Piano was your first instrument?
Yeah. I was a choirboy before that. My dad's a priest, and I was one of the non-octogenarian choir members in the local church. I'm not religious, but you do it because you're a kid and your parents are telling you you've got to. Then they realized I wasn't terrible at it. I auditioned for the cathedral in Manchester and got in there. If you go to the cathedral choir in Manchester, you also go to the school next door, which is Chetham’s [School of Music]. It's hardcore: 7 a.m. starts, six days a week of rehearsals first thing in the morning, then a normal school day of music lessons, and I was doing my normal schooling on top of it, plus extra music and piano lessons. I was playing piano as well, but I wasn't very good. When your voice broke, you'd normally leave the choir and go back to regular school, but by this point I'd gotten quite into writing music. I was 15, and I'd written a few pieces for the choir, which they performed. I auditioned at the school as a composer. There's a small department, but I stayed on as a composer and got into electronic music while I was there. My teacher was interested in that as well – electroacoustic music. I was spending a lot of time doing the standards of composition, like Bach chorale re-harmonizing, counterpoint lessons, and orchestration, plus writing my own music and doing lots of electroacoustic music as well. There are three studios there, and one was a little MIDI studio with lots of workstations with an Atari [ST] computer. You had to install Cubase every time you turned it on, into the RAM from a floppy disc. This was when I was 15 through 18. There was a newer studio there with a Mackie D8B console, [Alesis] ADATs, and all the advanced things you'd get in that kind of level of studio at the time. There was an old analog studio with a 2-inch tape machine and an Akai S950 [sampler]; that was my playground. There were a Korg MS-20 and some basic synthesizers. That's where it all started, as a 15-year-old working out of there, writing music classically and trying to incorporate electronics. I remember a school concert where I wrote a piece for trombone, and I filtered it through the MS-20 and put it into a [Yamaha] SPX990 effects processor.
You were studying theory and composition at a very early age.
Yeah. I was never very good at the piano. Still not very good at the piano. I can get around, and I understand it, but I don't practice enough, basically. I'm so much more interested in making than playing. Although now, as I'm older, I've been buying sheet music to play for fun. I'm going through all the Ravel, and I'm learning it slowly. I'm practicing a lot more now than I was before.
Can you sight-read?
Yeah. But not like Britt [Day], the pianist here at the ballet; he's amazing. You put a piece of music in front of him and he just plays it. But me, I have to figure it out and it's slow.
You detoured a bit and got a PhD in neuroscience. How did that come about?
Well, I had finished school, and I had two directions I could go in: medicine or music. I got a place to study composition at the Royal College of Music in London. I went there for a matter of days, and I realized it was just not for me. I was coming from a music institution, and at this point I was 18. I was listening to Goldie and Metalheadz records. The school in Manchester that I was at was right by the northern quarter where all the record shops were, like Fat City and Piccadilly Records. I started buying records with my pocket money. I was getting more into other kinds of music. Going to music college, they're saying, "Okay, first month we're gonna start a course on Bach chorale harmonizing," and I was thinking, "I've done that." I didn't want to feel I was above it or beyond it, but I felt, "If this is it, if this is an artistic adventure, then it's gonna kill the adventure." I needed to stay in London – I wanted to be there because I was already having fun. There's a clearing process for degrees. The school year had already started at university, so I managed to get into the UCL [University College London] to read physiology or something. Whatever they had left. I weaved my way through to neuroscience, and I was interested. I finished that degree and applied for funding to study a type of small molecule in neurons that regulates pain states. I got the funding and did that for five years – that was in London as well, at UCL. That meant I could stay in London. I had a stipend; I was buying lots of records and making music. All