Part 2

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

I first started to write solo music in Ableton in 2020, and the process was incredibly intimidating because of its limitless potential, and being so new to electronic music production software, I didn’t know where to begin. Ironically, a practice that got me through that limitation WAS limitation.

Limitation is a great way to expand creativity and deepen one’s relationship with specific aspects of a tool. I wrote a song called “Passage” on my first EP, Wordless. For this track I made the rule of only adding minimal effects to a single take of a voice recording that I sang into my phone and that that would be the whole song.



I wanted to see how I could make something as compelling as possible but use a minimal approach for production. Just barely knowing anything about Ableton, so it helped me a lot learn about some effects and getting into a nice workflow within the DAW.

This way I made a lot of discoveries of sounds that I liked and continue to use to this day from that one experiment.

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

A process that I have found I really like now is putting every single idea that is coming to mind out there on the tracks, every synth, every vocal line, harmony, texture, I am thinking of and I automate their entrances, often overloading the CPU. I will be working in Ableton and I open up iTunes and play music that is unreleased to see if it is the missing piece in whatever project I’m working on and sometimes it works.

I also love to go on long walks listening to early mixes on endless loops and take notes of the changes I want to make. Every once in a while I’m moved by the natural sounds of the environment around me that I hear while I’m listening to mixes on a walk and I’ll record them and put it back in the track to remind me how I felt while I was outside.

In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like? Do you find using presets lazy?

I think having pretension over what instruments people want to write music with is lazy. It’s easier to be pretentious than to examine the hierarchies we’ve built inside ourselves. If you like the sound of the preset then use it. Someone worked hard to make that preset and it can be a doorway to inspire you to try something you haven’t before.

I usually find my sounds by beginning with what I know and let things evolve from there and think of it like I’m building a world. I am a singer and a woodwind player and have written music with a toy glockenspiel, so I began by singing or using my voice as a midi instrument. Once I started using Ableton, I felt inspired to use digital synth sounds that reminded me of when I played on a Gameboy when I was a kid and I remember feeling like there were entire universes inside of compositions that were collapsed into 8 bits and arpeggiators.

I also love listening to classical music and noise music, so I have been moved by the sounds I heard in both of these genres, and find the cathartic place in me that finds truth in these sounds. I start somewhere that feels spiritually honest and familiar to me.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

In general, I don’t see people wanting to use AI as a creative tool any different than I see someone seeking inspiration from anything else outside of themself. That impulse feels very natural for artists.

I will sometimes develop inspiration out of randomness, like turning to random pages in a book that is near me and reading words out of order, and make sense out of it. Some people want something with more sense to help them create ideas, and I don’t think there is harm in that.

Being an artist can sometimes feel like we are in a race against each other, and so maybe that’s why we use words like “cheating” when things can be done for us quickly. I remember thinking that way when vocal harmonizers came out because I spent so much time developing the practice of layering harmonies together. I felt threatened by something that actually wasn’t taking anything away from me and just giving people more possibilities.

But I think what complicates AI the most is not the technology itself, but is instead capitalism. For example if companies who would normally employ human artists to write music for them now using AI software to write music because it’s cheap, then musicians will have less and less of a way to create income, to me that is a societal problem.

As a creative tool, I think it’s amazing that people can have options to get them through creative blocks. My hope is that we as artists will be able to thrive with the art that we make and for AI not to take away the role of a human, but to add to human’s lives in an enriching way. But because humans are complicated, AI becomes complicated.

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

Being someone who lives in a city where it can get quite noisy, I can see how the noisiness of an environment can be used as a measure of the overall health of a society. It puts one of those who cherishes silence but also loves big cities, like myself, in a unique position of finding ways to cultivate an interior silence amongst the cacophony, which has become a practice of mine. I’m not great at it, but it’s a practice.

One way silence holds an importance for me is how I can find ways to appreciate it when I am inside of it, and how I can create it when I am out of control of the noise. It becomes a barometer for a personal sense of peace.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

I always travel with ear buds in case I am at concert and need ear protection, and having my pair of overear headphones is a must, even of I don’t use them to listen to music.

After all these years, I’m grateful that my ears are healthy despite being reckless when I was a teenager and in my 20s going to all those punk and hardcore shows and standing too close to bass cabinets.

Honestly, now that I am older, I tend to go out to shows less in general unless I am very fond of the time I spend in my home with my wife or in more intimate settings with friends.

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

I think all senses are made to work harmonically together without favoring one over the other. That being said, in many pre-colonial civilizations, or civilizations untouched by colonization, their histories, ceremonies, myths, ways of mapping directions, and traditions are shared through song and the vibration of rhythm.

Since the inception of information sharing between humans was through sound, I think the kind of precision gained in multi-dimensional listening and communicating could potentially change how we experience presence, memory, and relationality to ourselves and the earth.

I feel that our sense of empathy would increase and our connection to nature would be restored. In contrast with reading (visual communication), there is a very linear quality to it. Word by word, on paper or on a screen, there is a meaning that unfolds in a line. That being said, I think poetry subverts reading in a necessary way.

With sound and music, there is the potential to contain layers upon layers of information inside of it that you can feel and integrate with the knowing of your body. And even if you cannot hear, you can feel vibration, as sound is the deepest form of touch.