Part 2

Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through, for example, file sharing, jamming or just talking about ideas?

As I become much more conscious about my music and what it means to me, musical collaboration is something I am very reluctant to embrace. Working on music is a very introspective process for me, and to step out of that to collaborate with someone else just doesn’t sit well in most cases.

A collaboration only appeals when the collaborator can do something I absolutely cannot recreate in any way. I’m particularly proud of my collaboration with vibraphone player Masayoshi Fujita, as this was essentially a case of me working with someone who is highly inventive and proficient at an instrument that doesn’t often find its way into much electronic music. 

I generally don’t share or talk directly about what I’m working on with anyone apart from my artist manager and label until the tracks are released. However, I am one to talk in depth about writing and production processes to other musicians on a more of a meta level. I care for how they’re feeling towards the act of writing and producing, rather than itching to hear their music before it is presented properly in release format.

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I juggle a lot of very time-consuming work projects throughout the week, which require a lot of time management in order to fit in the creation my own music around this. It’s as if my own music is the cement holding together these huge building blocks of work, but vital to holding everything together and keeping things going.

Over the past year or so, I’ve moved towards working on my own music in the mornings around 6 or 7am. The UK hasn’t quite woken up at this point, so there are fewer distractions and I can solidly focus on my ideas. I think there’s also a lot of benefit in making the first few decisions of the day creative decisions. I avoid reading any news or emails and just jump straight into making music – it improves productivity so much and I can often get what I’d do in a full day done in a couple hours.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

Whilst writing my last album Tåke, the creation of the track "It Cannot Surface" came about in a really unusual way ...

I was asked to support for Max Cooper at Islington Assembly Hall in London. As I was playing from when doors opened I decided to try create some improvised ambient music whilst people filtered into the venue. I used live coding techniques to create a randomised drone, then used other synths to play melodies on top and finally added drums via a drum machine. After playing around for about 15 minutes, the core elements of "It Cannot Surface" started to form, live in front of an audience. I saved the patterns and sounds, then recreated in the studio.

This approach is something I’m doing much more often now – the pressure of an audience really helps me make better musical decisions

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

I think this gets romanticised a lot; where an artist needs to have experienced something positive or negative in their lives to bring about a state of mind that lends itself to creating something unique. I believe that the best ideas come from perseverance at ones craft; adopting a general open mind to making mistakes and trying again from a different approach.

As creative beings we need time to think through ideas, and I strongly feel that social media fragments our attention to the point where it’s tough to achieve peak creativity. I think this is why I now choose not to casually engage so much with social media and use it more as a platform to promote things I’ve made, where it be music or photographs.

One of the biggest hurdles I have with writing music is breaking what seems like an infinite loop of compositional ideas. I’ll be working on a single part of the song and essentially trying the same thing over and over – it wastes a lot of time. Having prompts to encourage me to look at what I’m trying to write from another perspective really help. Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” is great for this.

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

Large sections of my live show are improvised and it’s increasingly informing what I write in the studio. There is nothing like trying to create an improvised piece in front of an audience, and that’s not a mindset I can really create in the studio.

On the other hand, working in the studios brings about ideas that I wouldn’t come up with on stage, especially within the remit of sound design.

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

I’ve always said that one of the hardest things to achieve whilst writing electronic music is matching the right sound to the right melody. Both have to complement each other otherwise it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve yet to figure out the method behind this, but I suppose the fun in production is the battle between sound and melody!

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

The most memorable gigs I’ve attended are ones where the sound has physically impacted my senses beyond that of an auditory nature. I quickly scan my mind for memories and think: This Will Destroy You at Whelans in Dublin, where I first experienced guitar distortion that physically vibrated the venue, or Ben Frost at Corsica Studios where the levels were so high that all I could hear was painful(ly great) distortion.

There are few things in music more satisfying than a large sound system feeling like it’s hitting you in the chest. I believe that music that impacts multiple senses is generally more memorable. Perhaps it’s something to do with associative memory ...

My live show is based largely around light and dark. Moments of it are extremely dark and intense: highly distorted sounds that are meant to physically move the audience. It’s almost painful in places. To make an impact I feel you need to tap into more than just a sense of hearing, whether it’s physically shaking people with high sound pressure levels or giving them associated visuals to strengthen the memorability of the performance.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I have a strong affinity to the processes of artists working in a visual medium. I paint sounds with a palette of audible colours constructed on my experiences. Often these colours come in the form of unusual sonic textures. These textures represent my feelings, and in their own right are a byproduct of politics, social issues, relationships and our climate. I only reflect my sentiment towards all these things via sound, people can read into this as how they want.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

I think it’s easy to answer this with a highly conceptual sci-fi fantasy response based around new technology as we know it today ... A virtual reality studio environment where a machine learning algorithm writes your next album based on your Amazon order history ... or something. However, a response such as this is just reflective of current tech trends and doesn’t really inform what spurs people on to create music in the first place.

Having been recently part of a music focussed A.I. project with a tech giant, I was reassured that there isn’t a focus on completely replacing human creativity with A.I., but using it in a way to prompt creative decisions that wouldn’t have been made otherwise. Over the short to medium-term I reckon this will slowly start edging its way more so into how people both compose and consume music.

At the core of this, the future of music relies on young people from all backgrounds having the opportunity to make music, and that education systems are sufficiently funded for this. My vision is that the popularity to compose music stays intact, despite the well known financial struggles of aspiring musicians, and the process of making interesting music becomes even more accessible via advanced systems finding their way into cheaper/free technology for wider adoption.