Name: John Atkinson
Occupation: Producer, composer, sound artist, writer, clean energy & climate analyst
Nationality: American  
Recent release: John Atkinson's Energy Fields is out via APK.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: Ocean of Sound by David Toop was a massive influence on me when I was first getting into experimental music, it’s been a very long time since I read it but I’d like to think it holds up as an informative yet vibey survey of “sound” in this specific sense.
More recently, I’ve been periodically diving into The Harmonic Experience by W.A. Mathieu, which is really wonderfully written at depth on that fundamental relationship between vibrations and music and math and being human.

[Read our David Toop interview]

If you enjoyed these thoughts by John Atkinson and would like to find out more about his music, writing and work, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, twitter, and bandcamp.



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it?

Getting a reel to reel tape machine, a multi-FX guitar pedal, and an eBow in high school was definitely formative in terms of early experimenting.

I had taken piano and guitar lessons and played saxophone in the school band, but as soon as I was able to spend my time working on making weird sounds with my guitar instead of, like, getting better at playing instruments, I was hooked (for better and for worse!).

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?

Seeing Black Dice play their record release show for Beaches & Canyons while I was in college was life-changing in a lot of ways - both because it showed me how “noise” can be transcendently beautiful, and because that’s where I met the dudes in Aa (Big A little a).



And then seeing Aa play, before I joined the band, was just totally transfixing - that kind of organized chaos in a performance, that feeling of excitement at hearing sounds I’d never heard or imagined before and not knowing what was coming next, really defined the music I wanted to experience and make myself.



What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

I grew up in (Central) New Jersey, so New York City has always been my north star in terms of music and culture – it’s impossible to overstate how much living here for most of my adult life has shaped my ear and the way I make music.

The noisiness and energy of the city itself and the level of “competition” in the music scene, both in terms of music history and the sheer volume of bands and shows going on all the time, really drives you to make not only the best shit you can but to try and make something new.

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be an incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

Yeah, personal and professional in a way. I’ve been working in energy and environmental issues for most of my career, so I think a lot about the natural world we’ve inherited, our impacts on it, and how we could take more responsibility for all of it.

For my day job, I usually have to talk about that stuff in pretty dry scientific, economic, or political terms, but there’s obviously a lot more to it than that – our relationship to the world and its resources is at the heart of our social and spiritual reality in profound ways that are hard to convey in words.

I think part of the reason I started working with field recordings was to find ways to reflect this in my practice, using sonic resources from the natural world and trying to create something very clearly artificial and digital, with the spirit of newness of the anthropocentric world we’re creating, for better and worse.

How would you describe the shift of moving towards music which places the focus foremost on sound, both from your perspective as a listener and a creator?

When you take away traditional musical structures to focus more on sound-as-sound, you have to make decisions about the most abstract aspects of music, and that ambiguity makes it even more important to put yourself in the mind of the listener as you’re making it. More and more, I find that the right solution is to take my ego out of it and let sounds speak for themselves.

On “Black Thunder” from Energy Fields, for instance, I was having a real hard time figuring out how to match the interest and intensity of the field recording of a coal mine at night, and it took me awhile to sit and listen and decide to let the sound “lead” for awhile, with me just providing subtle support and doing less as an active “creator.”  



What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and working with sound? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

The key idea that motivates a lot of how I work is borrowed from the Aa “style guide,” which really emphasized novelty.

Whenever we were working on a song and it started to sound too much like another band or a defined genre of music, we’d scrap it and start with something new. It was and is limiting in some ways, but also it really pushed me to develop my own way of doing things, and to purposely avoid basing what I do on anyone else’s techniques, gear, compositional process, or anything else.

Not trying to say that I’m doing something totally unique and unprecedented, but I’ve tried to avoid basing my technical process and compositional principles on anyone else’s, with some success (I think).

What are the sounds that you find yourself most drawn to?  Are there sounds you reject – if so, for what reasons?

I’m drawn to detailed, dynamic sounds, with a lot of range from loud to quiet, hard to soft, and ideally from a novel or unfamiliar source and not just, like, birds chirping or a burbling brook or whatever. More generally, a great field recording should be like a sculpture, with an immediately physical, textural quality that evokes a sensual response.

In terms of sounds I “reject,” I’ve grown pretty allergic to the sound of most synthesizers, and software-based synths especially – it’s really hard for them not to feel really antiseptic and empty to me, though there’s always exceptions. I definitely appreciate the warmth and weirdness from some of the modular synth wizards out there.

As creative goals and technical abilities change, so does the need for different tools of expression, from instruments via software tools and recording equipment. Can you describe this path for you personally starting from your first studio/first instruments and equipment? What motivated some of the choices you made in terms of instruments/tools/equipment over the years?

