You began recording sound and music at a pretty young age, right?
Yes, I started exploring songwriting, alongside documenting it, by recording it. I approach music more like photography, where it's more about capturing a feeling and collecting this archive of life – our feelings and our experiences through music. Music is a language that I really love, and it has resonated with me throughout my whole life. Performing is a beautiful part of that, but it's fleeting and impermanent. I've always been fascinated by that, versus this other element of music, which is recording – such a huge part of the practice and the industry – and how those two are opposites. One is this crafted, controlled version of how you want to be heard, or how the song is meant to be archived or living as a recording forever. And the live aspect is this momentary experience. I like to not have those be so separate. Giving up a little bit of control in recording is something that I've always been interested in. When I started to write songs, my first album that I made I recorded myself. A whole part of that experience was being aware that what I was documenting – what I was recording – was just a moment in time and a moment of my life. When we record Florist records, which have lately been recorded by one of the founding members, Rick Spataro, we're all there with a similar philosophy of trying to capture us as we are. With live performance, I like to embrace that as well. We're showing up as we are, offering that, and the audience is offering themselves as well – their time and energy in coming to the show. Recording, for me, started when I was 15 or 16. It was very much tied into songwriting and music making. I'm always recording as I'm working on music, because I like the archival aspect of it. A lot of the music projects and the albums that I end up sharing are conceptually about documenting life and sharing those experiences through that language.
Your new record, Cloud Time, was recorded live?
Yes. I was traveling in Japan, so I wanted to travel as light as possible. I recorded that with the [Teenage Engineering] TP-7 [Field Recorder], a tiny little recorder. It's important to me to be able to be portable, because I'm a utilitarian recorder. Whenever I am recording, I like to be able to do it on the fly, so that was what enabled this to be so easy. I was able to connect it with a six-channel mixer, so I had a bunch of channels that I was mixing down and recording live. I recorded every performance. I didn't know if I was going to release it, but it ended up being something that felt good.
You recorded six tracks of audio, and then you later mixed it. Or was it just down to 2-track?
Recorded and mixed down to two tracks live. You can connect the little Teenage Engineering TX-6 mixer to the TP-7, and you can choose to have it mixed down to two tracks or you can choose to stem it out. Then you can drop that file in and mix it in your computer. But I was mixing as I was playing the set. There's live mixing happening as well, from the six-channel stereo mixer, and I had an effect send going as well. There's a lot of live mixing that's a part of the songs.
You captured the performance, including the mix?
Exactly.
Location, place, and time seem to be a big part of your ambient music.
Yeah, I would say so. That goes back to my relationship to recording, which is very much about a moment in time. With Water Memory, it was a collection of recordings from a period of time, as well as a specific recording setup, and it felt very much about the feelings and the things that I was going through. Mount Vision was recorded on Mount Vision in Marin [County, CA]. That was a different time in my life, and a released sort of feeling. I felt light after having gone through some harder times in life; those were like signposts in the road. I've never recorded in the same place twice actually, now that I'm thinking about it. [laughter] It's very much about a location as a time and place. I like to go to new spaces to have a new experience, and then make music based off of that. It's like playing with what is happening as the music is being made. That, and getting embedded into the music itself, which is also what Cloud Time is about.
And the album Hill, Flower, Fog was done in L.A.?
Yeah. That was an album that I made right at the beginning of March of 2020; the first couple of weeks that we were locked down from the pandemic. That was music that I made in my house when I lived in L.A. I make and record a lot of music, but releasing a record is more of a selective process. I made Emily Alone, the Florist record, which I recorded myself in that house where I made Hill, Flower, Fog in as well.
Is that the hill behind the house on the cover?
No, this was in Culver City in Los Angeles. I lived in a back house, behind my landlords. It was a cute little place – a studio back house type of thing. That was when I was surfing a lot and living my "California" life.
I like the album covers. They have a sense of place to them. That's what initially drew me into your music – the cover for Water Memory and the title looked interesting.
That's good! Matt [Werth] and [his record label] RVNG, Intl. have a great design sensibility. They work closely with the design studio Will Work For Good, which is a partnership between Kevin O'Neil and Karisa Senavitis. The photos from Cloud Time and the photo that's on Hill, Flower, Fog were photos that I took. I said, "I want to use this photo for the cover," and then they adapted the text the design around it. On Hill, Flower, Fog, that photograph was from the neighborhood that I lived in and a hike that I would do pretty often.
What is your process for recording your electronic music? Is it mostly tracked live in the way you did the Cloud Time, or do you sometimes layer and overdub within a DAW? What is your compositional process?