the music-making there was on the side. I was quite serious about science. I was trying to find what I was interested in. I actually started to enjoy it towards the end of my degree because I had ideas for what I wanted to explore in science. I did the PhD, and I was so into it. I'd be at the lab until midnight looking after my cells, and on Logic in the evening on my laptop; whilst an assay was running, I'd be making some beats. [laughs] I remember I was in the lab very late one night, listening to the Benji B show on Radio 1Xtra, and he played one of my songs while I was working on some pipetting in the lab and setting up a PCR reaction. I was thinking, "This is great." My PhD finished, and I was like, "Okay, I need to carry on." I'd started a postdoctoral position, but I had a couple of weeks off. In those two weeks, I was invited to go and make a record in Morocco with James Holden and the Gnawa musician Maâllem Mahmoud Guinia. I went and did it and had the best time. I was putting my own records out at this point, and I was buying so many records at the record shops, and I was looking on the shelves... "Well, why can't I have my records on that shelf as well?" It was very simple. I went and made my own record. I went to the cutting studio, I took the lacquer, and I hand-delivered it to the factory. You don't do that. You post it! I picked up the collection from there, I took it back home, and then I took them to the shops and was selling them to the shops directly. Back then, everything was through distributors, and the stores were saying, "You need a distributor." No distributors were interested. I would say, "Do you want it or not? It's getting radio play." The record shops were supportive. Sounds of the Universe, Phonica, Black Market, and all ended up buying my records. Finally, a distribution thing came along to help. It was all happening very slowly. At the same time, I was DJ’ing. I started a party in a club called Plastic People, which I think informed a lot of the way I made music, because it was the best sound system, arguably, in the world. I was playing a lot of clubs and I was touring a lot. Crazy things, like where I'd be in the lab until 6 p.m., I would go to Heathrow, do a gig in Milan, and I'd be back in the lab by 10 a.m. At that age you can do that! I was DJ'ing around, and my professor was very, very supportive of all that extracurricular activity. I was putting records out and DJ'ing a lot, and the club itself informed the sound. I feel the whole world of dubstep was incubated in that room, Plastic People, because of the night FWD>> [forward] and what was happening there. FWD>> and DMZ, which was Mala's night, were two big dubstep nights at Plastic People. The subs in there were so phenomenally powerful. It was a Funktion-One system, off the shelf, and an acoustically perfect room. And 300 people, 220 on the dance floor, with a sound system that was two stacks in each corner. I eventually got so involved in that club that Ade [Fakile], the owner – he's in Lagos most of the time – said, "I want to change the system. I heard these speakers; I want to put ATC speakers in." I was thinking, "Okay. I know those speakers from studios, but they're kind of expensive." But there was a club that was shutting down in Mayfair – a fancy cocktail place that had an ATC system. I went there with a bag of my student loan and my overdraft in cash. I asked, "Can I take the system?" And they said, "You've got four hours to get it out of here." I was unscrewing speakers from cabinets. We rebuilt the cabinets ourselves. I took 32 bass drivers, ten of those heavy [ATC Loudspeakers] P4 amps, solo, up four flights of stairs and into taxis. I was in bed for a day afterwards because of how much damage I'd done to my musculoskeletal system. We built the cabinets and installed an ATC system. I didn't like it as much as the Funktion-One, but it had way more fidelity. I was hands-on with so many different things at that time.
At some point, your music moved into the foreground?
Yes, after I was in Morocco and working on that record, I felt I should do this properly. I was trying to finish my first album, which I’d been chipping away at during my PhD. That came out a year later. I was running this label called Eglo with my friend Alex [Nut]. At that point it was six years in, and we'd put out loads of records. We had 50 records out with other artists. We were busy. I can't imagine doing that much now.
You seem to keep pretty busy still! Elaenia was your first full album, right?
