Production can be a very insular activity, so for some producers being quarantined is business as usual. How's it been for you?
I'm definitely one of the lucky ones. I don't get out much to begin with, so on a day-to-day basis I'm certainly not as affected as most people. I'm trying to be positive and keep my head down. In general, I'm feeling very motivated. When producers are making music we're all affected by what's going on around us, but it's not always clear to see. I've spent the last ten years fully developing a series of different monikers, so what I'm releasing now has been worked on for practically a decade.
Some artists deliberately induce anxiety to feed their creativity. Is that something you've ever wrestled with?
I'm not into meditation, but, for me, making music is as close to a meditative state as I'll get. What I find interesting is not being too precise, as well as letting things influence me that aren't at the front of my brain. That can be useful. I'll go to great lengths to have a very inconvenient process, where I'm trying not to get a full grasp on any piece of equipment I use. That enables me to be in a state of discovery, where I'm interacting with an instrument in a very fluid way. As soon as I feel I've got a full handle on something, it becomes more of a tool and less of an instrument.
Do you believe that's easier for electronic artists as the tools they're using typically invite experimentation in ways that being in a rock band wouldn't?
I feel that a lot of electronic production deals in the "world of the contrived," where you're very exacting. What's useful is to inject a sense of spontaneity into that by not being over-controlling. The most useful state for me is to have a framework that I build, but within that there will be lots of play and spontaneity. On the one hand I can squeeze the life out of what I'm doing, and on the other still be entirely free-form.
Do you create structure out of abstraction, or the reverse?
I love the idea of working inside narrow parameters and structure provides that, but structure needs to allow for spontaneity in order to be interesting. Creativity is born out of trying to escape the parameters you have. I always think of scratch DJs who, back in the day, would use very rudimentary equipment, but the creativity was in how they escaped the confines of that gear to make incredible music.
Your recent Only Child Tyrant project was steered more towards the rock music aesthetic. Were you looking to make something that had more of a direct impact?
A project like Only Child Tyrant is running in parallel to Two Fingers as well as my own releases, so it's not like I got tired of a certain genre of music. But you're right that the focus was on immediacy. The idea was to have very upfront elements, in terms of melody and the production. There isn't any of the weird sound design elements that people associate with me, but it's still electronic. Whether it's Only Child Tyrant or the latest Figueroa record that I'm putting out – that sounds very acoustic – it's all programmed, made with synthesisers and some degree of VST [Virtual Studio Technology]. The overlap between all of these projects is that they're different expressions of the same tools.
So with Child Tyrant you deliberately refrained from taking a perfectionist approach?
Yes, and that was a conscious decision. Child Tyrant's a great example because the production is quite rough, unpolished, and there are lots of mistakes left in, whereas with Two Fingers the process was more exacting and laboured over. I listen to music that moves me, and a lot of the time there's looseness to it that's so important. ISAM was the most throttled thing I've ever done – it was about making sounds that had never been heard before, using impossible sound design that would have other producers scratching their heads. There's a lovely competitive aspect to that, but that isn't all there is to music. Child Tyrant and Figueroa are the entire opposite of that.
Another aspect of the Child Tyrant album is that it's an indie rock-sounding album with "guitars and drums," but there are no guitars or drums on the record. Was that the experiment?
Not even that – there are performances you can do with electronics that a real drummer or guitarist wouldn't necessarily be able to do. The idea was not to quote unquote "emulate a real band." Rather, it was to try and take what I appreciate from those styles of music and approach them with a different sound palette, which is when it becomes interesting. Unfortunately, a lot of electronic music is overly concerned with economy. "It's too expensive or difficult to work with the real thing, so let's make an approximation of it." But Child Tyrant is the inverse of that. It's a hell of a lot harder to program every note of an insane guitar arpeggio than it would be to hire a session musician to play it [laughs], but the point is that you can do what they can't.
Nevertheless, it would be nice to know some of the techniques you used to get those characteristics.
The real meat of it lies in how parts are articulated and played – and that applies to programming drums as well. The swing, timing, timbral, and toning variations are much more central to how something sounds compared to any effect you might eventually put on a sound. In the end, it's just music. While some people like to nerd out about how sounds are made, it's much more important to have an emotional connection. I'm interested in both aspects and have opened those doors for myself, but if the listener has no idea or doesn't care about how it's made, that's fine by me.
It does seem that people who like electronic music are often more inquisitive about the process behind its creation…
I have the same problem, but I feel that curiosity adds another layer. The first thing that hits me is always an emotional response, then sometimes I'll try to pick it apart and get a better understanding of it. With the Figueroa project, the thing I was trying to learn was harmony. I was listening to a lot of Mexican folk music, and trying to understand how the harmonies worked. There was an analytical side to that, but it's a lovely puzzle because it's so open-ended and limitless. I remember years ago everyone was trying to figure out what was so special about the Amen Break [widely sampled drum break]. It's a relatively simple pattern; you could play it or program it, but it wouldn't have the same energy. Why is it that you can replicate the exact placement and timing of drums and have it not sound the same? Well there's so much more to it, such as how it was mic'd and the emotion that was captured in that moment. There's a lot of nebulous ambiguity behind how sounds are made, which is why I'm a little bit wary about diving into processes and details of how I make music. In the end, you can only describe a small portion of that process. What you can replicate isn't necessarily pivotal, or the kernel of what makes it what it is.
Having said that, the drums on the Child Tyrant track "Solid Grey Zebra" are so realistic you could be accused of putting drummers out of work! Are they finger drummed?
I don't have the dexterity or skill to do that, so I draw everything and it's programmed note by note. It's basically very elaborate MIDI programming. I learned all of that 20 years ago when I was making drum and bass productions, because I can get a sense of timing when I use different approaches to programming electronic and acoustic drums. What I love about the Child Tyrant drums is that even though sonically they sound like acoustic drums, at the same time they don't sound real because the fills are impossible. It goes back to what I was saying before about trying to do things you wouldn't necessarily expect a human being to do. I'm sure there are drummers who could easily do a lot of what I'm doing, but not all of it. [laughs]