Everything that I've released so far has been basically recorded live. The difference between those albums and Cloud Time is that I would do multiple takes sometimes, if that makes sense. They wouldn't always be the same. For the modular music, I would have a patch going and I would record a few different variations of the patch for anywhere from three to 15 minutes at a time. It's very performative, trying to find that emotional point, find that groove, and then go back and take that section of it. There might an occasional overdub, but it's mainly the process of mixing as a performance tool and getting a stereo track. I'm starting to work more now, even with the modular, with recording my tracks separately and then having a mixing process. But the reason why I've avoided that for so long is that I'm a little bit allergic to fiddling with the computer with any kind of music. I'm not a tape purist or anything. I love tape, but I am allergic to clicking on little points on the screen and mixing like that. It's never felt quite musical to me to work like that. As I've gotten more interested in focusing on the making aspect of music, I still love recording. I will always record myself. In that process, the recordings still need to feel like a part of the creation to me. I've set up my studio in ways so that whatever I am recording, even the parts that are related to mixing, can still feel very performative and creative.
Your production process is more choosing performances rather than getting super into the details of any one performance and getting super tweaky. It sounds like you're making decisions quickly.
Yeah. I'm an intuition-based person. I'm guided by feeling; when I'm recording something, I usually know if it feels good and I make sure I like the way that it sounds. A lot of the times, that can come after spending a lot of time getting sounds the way that I want them. I do spend a lot of time adjusting the different elements of a track. If it's a modular or any synth piece, I usually have at least four tracks and then one or two effects. It's a few different elements that I tweak for a little bit before I start getting into recording the takes that I want to use. But it does happen pretty quickly. The prep and the time spent getting ready to do this is a lot more time than the actual process of recording.
Earlier, you mentioned finding the emotion in a track, and that's something that intrigues me. Especially with instrumental music where there is no vocal – a genre that is seeing a lot of growth, but is also being flooded with generic AI ambient tracks on streaming services like Spotify. With your music, I feel like I can hear a person behind it. How do you translate emotion into music that people respond to on a deeper level?
That's a good question. The only way I can answer that is that it's the reason why I make music. It's the reason why I have chosen this path every step of the way in my life, despite it not being necessarily the safest or best choice. It's honestly the way that I feel I can communicate best, whether it's songwriting or ambient music. I love the fact that ambient music doesn't have words. I've written so many lyrics and said so many words in music, and sometimes I feel like an instrumental track can say more than all those words combined. It's an element of our lives and our relationships with each other, and it is nonverbal communication. Speaking about Cloud Times specifically, that's what I wanted to do with this music – go beyond music as just a utilitarian aspect to our lives. A commodity or an entertainment. This is part of the environmental music philosophy, Kankyō Ongaku, which is that music can exist in the background of our lives and enhance these emotional experiences. For me, making music is first and foremost always about this translation of an inner world, unspoken or hard to explain feelings or experiences to music which has this mysterious power to affect us. When I'm making something, I'm trying to be as connected to that feeling within myself as I can. When I choose music to release, I have to really think about what I'm feeling, because I want to share that common experience. I want to share our vulnerability, and our emotions, and say, "This is real and this is good." With Cloud Times specifically, I was thinking a lot about the live performance aspect and how when we have relationships with people; we have these one-on-one relationships. It's easy to be aware of the fact that we sometimes pick up on other people's energies, or we bounce off of each other, and we have little ways that we might change the way that we speak, as well as our body language. When you add more and more people to that, maybe it's two people, or a group of people. In the case of Cloud Times it was, on average, about 100 people in a room, which is enough to have all of these energies bouncing off each other. Everyone's coming there from a different reality, a different experience, and I wanted to try and make music that was all about that fleeting experience. Again, documenting something that happens and passes us by like time, Cloud Time. It just, passes us by, but recording is this interesting way to capture what we're feeling at that time. We're all affected by each other, so I wanted to improvise music in a space with lots of people and to try and capture what may be bouncing around there and what I'm feeling in the moment. When I listen to Cloud Time, I can feel or hear that there's some melancholy and some anxiety. Sometimes it's confidence. Sometimes it fumbles a little bit. Sometimes it's easy-going. Sometimes it starts to become a bit more built up. That feels like a reflection of how we can navigate a day, and that's what I wanted to do with those recordings.
You mention that you like music without words, but your first two records have short poems that open both of those projects. I always thought that was a nice part of how those albums start.
Well, before I released those records with RVNG, I self-released them on cassette and those poems were written inside the cassette jacket. When we did the vinyl release with RVNG, Matt suggested recording those poems. I like incorporating spoken word into electronic music. I'm a huge fan of Out of the Blue, the "Blue" Gene Tyranny album. My next record, which is going to come out next year, is all modular and has purely instrumental songs, but it also has tracks with singing and tracks with speaking. It's a whole new path that I'm exploring. I'm definitely going to keep trying out stuff like that and adding words. No absolutes.
