the notes were the same shape is a little bit frustrating once you recognize it and that's something that I don't get if I listen to like a Henry Cow album because, you know, there's people are touching the strings, right, so because, a piano is quite a strange thing when you think about it. It's quite like a Heath Robinson sort of machine where there's all these unnecessary steps in order for you to hit these strings, right? So I mean, don't get me wrong, they're very good as pianos. They're very good because you've got the overtone series and you've got all this kind of interaction between the strings and everything that makes it sound beautiful. But as a way of controlling something like a synthesiser, it's less satisfying so.
“Have you heard any of Mark Godwin's / zK’s recent music yet?”
Yeah, I love Mark's stuff. I think he's really brilliant actually. He's one of my favourite artists. It's weird because I think a lot of people have never heard of him. But yeah, I love his stuff, their stuff I should say. But yeah, it's really great stuff.
“Ambient music, Tim Hecker, Biosphere…”
Is Tim Hecker ambient music? Really? Just because it's not got beats, I suppose, right? [vapes] I think it might not be ambient music. Biosphere. Bits of early Biosphere I think are quite nice. I actually quite like his approach. He's quite odd. It's quite kind of, it took me a while to realise that I actually liked it though. But yeah, I like how still it is and how kind of, there's almost not a lot happening there. It's quite kind of, it's just very content sounding music. I think that's where I put it. You could call it boring I suppose, but I think I've gone beyond that stage of thinking that about it, so. But I don't know if I'd call it ambient either. I think it's a particular kind of techno. Hang on a sec.
I think a dog… Sorry Charlie, I couldn’t close this. Yeah, where are we?
“Favorite old keyboard?”
[laughs] No, I'm not answering.
“Did you watch Twin Peaks season three?”
Yeah, I really liked it a lot.
“Thoughts about Jared Leto?”
I don't have any.
“Favorite Lynch film?”
Inland Empire.
Crimes of the Future? What, isn't that out already? What? Has he remade it? What's going on with Crimes of the Future? Explain because I've seen that, I'm sure.
“Do you like Michael Mann?”
Yes, a lot actually. A lot more than I probably should. Particularly Manhunter, which, I think is just fucking beautiful. But I even like Miami Vice. I used to watch Miami Vice when I was a kid. I loved the atmosphere of it, you know. Massive overuse of Phil Collins but effective, you know? I quite like that aesthetic. It's so kind of far away from what I grew up with in fucking Middle Earth, you know? There's nothing like the Miami Vice aesthetic there, you know what I mean? So it was kind of like, in that late night driving with just the music and the kind of, the whole vibe of it was so different and alien that yeah, I really loved it and he nails it as well, So, I like The Keep even though it's, it, you know, it's a funnily shaped film. It doesn't quite, just doesn't quite work, but I really like the kind of vibe of it, and the way it's shot and everything like that. So yeah, I like Michael Mann. Thief as well, you know. Brilliant. Yeah, very good. He's good.
Not seen any of Cronenberg's son’s [Brandon] films, no. Maybe I should.
“In your WATMM AMA, you mentioned sending some tracks to Coil. Anything you can share about Coil?”
Yeah, no. I want to talk about Coil. I mean, yes. I used to chat with Geoff [Jhon Balance] quite a bit. We got on. Sleazy [Peter Christopherson] I knew less well, but we always said hello. We always had, we would have very short chats at gigs and stuff like that, but Geoff, I’d talked to for hours and I really liked him. And I think they were both really nice kind of warm people. Yeah, I don't know. I mean we sent Coil, I sent because Sleazy had asked for some beats for something to maybe do a collaboration, and we sent them some beats. But then they said that it sounded complete and it was just beats, you know, there's no stuff. So it was a bit, I didn't know what to say. I just thought “well I've just given you the beat so you can do what you want with it. Just cut it up. Just do some Coil tape style manipulation. Get it into sound designing. Do whatever you want,” right? But they didn't. So that didn't happen and then they asked us to do the remix of Panic, so we did that, and then they didn't release it for reasons. I don't know, like whatever. I've been approached by people since then who I think are connected to Thighpaulsandra about potentially releasing it. I just said no because they didn't want it to come out when it was done. So let's just honour whatever their wishes were because I don't know, because they were quite opaque about that. So yeah, I can't really tell you much else other than like Geoff used to talk about a lot of different things and was a very dynamic thinker. One of the smartest people that I knew at the time. Very very smart, Geoff. Scarily so, but you know, smart people don't always have an easy time, do they? So I think he struggled with a lot of different stuff.