Yeah, I finished the PhD, and then I focused on finishing that. I managed to get a lease on a basement in Shoreditch and was building a studio. It was a good location – it was big, very cheap, and my landlord was very generous to me. I had built my own mega monitor system down there. I'd been buying studio gear, and I was living in a flat in King's Cross – in a terrible flat that flooded occasionally. I was buying lots of gear because there was a sound I was trying to get. I bought an API 1608 [console], serial number 60 or something. It was a crazy thing to buy as a 19- or 20-year-old. I remember calling my mom, "I think I need a mixer. It's expensive, and I'm taking out a loan. Am I messing up?" And she said, "You're on your own now. That's your problem." I bought it on a loan. I bought a spare frame for the API from Kate Nash. I had the mixer at the end of my bed, and I had to crawl under the desk to get into bed. [laughter] That's how I was living. I found a [Studer] A80 multitrack via one of those old BBC auctions, and I bought that. It arrived at my front door in King's Cross. Those things are 72 cm wide. My door frame was 70 cm wide. I had this moment where my flatmates and everyone were asking, "What the hell are you doing? This is crazy." I put a tarpaulin over the top of it and left it outside my front door in the middle of the street in King's Cross by the train station. This is a busy part of London, and I just wrapped some bungee cords around it. I mean, who's going to steal it? It's quite heavy: 280 pounds or something. I scrambled to find a studio. That's when I found the basement in Shoreditch, so I put it in there. One of the delivery crew cried, it was so heavy. In fact, when I moved out, I left it in there because no one wanted to move it out. That was a nightmare. But I used it, and I recorded Elaenia on that.
On the A80 and 1608?
Yeah, and by that point I put an Otari MTR-90 in as well. It had a Dolby A unit and the Dolby SR. The Dolby A unit was a bit annoying, but it sounded great. The SR was in-built and it always sounded good. I recorded a lot. I had those two machines and an Ampex ATR-102. I think I was somewhat fetishizing the analog gear. Digital stuff at the time was not that great for my budget. It was cheaper to record on tape than recording digitally with the quality I could afford. I couldn't afford the Prism soundcards at the time, but the tape machines were cheap. After that record, I started moving more to digital. I still use the 102 a bit. I quite like that. Back then, digital never sounded good enough to me, but it does now. I don't care anymore. Give me digital all day long.
Do you still mix through the console to the ATR?
I mix through the console into the Crane Song HEDD. All the instruments go through the desk, and then I record it back into the HEDD into a Sound Devices recorder, digital in, so it's a separate system. I record through all the outboard stuff as the final if it's on the desk. If it's internal in the computer, I just bounce it at 48 kHz. There was a moment when I was doing both at the same time. At some point, I was thinking, "I can't tell the difference versus how annoying it is to manage." I'm by myself, I'm doing everything, aligning the tape machine and all that stuff. Now, with the sort of work I'm doing, I feel there's a certain time pressure that's like, "No… forget that." I like the craft, but I want to work a bit faster. Also, digital sounds so good now. I'm over it. Even the cheapest soundcards sound good.
Are you still summing analog? Or are you mixing in the box more now?
Both. Yeah. It depends. You can totally achieve a good mix in the box; it's just that there's something nice about the tactility of doing it on the desk. I feel I have so much more control when I put my fingers onto the faders. It's not like a digital fader. With those VCAs, when you start pulling down on an API fader it doesn't feel like it's doing anything until it crosses a threshold. It's like the brushes need to catch the other way. With the API, I always feel that the smallest movement has an audible change. We're talking micro decibels. I have no engineering background in audio. I have no real idea what a compressor, limiter, de-esser, any of these things do; I just turn them on and play around with them until it sounds good. The reason tape was good at that time is because it's so forgiving of any oversaturation.
I feel panning is so much better analog. When I move a mix from in the box to my 1608, I can move the pan pot the tiniest amount and I hear it, but in the DAW even big swings seem less noticeable within the stereo field.
The spatial change. Yeah. I do feel my older records do sound more interesting. Maybe I've just done quite a bit of dance music the past few years that doesn't have a lot of finesse. Some of my favorite stuff I've made has been done on the headphone output of my Mac and through a [Thermionic Culture] Fat Bustard. It's weird, because it's quite a dull-sounding box, but those records are quite heavy.
Parts of Elaenia remind me of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. You've played with Tom Skinner and Shabaka, both great jazz artists. How did your jazz influences evolve?
