From an interview that was supposed to be published by SoundBound.it along with a mix, but never made it.
- when did it start?
Well for a while I had wanted to start a
label. I had a vague idea of what kind of music I wanted to make -
pretty textures, long tracks, field recordings… I guess I was thinking
something like Hakobune or Celer. One night I was walking around my
apartment listening to Sun An’s incredible Ice Cream Memory Card and I
noticed this totally brilliant moment in one of the songs: the sound of a
digital audio recorder being taken out of a backpack, scraping sounds
and all, with tons of reverb and all of it clearly intentional. That is
what demystified music making for me. I could do that! I had an audio
recorder sitting on my desk. So I decided to try it out, putting field
recordings on top of textures I drew out in Audacity and just doing it
any way I could.
- what are your influences?
Anyone who
made experimental music and released it on cassette between 2007 and
2010. There were all these great blogs around that time that posted
tape rips of ambient, noise, whatever, no matter how marginal or
obscure. I would come back to my dorm room after class and spend hours
downloading everything. It was really exciting. The first time I heard
an Emeralds song it felt like an entirely new world of rhythm and
texture opening up… I especially liked the more ’emotive’ stuff,
whatever you want to call it - Infinite Body’s split with Emaciator, for
instance, or Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s excellent “Black Is The Colour Of My
True Love’s Hair,” some tracks from which I’ve included in the mix.
Also
relevant to my music, of course, is the compulsion these people have to
create music along with a physical record of it, even in the face of
obscurity and indifference.
- how do you describe the sound of your debut release? Can we consider it as album?
Yeah!
Album. I usually just say that it’s ambient music, which to me means
it works whether or not you’re paying attention to it. I like ambient
music that carries me off like rising water and this is the standard to
which I hold all my work. One of my friends said, “it put me in a place
where I felt like I was nowhere but everywhere at the same time and
brought me so much resting focus.” I found this very touching and I
felt like I’d achieved everything I’d hoped to.
- At the moment what are the artists you like most?
Lots
of moody house music… I mean the big name there is Mood Hut, but by
extension pretty much anything coming out of Vancouver these days. And
Acting Press— PLO Man’s “Stations of the Elevated” was one of last
year’s best records. I also really like what’s been coming out of
Aarhus lately, Regelbau, No Hands, all that. They’re taking that
moodiness and adding an Artificial Intelligence flavor to it, I like
that a lot. Hm… Of course, the new Leon Vynehall album is good. So
good. And I keep listening to the same MCDE songs over and over again.
Outside
of that world, Lorenzo Senni is making the most vital synthesizer music
since Oneohtrix Point Never’s Rifts. He is taking everything about
trance music I’d never wanted to admit I liked, distilling it, and
inventing an entirely new language with it. It’ll be a while before
dance music fully absorbs what he’s done. I see him as an heir to Basic
Channel, who also spoke a new language and will always be relevant.
-What are you looking for with Eating Flowers?
What
gets me really excited is when I hear textures I haven’t heard before -
anything that constitutes unexplored sonic territory. And what I see
over and over is that the way to get there is by picking constraints and
working against them for a long, long time. The constraints you pick
are arbitrary. For instance, in “Five Modern No Plays,”
I picked at random a 1017 Brick Squad drum kit I downloaded somewhere
and said, okay, I’m going to pick five samples from this pack and make
all the drums in this track from them. So then instead of going through
thousands of hihat samples I spent time in Audacity and Ableton trying
to make new sounds and textures out of the ones I had. “Unexplored
sonic territory” is a bit of a stretch to describe these drums, but
they’re an example of what can happen when you pick arbitrary contraints
and spend some time working against them. So, too, is God Was A
White-Tailed Deer - the constraint there was to make an entire album in
Audacity with no original material, excluding field recordings. I see
this approach as crucial to what I do.
what can we expect from the future?
More
stuff you can dance to. I’m still interested in the sampling
techniques I used on God Was A White-Tailed Deer but I want to add some
drums, you know? For every texture that’s just perfect on its own there
are hundreds that sound great in tracks as background, and it gets even
more interesting when you start using those textures to make
instruments. More generally I’m interested in the kinds of constraints
hardware like synths and drum machines impose on music making. Like I
said, the constraints you choose are arbitrary, so I bought a few synths
on eBay more or less at random.
There’s some new stuff on Soundcloud. I’m all over the place right now. I was working for a long time on a 17-minute Carly Rae Jepsen remix.
That took forever. I recently met Bubblyfish - we work at the same
software company - and we did a remix of an Alex Mauer song. My friends
and I like Mood Hut a lot and we’re putting together a demo.
-in your opinion what’s the connection between contemporary art and your sound?
That’s
a good question! If I had to pick out one strand from the narrative of
contemporary art it’d be the use of technology to transcend the
barriers between senses with the intention (I think) to impress some
“total” experience upon the viewer. For instance, in my artwork
I work with LEDs and there is an intuitive connection one makes between
the rasterization of light we get from LEDs and the rigid quantization a
sequencer affords. Or pulsations of light with LFO or the arpeggios
found in synthesizer music. You know. I don’t profess to have achieved
any synaesthetic effect with my music - believe me, I tried - and I
think this is deceptively difficult to do in any medium. But my point
is that I have seen it done with similar work. This video Jennifer Jupiter Stratford did
for Sun An’s track “Fritto Misto” is a good example. Now, what makes
this good is that, again, there’s an intuitive relationship between the
visuals and the music. It looks like the way it sounds and vice versa.
And there’s a lot of art out there that fails to achieve this kind of
parity.
- help me to define the concept of contemporary.
Haha,
that’s broad! I mean, this is the same as the one about what makes
something cool, right? ‘Contemporary’ is the carrot on the stick. Yet
some artists have transcended the chase for this status and have
paradoxically achieved it through radical invention. And in music, at
least, radical invention comes from play and application of extreme
constraints. That’s all I know.
_how much is important for you art?
Very!
I make art and work with technologists and artists through my job and
am fortunate enough to live in a place where there’s tons of people
interested in how technology can be used in art practice.
- the reckno sound is also for clubs? Or is just mental one?
Chris
calls Reckno a “frontierless abstract” label, which I found pretty
intuitive and also clever for how nonspecific and versatile it is.
There’s so much variation in the Reckno catalog and I’m honored to be a
part of it. I think the Reckno sound is primarily mental, but
‘frontierless abstract’ would leave room, to take one example, for
artists looking to subvert the language and syntax of club music.
- what are the biggest experimental artist of all time?
Ryoji Ikeda.
-Give me a name of a remixer for your release on Reckno. Who would you choose to collaborate with?
Haha,
I mean I pretty much have to say DJ Koze right? Thought Superpitcher
wouldn’t be bad either… As far as collaborator, I’d go with PLO Man or
DJ Sports from the Regelbau crew. I mean just listen to this song.
New single out on bandcamp.


Minolta SR-T 101
My album is available again for purchase on cassette!! Dope art by yours truly.
“… I started taking things I’d heard and liked, rich textures, videogame music, field recordings I’d taken, and started playing around with them in Audacity and whatever else was at hand, doing it any way I could. I didn’t know what I was doing and still don’t. But my process involves taking objects or symbols of beauty and ingesting them, somehow, no matter how wrongheaded the process is. In this way I am ‘eating flowers’.”