“Do you use any hardware effects anymore?”
Not really. No. In fact not at all, because I'm totally ITB.
“Did you ever consider signing my Wayne Archball at GPR?”
No. No. No, didn't.
“What's your favorite album artwork in Autechre’s discography?” “There's lots of polyrhythms and polymeters on your drum patterns, especially the older work. How much of it is conscious or not? Do you go about different meters and phrases?”
I don't know. I just sometimes, you know, when you're listening to a track, especially one with a kind of slightly ambiguous rhythm, you hear, you might hear it in a different way? So you might hear it one day, you might hear the snare in a different place and it just all suddenly changes, or sometimes you might get a track where you hear it wrong, right? So you, for ages, you thought that's where the beat was, but then later you realise, no it's one of those beats where there's that way around and you go “oh fuck,” you have to kind of retrain yourself to another way. It's a bit like when you see, like when you suddenly see the thing in a Dalí painting that you didn't notice at first because it wasn't that obvious because you were too busy looking at it the other way and then suddenly the other thing pops out. I got quite good at being able to do that looking at Dalí, like just switching between one and the other just while I was looking at it, and it's a bit like that with rhythm. You know, sometimes you can just switch your brain so that you're in it the other way and then switch your brain back and it's a training thing I think to some extent. So, and I like doing that with my own tracks when I'm working on them. I might suddenly hear the beat a different way around and then kind of, and then work on that, you know? So especially with stuff where you've got triplets and 6/8 stuff. So you can kind of like hear the other beat in there, but people might not necessarily notice the transition, but there's one of those in that Cap.IV track in the middle of it. A lot of people don't notice it's there because it wasn't that obvious. But I sort of, I just kept it there because I thought it was fun that somebody might hear it suddenly pop out and they'd be like “oh!” you know? So yeah, I like those kinds of things.
“Have you ever seen Tarz Retma[?] maestro harmonies?”
No.
“Prefer Beavis & Butt-Head or King of the Hill?”
Beavis & Butt-Head, like I love it! I think it's fucking amazing! Like there are some Beavis & Butt-Heads that are just absolutely genius. Like I do really like King of the Hill, by the way. It's dead wholesome and fun and kind of easy and I kind of like the, kind of, little family parable things. But yeah, Beavis & Butt-Head is just unreal. It's just so good. It's like my favorite Mike Judge thing and I absolutely, I think, he's just nailed it. He's just so good. Even now when I'm watching it, I just, immediately I'm just giggling and there are so many aspects of it that are good. So yeah, I love it every time.
“Do you code in Gen in your patches?”
Yeah.
“Are you able to code anything you want in Max without using Gen?”
No.
“I love how deep it gets, but I also found it takes away from working on musical software.”
I think it depends on what it is that you're trying to do. Like I go through phases with it. I mean I've done a lot of the kind of necessary stuff in GenExpr that I wanted to do recently. But I don't tend to sit there coding away in GenExpr to make things, but I will sometimes. It just depends on what I'm trying to achieve. But usually I have a specific goal when I get in there. It's not often I'll just get in there and randomly fart around in GenExpr. So I don't find that much fun. I prefer patching for kind of sketching ideas out and if that's what you can call them.
“Looper. Saw Day After Tomorrow.”