Let's change the subject to something more practical: Can you tell me about your rig and the modules you've used on your records? Has that evolved over the years into a fairly stable setup?
I've used modular synths for a lot of the electronic work. But Cloud Time is mainly made with a Vongon Replay synth that is a pretty new, a basic subtractive synth based on a [Roland] Juno. That's the main synth on Cloud Time. There is an arpeggiator on it; a rudimentary sequencer. But I wasn't using any of those automated things, I was just playing it. It was going through the Vongon Polyphrase delay, which can have long delay times up to 22 seconds. I can almost get this feeling of a looper, and it won't self-oscillate if I don't want it to. It's clean, so I used a lot of it live. The Replay has the basic synth controls for sound design on the front panel, and it doesn't have any presets. Throughout the set I was changing all the sliders to make these different patches, like little electric piano type-sounds or growly droning sounds. That process was fun. I do love synthesis; coming from modular and then going to something like that, it's easy to set what waveform and filter I want. Then I can set the envelopes, and I can get so many different sounds. With the delay, I can have a little line going through the delay and then change the settings on the synth, so it sounds like a different instrument adding to it. It was a simple setup, but because of that simplicity I felt there was so much possibility and that was inspiring. I had not used modular for quite a while; but now I've been going hard on modular and I've been loving it again. The Make Noise Morphagene is a module that I use in almost everything I make. Every time I play live with a modular, I use that. I love all the [now discontinued] Mutable Instruments modules, like Rings and Clouds. I used those on a lot of Water Memory. I believe, on Water Memory, that main synth sound was Mutable Instruments Tides, version one, in oscillator mode with some sequencer and probably a little bit of Clouds. The sequencer that I use for this record that's coming out next year is Hermod+. It's a new version of this Squarp Instruments sequencer – they've made it so much better with the second version. It's a four-by-four grid of buttons and I can play it like a little keyboard. Then I can live sequence, and it snaps it all to whatever grid I want it to be on. I love writing melodies, and it's hard to dial in a specific melody on a traditional slider or step sequencer [with potentiometers]. I like to play melodies and get that feeling from it. It has eight-tracks and it doesn't take a lot of space.
You use piano a bit on Mount Vision. Was that just because it was there where you were recording, or is piano a part of your musical language?
Yeah, I have a [Fender] Rhodes here in my little studio. I love electric piano and acoustic piano. Any time I'm anywhere with an acoustic piano, I bring out my Norns by Monome – which uses a music application called mlr. It's my favorite way to record sampled audio. I'll then compose a track with the sampled audio from it. I don't have a piano. If I did have a piano, I would probably make a lot more piano music. I specifically love recording piano and mangling it with a sampler, which is what Mount Vision is. But sometimes you can't quite tell if it's just really weird piano playing. I like that mix of phonetic, strange piano playing.
I was wondering if you had played that live or if it was a bit manipulated. Florist is a whole other aspect of what you're doing. How do you switch your mindset into a collaborative group process? You said Rick Spataro is doing a lot of the recording now.
Rick and I went to high school together, and we were friends before I met anybody else in the band. He recorded some of my songs when I was 16 and 17. I had been recording myself a little bit too, then I recorded a little bit with him, and then we formed Florist over the next few years with the two other members. The recording process was always pulling our gear together and finding a location. For the first Florist LP, The Birds Outside Sang, I recorded half of that record myself and the other half of it was recorded in Rick's apartment at the time. The second record [If Blue Could Be Happiness], we recorded in a house around here, in the Catskills, that I was renting and living in one summer. It was an old schoolhouse that had this cool vibe and sounded interesting. All of us, all throughout the years, have been collecting gear and learning more about recording and playing together, so the recording process has always been pretty collaborative. The latest record, Jellywish, was fully engineered by Rick. The self-titled record was mostly engineered by him as well. We have a cohesive process whenever we are working on a record. We go in and out of the recording space; like somebody will hit record and start playing something, and some other people will chime in. All of the Florist records, except for Jellywish, we recorded on 8-track, 1/2-inch tape, which is a process that we started when we started the band. We all said, “Let’s record to tape,” because that is going to sound good. Our records are generally “Produced by Florist.” I usually have a lot of ideas going in, and I maybe steer things a bit more in the production way – like how a song is going to be arranged – but we're collaborative overall. If I'm feeling a song wants to be in a bit more of a different vibe space, maybe we'll start it over and try some different stuff. And again, we've never recorded an album in the same place twice, and we've never recorded in a proper studio. We always bring our own gear, and do our own thing.
