A Journey Through Time and Space

I was exposed to music from a very young age. Each member of my family had their own unique gravitation toward certain genres. My mother was very into early hip-hop like Outkast, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Digable Planets, 2pac etc.. My uncle, who first put a guitar in my hands and is very much the spark of my interest in music, showed me tons of artists, everything from Pink Floyd to D'Angelo. He was really the first person to describe the wonder of music, at which point I became aware of it as a vehicle for personal and spiritual exploration.

As I began to gravitate toward my own musical interests, I started writing and recording as a songwriter, which was a very beautiful time in my life that coincided with a sort of awakening to the kind of person I wanted to be. My first production endeavours were very humble and self taught using Garageband. When I pursued electronic production in college I started to get into synthesis and more adventurous types of music. Looking back, everything happened naturally for me honestly, I don't think I ever had a choice in the matter.

I stumbled onto electronic music. I was exposed to the technology before I started listening to artists in the genre. I took a class in college about control systems in electronic production which unlocked this whole world to me. So I was essentially producing electronic music before ever really hearing it, sloppily of course. In those early years, I remember listening to 'The Pearl' by Brian Eno and Harold Budd a lot.. I adore that album. I was also very inspired by cinema at the time, there is a song from the soundtrack of the Larry Clark/Harmony Korine film called 'KIDS' that had a huge impact on me, it's called 'Raise the Bells'. It's still one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. I eventually got really into artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Björk, Tim Hecker, Taylor Deupree and composers I feel helped point to electronic music like György Ligeti, Debussy, Zdeněk Liška, Ravel, Miles Davis, etc..

I did the New York thing for a year or two. It's funny, I hadn't really ever had an experience where I felt like an environment inspired me, mostly people inspire me, but New York was a huge inspiration, it's hard to say exactly why.. It's not like the city is the most beautiful place, it's quite the opposite, it's like this pumping organism compressed to the extreme with high and low energies and millions of reactive human experiences. And there's a lot of poetry in that.. It's fair to say the whole 'Plum God' record would have never happened without that city, in a large part the record is an emotional response to my experiences there.

I honestly have difficulty tracing exact influences. When I am working on composition I rarely ever listen to music, not as a rule, but just because making music is a demanding task that absorbs all of my attention. I have a wide range of taste in music and most of what I listen to is not my performed genre. I can name a few artists that had a profound impact on me: Talk Talk, Nick Drake, Ricardo Villalobos, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Radiohead, David Bowie, and Sonic Youth.

Genre is inconsequential to me. When you pay close attention to sound as the primary vehicle of emotional communication, liberation from classical song structures emerges naturally. My aesthetic instincts lean toward the non-linear. There's structure in that I'm restrained in what sound palette or processing tools I'm using, but the overall approach to form is essentially whimsical. My favorite pieces of art, whether films, paintings, music, tend to have a dreamlike, visceral quality to them, I love experiencing things that sort of avoid my intellect, which in some way appears to be more of a reflection of actual life, a very emotional, fleeting, non-linear experience.

That's pretty accurate. A lot of the time if a piece gets sidelined I'll re-process the sounds I recorded to create something new. Though I do have a lot of music I'll probably never share.

Not really.. sometimes I'll feel like a piece is as finished as it can be at that time and I'll come back later and make final revisions, but a piece ends when it feels like it's ready to, and it feels sort of impossible to aspire to a perfected conclusion. I'm kind of impatient with music, I can't really work on anything for more than 1-2 weeks or I'll start to loathe what I'm working on, and once I don't love something anymore there's just no point. Most of my music is composed rather quickly, in an improvisational setting, which I get the most gratification from.

Well, I don't think I would define it actually... it's hard for me to describe my music so I never really try to. Experimental and ambient are both totally fair categorizations. I'm definitely drawing from that history and current output. Though, I wouldn't call what I do ambient 'background' music, at least I hope it's not.. I want my music to have a visceral, experiential quality to it, where the listener is interacting with something that feels like it has a mysterious origin, some balance of the unknown and known.. like the art that moves me most. I'm happy if it finds a place at all, call it what you want!