What are these? People just listing movie titles? Like Looper was stupid because, and I can't remember why now, because I can't remember it very well, but like. Yeah, there was some kind of massive plot hole in Looper that I can't remember. Like, something like why didn't he just go back. There was something that I couldn't quite work out why they hadn't done it and it didn't make sense to me. I was just thinking why didn't, I'll have to watch it again to remember why it was, it seemed stupid. Because there was like one thing that he could have done that would have just made everything fine near the beginning of the film. So I mean it's just, you know, it's, yeah. I don't, can't do, so it's not that. It's disgusting. It's just, there's just not a lot else there.
Primer, yeah. Like Primer a lot. Good. Okay. This is just like talking about cinema now?
“What do you think of the new Blade Runner 2049?”
[Exhales, shakes head] I mean…
“Did you ever play pen and paper role playing games?”
Nah, right. My mate Andy, when I was a kid, my mate Andy Travis used to play Car Wars and I was always a bit baffled by it. It was like, “I don't get it, but I'll play for a bit. I don't get it.” Yeah, it was all right. I mean, I guess I could get into it. I'm not enough of a kind of, I don't want to be a slave to some dice, you know?
“Those Peel sessions feature some of my favorite tracks of yours. Did Peel name the tracks?”
Yeah, because for some reason the tracks list, the list of the titles didn't get through to him or something. So we just phoned up the show, we, like, phoned up Radio 1 and went “Oh, it's Autechre! Tell John Peel…” you know, and that was it. He named them. So that was fun.
Yeah, I've seen these P.T. Anderson films. I probably need to see them, but they sound bad. I mean that title, There Will Be Blood, it's so cringe.
Yeah, The Endless and Resolution, yeah, there you go! Yeah, I quite like them films. They weren't perfect, but I liked them.
“Ever try lucid dreaming?”
No. I don't try it, but it happens. So usually with lucid dreaming, how it happens is it's always naturally. So I don't know how to spin or, like, do any of the tricks that, you know, that can bring on a lucid dream, but it happens a fair bit. Usually if I'm talking to somebody who’s dead. So I will say “Wait a minute, you're dead!” and at that point I'm lucid and then it'll be a thing of, because I don't know if you've ever told a dream character that they're not real, because they lose their shit so hard! They're like “The fuck? I'm fucking real! Fuck you, I'm fucking real!” They start going mental on you, and I'm like, okay. Well if you were my dead relative, you wouldn't be responding like this. So I know now that you're not that person and that you, I don't know what you are, but like and asked, and you know, and if you tell them like “I created you. I'm imagining you,” they'll just go fucking mental, you know. You should try that if you ever find yourself, fucking hell, these mozzies! If you ever find yourself lucid dreaming, like just try telling the people around them that they're not real. Because it's not like if you said it to a normal person, if you sat now with a normal, regular, what we think of as a flesh and blood person right now, you would say “oh, you're not real.” They'd be like “Yeah, I am.” They wouldn't start getting mad at you and everything and throwing things around. But dream characters will, and that's how you know, you know? So yeah, I don't know who they are, but they don't like being told they're not real and they'll do things as well to try and trick you into forgetting that you're dreaming in the dream. I've recognised this later when they've succeeded in tricking me that they were literally tricked, they'd used some kind of tactic, some sneaky tactic to try and get me to forget that I was dreaming. Fucking mad.
“Have you heard of Richard Devine's recent output? What do you think of it? If so…?”
I heard that thing that was meant to be all analog. I can't remember what it was called. yeah, I thought it was quite good. It was like definitely better than the kind of, whatever the kind of very digital sounding stuff that he was doing before, and I guess it had that contrast to it. But you could tell it was him because it was kind of very worked. Yeah, you know, I don't have very strong memories of it but I remember thinking it was pretty good, so. I think I'm a bit too self-involved to comment on or at least involved with Autechre to comment on things like that anymore. I don't really have much authority when it comes to talking about other people's work musically because I'm not, I'm just not paying that much attention to it anymore. I've got so lost in doing what we're doing. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing really, but it is what it is.
“Do you think about instrumentalism in the music? Do you ever aim for a feeling similar to that of performing a physical instrument?”