I’m super interested in the reverse of that actually – like, as different tools of expression change, what kinds of new creative goals and technical abilities can we explore?

I feel like the tools we have today for recording and manipulating sound, as well as the kinds of instruments we can create, have incredible untapped potential to create some really new and insane kinds of music. I would never say that I’m, like, taking full advantage of that blue sky space, but it’s definitely driven a lot of the “instruments / tools / equipment” decisions I’ve made.

Like, I “performed” the raw takes for Energy Fields using a gestural controller designed for VR video games (LEAP Motion), a pressure-sensitive pad controller (Keith McMillen QuNEO), and a head motion/breath controller (TECcontrol) ... All really simple and relatively cheap tools, but also totally unimaginable to me when I started playing music!

I’m excited to see what becomes possible in the next 5 or 10 years.

Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect and organise them?  

In recent years I’ve been trying to focus on making albums around sounds collected from specific places – Energy Fields is one of the most coherent examples of that, as the entire album is constructed from sounds I recorded during a weeklong road trip between Minneapolis and Ucross, Wyoming.

For that trip, I used the “Energy Atlas” maps published by the Department of Energy to identify energy infrastructure along my route, along with national parks and other wildlife spots. And I composed a piece called “Long Harbor” at a residency on NYC’s Governors Island in 2021, which used field recordings I made all along the New York waterfront to tell a story about the city’s relationship to the harbor environment and how it’s changed through history.

But those kinds of trips aside, I usually just try to carry my recorder around and keep my ears open! Interesting sounds are really easy to come by, especially in New York.

From the point of view of your creative process, how do you work with sounds? Can you take me through your process on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?

Well, let’s take Energy Fields.

When I arrived at Ucross, I spent my first few days just listening to all the sounds I’d recorded during the previous week, identifying the best ‘takes’ from each setting, breaking long samples down into lots of little microsamples, and organizing them into groups that I thought were thematically and sonically interesting.

Then, for each song I did some basic spectrum analysis on the core samples to find the most resonant frequencies that are already present, which I use to hone in on a root frequency for the larger harmonic structure of the song.

Then, in Ableton, I used the sampler and a few simple tools to warp each of the samples in different ways, either filtering to bring out certain “musical” frequencies to make tones or stretching them out or twisting them in subtle, non-tonal ways – in each case, the goal was to make them work as musical elements and to give them an “artificial” feeling while preserving the character of the original sound, which usually means avoiding digital effects like delays or reverbs or granular processing that kind of make everything sound the same.

The last step, or the next-to-last one, was assigning all these sounds to those gestural and touch and breath controllers, so that I could play them all together and experiment with structuring them into compositions.

The last, and longest step by far, was jamming and editing the jams into the final versions on the record, which was brutal at times – again, when you’re working with this stuff you’ve got to make really abstract decisions, and there were times when I had to walk away from some of the songs for a couple of months and come back with fresh ears.

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

I think part of the appeal of field recordings in music is the sense of space intrinsic to them – like, there’s a lot of ambient music where the field recording is basically functioning as reverb as much as anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with “artificial” reverb effects but I love being able to use that “real” space as an ingredient instead.

Field recordings are also rich in the compositional sense of leaving negative “space” – for the most part, whether you’re in a “natural” or man-made / industrial environment, you’re dealing with an inherently dynamic system of sounds and silences.

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?  

I wish I knew more about it! It’s totally at the intersection of my work interests in climatetech and my creative life, but I haven’t read deeply on it. It’s so intuitively true that the sonic environment impacts and reflects the creatures that live there – we experience it all the time, and especially in New York! – and it seems like a really exciting time to be able to start really studying it in a more systematic way. I feel like we’re going to learn a lot, and it’ll be interesting to see how we use it.

Like, strictly from an anthropocentric perspective (God knows we need to do something about underwater noise pollution, etc), on some level I think we should have EPA standards for noise pollution just like we have standards for air pollution – but there’s also a part of me that absolutely loves the racket of the city and hates DIY shows getting shut down by the cops!

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

From a purely personal feeling, I think the dynamics and detail of a given listening experience is more important to me than whether it’s “music vs field recordings.”

Not to be too old-fashioned, but I feel like a lot of contemporary pop and pop-adjacent music is just produced to be so fuckin loud, it makes me feel physically uncomfortable – which I guess speaks to the acoustic ecology question!

But I love a lot of older pop, soul, rock, folk, etc, in part I  think because it has that same sense of “real” space and dynamics that I really enjoy in environmental listening or field recording-based music.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

I’m into it from both the scientific and spiritual angle!

I got into the whole mathy-but-spiritual just intonation world a few years ago and have been using those harmonic intervals in generating some recent soundscapes from field recordings, like Long Harbor.

Sound is just vibration, and there’s something so profound about going back to those first principles when thinking about composition.