Interview with SoundBound

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.

house ambient artists on tumblr soundbound regelbau dj koze reckno soundcloud

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’.”

ambient cassette tape tape music ambient music noise drone eating flowers reckno cassette music deep ambient orchestral drone artists on tumblr