I mean, I guess? I guess I'm influenced by physical reality. So, you know, I want things to feel tangible in some sense, but also like, you know, there are things that are just impossible to achieve using things made in physical reality. It's like doing physmod stuff, like if you're doing physmod stuff of instruments that exist, you know, it's fairly interesting. But I guess if you can make it do something that you couldn't do physically, this probably going to be more interesting, right? So yeah, I guess I'm somewhere in that uncomfortable zone, if is it real or is it doing something impossible, you know, or what is that what? What am I hearing there? You know, those, these kind of questions I find quite interesting. If I'm hearing stuff I'll, or I'm seeing stuff, you know. It's quite often one of the things that can hook me in. It's just that ambiguity and that uncertainty about what I'm dealing with, you know. I like that.
“Miller Puckette said the voice is the ultimate 11th dimensional controller.”
Yeah, that's fair. “When are you gonna sing a ballad for Max/MSP?” Yeah, I mean I guess. I mean, yeah it's funny innit, because like a game controller is probably about as good as we can get at the moment, and that's been worked on for a long time. People have been trying to figure out how many dimensions and axiis can we fit into one thing that one human can use at once, right? So as long as both your hands are working. So they exist. Not many people using them to make music with, don't know why, but they exist, so, you know. But lots of instruments use both your hands fully, you know. I mean, plus your breath, right? So, like a saxophone. It's probably got more dimensions than the voice, it might, maybe not? Yeah, I think it has. Well, anyway. No,probably hasn't actually because one of them's just strict and it's just pitch, so. But yeah, guitars as well, you know, you can do a lot with guitars, you know, realise watching Tom play with his bass, there's just so many ways that you can manipulate it. But I think a lot of these things don't make very good input devices. So I don't really know how many dimensions you need to be able to control at once, you know, to have an adequate input device. I don't think it's necessarily about that, but I'm not really interested in controlling anyway. I prefer having automated processes doing it because I like that. I like the way that sounds, I always have, you know. It was like quantised beats and stuff like that, so. That's just a taste thing, you know. I just prefer it to sound like that, so.
Am I interested in philosophy? Yeah, I mean, I guess I must be? But I don't read much, so, any actually. So, I used to a little bit.
“Thank you for the answer. Btw Cronenberg's my fave too.”
“Do you like Lorenzo Senni’s stuff?”
Yes I do, and that's going to be a controversial answer because I know all you IDM kids are like “[snob voice] Oh, Lorenzo Senni! He just plays arpeggios!” Yeah, but fuck all, like who cares man! It's just like, do you like the buzz, you know what I mean? So I don't mind his stuff at all. I think it's quite good. So I don't really care that it's just a synth preset and an arpeggio. I think this whole idea of assessing music based on the amount of effort it took is just totally full of fail. Just fuck all that. Does it sound good? Do you like it, you know, so.
I mean quite often, those kind of criticisms are coming from people who are, they're putting a lot of effort into what they're doing and they're not being rewarded for that effort, right? So I tend to ignore criticism like that. I don't think there's any point in it. It's just, do you like it? Do you want to hear it? That's really all it is. Are you interested in it? Whatever. If you're not, then fine, you know, I'm not going to argue with you about that. Up to you. I don't think you have to justify your opinions and you're not liking of something by criticising it for being low effort because a lot of amazing fucking shit was low effort. So it's not what it's about, you know?
I look like Moby? Fuck you, man! Fucking Moby! Argh! Moby hasn't got all these fucking mosquitoes, like.
"Hope you don't mind me asking how did you approached the timbre of the percussive sounds in Xylin Room and Surripere from a technical standpoint? They're incredibly spacious and crunchy."