One thing you touched on there was the sound of the house and the non-studio spaces you're in. I was talking to another musician recently about what he called the “in-between” sounds: The sounds of the house creaking, the ambience, or maybe some birds outside the window.
I love that nature of documenting with recording. Music and recording, to me, is just as much of a philosophy connected to life as much as it is a job or a commodified thing. I like the fact that we can make something that is imperfect. I want to share music that shows how real life sounds. I have nothing against perfectly made recordings and totally isolated tracks, but, for me, this lifelong devotion to music is about it being a translation of real life. It being this document and not trying to smooth over anything or erase the messiness of who we are and how we live. In recording, it's coming as you are and showing that music can exist in this space and be captured and translated that way to the listener. To translate an everyday scene, or moment, and to have a sense of place feels important to me. The whole concept and purpose of the music that I want to make is to show the vulnerability, show the flaws, and show real life. So, when something gets into a recording, this is still music. It's everything. It's all music. We are in control of what we carry and present from this document. I definitely embrace that.
You mentioned using tape and that you like the sound of it, but what about the process where you can't have a playlist with 29 different takes? You have to commit and make decisions.
With tape, it's like we came for the sound, but we stayed for the process. Tape has been the main way that I've recorded for my whole life. We started recording to tape because back in 2010 it was "cool." But, at this point, it's 100 percent about the process. I'm less concerned with the way something sounds now more than ever. I'm much more concerned with how I feel during the making of it. And with tape, we can be so much more present in the air and the space where we are making the music. I am getting old fast, in the sense that I hate using computers and I'm bad at using technology now. I'm only 31 years old, but I have gone downhill fast with technology and I'm not interested in keeping up. I like that slow process. That's why I love this little TP-7, because it has no screen. I love being able to press record on something and forget about the rest. There are the elements of tape being limited, in the sense of what you have to work with. Like you're saying, we can't edit into infinity to make something perfect. I like that philosophy, and that goes into the way that I record the electronic music, which is with live performance takes where it feels good. When we're recording a song on tape, it's like, "This take feels great." Maybe it has one little chair creak, but it feels so good. We're not going to be able to edit some of the imperfections out. That's how I feel with recording live. It's not manufactured to be a certain way. It just is. The process of tape, and the process of limitations, are hugely important to me. It's always been a part of whatever I've been making.
Do you still have your tape machine?
Right now, I only have cassette machines. I've been recording onto a TASCAM, a Portastudio, which is what I recorded Water Memory with. I'm looking for a reel-to-reel. I had a little 2-track in L.A., which I recorded Hill, Flower, Fog on.
You've recently started using people to mix your records. What do you like about that process?
I like being able to pull focus more to the writing and the production side of the recording. It was Phil Weinrobe [Tape Op #167] who put this bug in my ear one day, where he said, "You're a songwriter. You are good at songwriting. You should focus on that. Don't worry about having a huge studio where you can perfectly record yourself." I thought, "There are things about recording that I like, and things about sound that are fascinating to me. But how do I want to spend most of my time, and what makes me ultimately feel like I'm making something?" For me, it is about that first step, the writing, the producing, and the sound design. That's where I feel the most inspired and creative. That's where I feel my strengths are more than the mixing. I've found that it is a liberating feeling to not have to be thinking about that as soon as I finish making something. To have that collaborative experience where somebody has fresh ears. It's a conceptual collaboration, where you can say, "This is how this is supposed to feel." I like being able to translate my language of talking about music, which isn't always the most technical in a mixing sense. Rather, I’m saying, "I want this to sound a bit more like we're in this kind of space." Or maybe I want it to sound a bit darker. Either way, I want to communicate to a mixing engineer who can then do the technical stuff. It takes a lot of the pressure off of trying to finish something and have it sound as good as it can be, while also still having fun with the process.
Nice. In the past, you've produced other artists, such as Gabby's World. Do you see yourself doing that again?
I would be interested in that. I enjoy adding to, and helping contribute to, other people's music. I recorded some Buchla Music Easel on a friend's folk record, [h. pruz], which is very beautiful, very acoustic music. They [Hannah Pruzinsky] had asked, "Do you want to come up and play something?" I thought, "Yeah, I'm going to bring this weird instrument to make it a bit more deviant." I'm interested in that, collaborating where I'm bending and breaking the rules. I don't see it being something that I do a ton of, but I'm open to it. I'd like to think, above all, that I can keep growing as a musician and as a person. Limiting myself to what I've only ever done or what I know is not something I'm interested in doing. So, in that sense, I would love to try new things!