The reason why I wanted to stay in London was because a lot of my friends from school ended up there; they all went to music college. I got myself into bands whilst I was there – wedding bands and things like that – to make money. And I was writing some music as well. Maybe because I was ostracized from the music college world, it meant that I needed to make an effort to try and keep a toe in that world by making music for those musicians. I was writing and recorded it occasionally. I did a project for a group that I had assembled – players from colleges and friends of mine – that we recorded at Fish Factory Studios in London. That's where I first used an API. He [owner, Antonio Feola] has a big [API] Vision console. I was mixing it there, and I was thinking, "This is so easy," because I'd been mixing in my laptop until then. There's the speed and ease which the desk gave me, because I'd never done it before. Then Ninja Tune put it out, because it was orchestral. It was big strings and flutes and stuff. That was called Post Suite [as Floating Points Ensemble]. Then we did a Maida Vale session as a result of that, and I think maybe that helped establish with some of my music friends that I was a bit more serious about writing. That's how I kept my toe in that world. I initially knew Shabaka as a clarinetist. He played clarinet in my band for a while and then met Skinner through Leo Taylor, who's the other drummer on the record. I think they were flatmates or something.
Were you listening to a lot of jazz when you were in high school?
Oh, yeah. When I was at school, I was studying composition and jazz and classical piano. But it was my jazz teacher who opened my mind to a lot of interesting music. My composition teacher would be showing me Tōru Takemitsu and Henri Dutilleux, and my jazz teacher would be showing me Kenny Wheeler and Chick Corea. I would transcribe those solos and play along to try and imitate them. Chick Corea, especially. I was obsessed. I guess that sensibility kind of followed. I mean, those records are a bit cringy now... I listened to Elaenia last year, and there are so many things I wouldn't do now. But I don't think it's appropriate of me to hate on it.
Pharoah Sanders apparently heard Elaenia and reached out to you?
I got a message saying, "We should make some music sometime." But we couldn't get it together because he was busy, I was busy, and then we finally got together to do something. The idea was sold to me as me helping him produce his next album. I thought, "Oh, he's got some songs and he wants to record." We got to the studio, and he says, "Okay, what'd you got?" And I was like, "I haven’t got anything." We jammed for a bit, and then I said, "Leave me alone for a few days, and I'll come up with something." I wrote loads of stuff in a frantic two days – 13 tracks or something. We recorded lots of them, actually. We've got loads more stuff. We've got one that's just a Buchla [synth] and Pharoah. It was a nice moment, because he's playing into the Buchla and I’m processing him as if he was one of the oscillators. He had his headphones on and he was laughing and playing into it – imitating the Buchla. It's a nice recording. "Promises" was one of those tracks. But yeah, that piece came together quite nicely. I was asking Nigel Godrich about studios in L.A. that had level accessibility, because Pharoah’s quite elderly, and Nigel immediately suggested Gus Seyffert [Tape Op #118] and Sargent Recorders. He's great. We used Gus' studio in Los Angeles, and it was wicked. He was giving me a tour of the studio, and he has the celeste that's on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and a battered-up piano that sounds amazing. He has a harpsichord upstairs with tie lines going up there. I told him I wanted to record the harpsichord. I came in one morning and Gus and his partner, Azniv [Korkejian] – she makes music as Bedouine – they were carrying this heavy harpsichord down the stairs into the studio. I asked, "What are you doing? I could just record it up there." The pressure to record that suddenly mounted, and I was thinking, "Okay, I must record the harpsichord now." So, Promises came about because of this situation where I was thinking, "I need to record that piano, it's so beautiful. The celeste is the Beach Boys' celeste. I've got to record that. And the harpsichord has been brought down the stairs at great pain, so I need to record that." The sound of that record is those three instruments. That's really where it came from. It's seven notes, basically, onto tape at 15 IPS. I slowed it down to get that oily sound to it. It's slowed down a lot. I recorded it at 145 BPM or something and slowed it down 25 percent or so.
When we talked last year, you mentioned you transferred the tape to Pro Tools and slowed it down digitally?