They're both really different. They're just samples. I don't know what to say. Xylin Room was like, originally it was like samples of a wooden outdoor table, like a garden table being knocked by knuckles, and then it was taken into the sampler in sequenced really heavily. And then Surripere, I can, the first part of it was some kind of fake analog. I think it was the Nord actually, yeah. And then, Nord Lead, and then the second part of it, the crunchy stuff. I can't actually remember, but it was done using that Native Battery, so, you know, the sampler that Native did. It was done using that because I remember the loop modulation. You could do loop modulation in it. You could tie it to the envelope, so there's some of that in there, but that's all I remember. I don't remember what the actual sources were. They were probably drum machine sounds originally, but they probably just grittied up. I can't remember now. I'd have to go and get, I don't even know if I've got the files for that stuff. Hm, anyway. Yeah, don't know.
“Can you make my Elektron Model samples?”
I don't know what that means.
“Would you consider doing a soundtrack for a film like a Lynch film?”
I mean yeah, but it's a bit, you know, client, having a client and then telling you to change what you're doing every five minutes, so. For sync work isn't as rewarding as you think. Like you think, oh yeah, I've got this brilliant soundtrack, but then you've got all these fucking idiots, producers mainly, but other idiots too, telling you that “this bit is too loud” or “that bit's too loud” and then you deliver the music and then they just mix it differently anyway, and you don't even get to hear it all because there's a fucking sound editor and his whole job is to be an egomaniac. So, you know you're a kind of slave to the process and you end up with something that you wouldn't necessarily have just produced yourself. But if somebody gave me the ability to mix the film, be the sound editor and be the musician and all that, then yeah. That'd be fun. I'd be up for that, you know. I'd do that. I'd do like, you know, so I could be in control of all the atmosphere and all the foley and all that. Be a lot more work, but at least I'll be able to put my name on it, right? So, and what I like about Lynch is that he's worked with Alan Splet for quite a while and they've got this very good relationship and Splet is just a phenomenally good sound designer, like very, very, good. I think the first example of time stretching I ever heard was on Dune actually. Like, but I just fucking love him. I think he's amazing, and I think Lynch is very, very good as well and knows what he wants and they have this very kind of, obviously, quite symbiotic thing and also like a huge taste overlap. And I'd say the same for Lynch and [Angelo] Badalamenti as well. You know, you hear a lot of Lynch's music, you couldn't hear a lot of Badalamenti in there. They're obviously very into each other's stuff, right? So, and I think it helps when the filmmaker and the musician have got a lot in common and I don't know if we'd be able to find somebody like that. You know, I think it'd be difficult. I think it all depends on time and place and getting along with people and I think I'd get along with David Lynch really well because I think he's quite a nice person. You can tell that, but, you know, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure if we'd know each other well enough to be able to do something like that. I don't know if that makes any sense. I think it does matter that you get, really get along with the person to make a good piece of work and normally if we get a request for a sync that comes through Warp Music or whatever, I'm looking at it and thinking “nah, I don't know you,” you know, I can't agree to this without having met you or anything. So it's always a little bit difficult.
Oh, so he's made a new one called Crimes of the Future, also called Crimes of the Future, a remake. Fucking hell! Crimes of the Future is pretty fucking weird. That's weird he'd chosen to redo that. God. Wow.
“Do you like Squarepusher’s sound?”
Yeah. I mean sometimes. I think he, I think when he's doing that kind of acid technoy sort of stuff, that stuff he did for NTS a few years ago was just absolutely amazing. Just really up my street, I loved it. I loved the kind of the structure of everything. It was just really nice and the sounds that he was getting were really nice and twangy and he's just got a really good taste in that kind of 303, 909, sort of Korg filters. You know, all that kind of aesthetic. He just nails it. So yeah, there are some things that he does that I think are amazing, but you know, when he's full-on kind of Jaco Pastorius bass kind of all over the shop and then kind of 70s jazzy chords? It's not my thing, but he knows that, you know what I mean. So it's just not really my thing, but that's a big part of how he is, so. But yeah, there are some things that he does that I think are really beautiful and amazing. Solid as fuck and other things where I'm just not sure what I think, you know, or they'll be like a track where it's amazing and but then there'll be one really high melody that comes in that's just sort of kills it. So yeah. I'm, you know, but I'm, you know, I'm too grey for him and he's too fucking dayglo for me, so. But we know that, you know what I mean, so.