I'd be lying if I said I understood anything or that my ideas come from some kind of place. It's all action and reaction. I'm not trying to say anything. I find a space I love and I just follow it, which can lead to a lot of beautiful accidents, and you start to feel like you're more of a vehicle for the ideas being expressed than actually doing the expressing. It all ends up making sense in a very natural way as long as I love what I'm doing. It's all very lighthearted really.

To date it's definitely the largest artistic project I've released, being my first LP. But it's also my most successful body of work up to this point, the fruits of a long trial and discard period where I was trying to figure out how to say something. That album will always be special to me for the place and time that surrounded its creation.

I basically always print most of my effects and processing in real time. It's also a way of staying committed to an idea. A lot of the systems I use are doing some type of granular or spectral processing which ends up becoming a part of the sound itself, and that definitely leads to the effect triggering an idea. I love to take natural instruments and push them into places they couldn't go otherwise, while still retaining their organic quality. Structure and form usually come out of a response to a sound, it's not really something I ever hear in my head beforehand.

Nice! I love those guys. I've actually gotten that question a few times so I will reveal the secret. That main ostinato was composed on an OP-1, and I did some additional processing with some waveshapers in Max/MSP.

I love field-recordings, if you listen, you'll find music everywhere. The knocky/bass textures on 'Wire and Leaf' were taken from an empty subway station. There was a loose sewer top that when you slammed your foot on would make the most glorious reverberated sub movement. Though, a lot of the background ambience on the record came from sound sources that originated from vinyl, tape, or old public domain films. I'll record anything or anyone that catches my attention.

Slowfield was an improvisational piece I composed quite some time ago and never revisited until my frequent collaborator and close friend Roopam Garg insisted on finishing it. He's an incredible player and plays guitar on that piece. I'm not going after or coming from any emotional place, that piece did come out quite tranquil, but it's all just the act of making music. However it sounds after the fact wasn't really up to me in any way that was conscious. As you work, the material begins to sort of call out to you with the form it's trying to take, if that makes sense.

Hmm.. that's an interesting question. I'm not sure if my personality has any correlation with the music I make. Most of the music I listen to isn't entirely electronic. I don't think I'm that complex of a person, we all have our depth, but philosophically, I would much rather simplify a complexity in an effort to make it more relatable.

In my case, the length of a work is coincidental. I can't really assume the listener will or will not retain interest, but I know if I'm bored and if something felt like it was dragging to me, I'd cut it down.

My template changes once I've exhausted a method. My approach to composition is pretty strict and organized with self-imposed limits and sound palettes, but that's after a long time spent in option paralysis, once you learn what works it's easier to explore. Hopefully whatever gets me making music the fastest. Orson Welles said, 'The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.'

I always love to hear any feelings a listener may have, whether positive or negative. I'd like to leave my interpretations unexplored to allow listeners to draw their own conclusions since the tendency has been that I feel entirely different.

No. I'm not trying to prove or achieve anything. I just want to be honest with my work and let the music happen. At the end of the day, a great deal of being an artist is learning how to get out of your own way.

My setup is pretty straightforward. I mainly use Max/MSP, Ableton, and sometimes other audio processing languages and plugins. I use these programs as synthetic sources and also as processing tools for all the acoustic instruments I own. I don't own much hardware, that's where programs like Max have been indispensable.

I'm fond of granular synthesis, which all comes out of Max/MSP. Most of my processing in general, whether compression, saturation, delay, reverb etc.. comes out of Max. I've taken some of these effects and made Max4Live devices I can use in Ableton. As far as plugins go, I'm pretty simple.. if I grab a plugin it's usually a stock Ableton EQ, Fab Filter, or something from Universal Audio, the tendency to use Max just comes from the ability to treat things with basically limitless modulation options, something you couldn't accomplish by working entirely with a single DAW, but it depends on what you're after.