“Would you release things for a quick turnaround on the AE Store like you mentioned thinking about some years ago?”
Yeah. I mean, we sort of, we could do that. I'm starting to be a little bit more careful about just randomly throwing things out now because it's too easy, basically. So I'm, it's a discipline thing more than anything.
I am literally getting bit to fuck here, so I'm going in a minute.
“Do you think EP7 is underrated?”
I don't know about this underrated, overrated thing, you know? I don't really care how rated things are. But I mean, “I don't know” is the honest answer. I don't know if it's underrated or not. I think it's probably correctly rated because ratings are subjective. So what can I say about that?
“Are both of your laptops onstage generating sound?”
Yes.
“Are you controlling one of those patches simultaneously or are you playing together independently?”
They're synced. So like, there's two sequences, there's two engines running, like one on each machine. They're not identical because Rob has modded what I built a lot, so his mod is like a bit of a Frankenstein version of my basic stuff. He's got more functions and features than mine. I deliberately keep mine simple. So I'm more of an efficiency geek and he's more of a kind of information feedback and capabilities kind of geek, right? So, but they're basically the same. I mean in fundamental terms, they're the same thing, so, and they're synced with rudimentary MIDI sync over a Thunderbolt cable. But it doesn't use MIDI clock in the normal way. We're just using MIDI clock messages to send each other occasional pings because basically the sequences are tighter when they're not getting constant pulse per quarter note update messages because that doesn't, that just spazzes it out too much. It's better if it's just not getting that, if it's just getting like every so many bars, it just gets a little pip because then they keep sync properly because why wouldn't they, right? I mean they're both digital systems and they're both capable of staying in sync, so they do. So it works really well like that, and also because we're doing that, means that if one of the computers dies, which happens because things crash sometimes, the other one can keep going and then, so like say, let's say mine crashes, right, and we're both and Rob is synced from me. So if mine crashes, his just carries on, in on beat and then I can reboot my computer and launch my system and he can go into master mode while he's still running and I can go into slave mode and mine'll just pick up sync. So there's no gap in the set even if one of the computers dies, which we couldn't do any other way. We had to build it to do that, so. I don't think you could do it with a DAW. But you know, fuck DAWs in general.
“What synths and drum machines did you use on tri rep?”
R8, Juno, 202, MS-10 Korg, 606 I think? Maybe not. [Roland] CR-8000 on Overand, Quadraverb, have I said Ensoniq EPS? Should do. I think the [Alesis] MMT-8 as well. I think Clipper was done on that, I can't remember. Atari 1040[ST] running C-Lab Creator, Boss RSD-10. I think that's it.
Ah! Oh God! Like, why me? God, I must smell nice, like…
“Have you experimented with music trackers?”
Yeah. I mean a bit of Renoise, SunVox. Mainly Renoise.
“Have you interacted with Actress?”
Actress, the artist? No. Should I? I like Actress. It's nice, like [*wooshes*], I like the [crackling]. This is quite, you know, textual.
“Have you ever owned an SH-101?”
No. We borrowed one off Daz Fitton’s for a little while and then, it was a blue one and that's it. Otherwise no. “What you…”, I didn't really like the 101 as much as the 202. I don't know. Really, the main reason was that you couldn't do the accents and the slide programming. So, you know, the 202 was a bit more interesting, you know, you could sequence it in a more interesting way than you could the 101. The 101, you were just stuck with MIDI which was, you know, it's MIDI, MIDI’s mid. I think Roland designed better sequencers than the later MIDI sequencers, but you know. Whatever. [vapes]
“Are you aware that American blues…”
Yeah yeah yeah. I know about ZZ Top.
I'm gonna go and eat now, so that's it. I'm sorry if I didn't answer your questions. There seems to be quite a few. Sorry it takes me so long, I just talk too much. I might come back on later but I might not. So if I don't, don't be disappointed, alright? I'm gonna love you and leave you. Ta-ta!