Yeah. I recorded it at 44.1 [kHz sample rate] because at the time, everything I was doing in my studio, my computer couldn’t handle so many tracks at higher rates, as data was still so expensive. Higher sample rates were just costing more. I couldn't tell the difference. I do everything at 48 [kHz] now because I have so many film things coming along and I can hear the difference. That song's sample rate is about 33 [kHz]. The main backdrop to that whole piece is pretty low fidelity. I can hear the benefit to high sample rates, but for my process I like to work at a certain speed. And once you get into those higher sample rates, my computer goes into meltdown. I couldn't afford that. If you're just running a Pro Tools session recording audio and run at 96, have at it. It's fine. But once you start loading 100 instances of [Xfer Records] Serum into your Pro Tools session, you're going to wish you were working at a lower sample rate. But on Promises, all of Pharoah's playing and the London Symphony Orchestra was at the normal sample rate of 44.1.
Pharoah came back into the studio?
Yeah. I came up with some melodies, Pharoah came into the studio, and I explained it to him and I played it to him. There was a lot of explaining, a lot of talking. I asked, "Okay, do you want to have a go?" He said, "Okay," and he did one take all the way through, 40 minutes. Just sat there and played the one take. Then we had lunch from a pastrami place downtown, Langer's, his favorite place in L.A. We'd get lunch there every day. We came back to the studio after lunch, did one more take, and that was it.
Wow. You had told me you had very short notice to track the strings with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Yeah. We did the initial recording, and it was kind of on ice. The label [Luaka Bop] was asking about it. They're a funny bunch. I really like them: Yale [Evelev], Eric [Welles-Nyström], and Eliza [Grace Martin]. They're very serious people and they're very serious music lovers, and the label is serious. They've put out great stuff. They're also quite playful. They were saying, "It would be great if you finished that record you recorded two years ago," and I replied, "Yeah, sure, whatever." And then the pandemic happened and they said, "Now is a good time for you to finish that record." I tried to buy some time by asking for the un-grantable. I said, "I need the LSO [London Symphony Orchestra]. I need AIR Studios." And instead of them saying, "No," which is what I was expecting, they said, "Okay, you've got 12 days and you're booked in." They did it.
With 12 days to prepare?
Yeah, 12 days until the session. I was expecting them to say, "No, come on. Let's be realistic. This is a very niche, 40-minute-long, single-track piece of music." But they didn't. That excites me when that kind of opportunity happens. I'll say, "Okay, let's go." I probably spent the first six days moaning about it. That's my usual style. Then six days actually writing it. It's not that much music, maybe five or six minutes. I scribbled it out on [staff] paper, and I discovered there's a copyist who will take your paper music and put it into Sibelius, because I hadn't used Sibelius since I was a kid. I was a bit behind on the software. I swear it's gotten worse. Notating music hasn't changed very much, and back when I was a kid I could crunch out scores quickly. Now it's complex, but I'm not going to moan about software. The session started just as social distance things were happening in studios. It was a weird session because everyone was far apart. Nigel came down to help with the recording as well, because it was 50 players and me. I was a bit out of my depth, so I said, "Nigel, help!" He came in and said, "It sounds great," but as he was listening, he said, "Hmm, the plate reverb is a bit too immediate." He put it through an AMS delay with 20 milliseconds of delay on the front end, before the signal goes to the plate, and it changed everything. Suddenly I was thinking, "Whoa, that's it. That's so sick." It was just this casual thing. That just opened it up in the studio right there. He's a badass. [laughs] He knows what he's doing. We recorded that. Didn't take very long. They're a good orchestra. [laughter] Like, really good! It was basically done a few days later, because I'd mixed it up to the point I liked it, and then I just plunked the strings on top. They'd created a rough mix for me, so I used the rough mix. "I don't want 96 microphones; don't do that! Just give me a stereo pair, that's enough." They gave me a bounce of it, I stuck it on top, and I did a bit of EQ'ing.
And that had the reverb and everything mixed in already?
Yeah. It had everything in it. The reverb was on a separate track.
Did you do more overdubbing of the synths and things back home in London?
A lot of that I did in the studio in L.A., actually. There was an [Oberheim FVS-1] "Four Voice" and an [EMS] Synthi there, and the Buchla, which I brought over. I did a few bits in London, but not too much.
Now you're doing the ballet, Mere Mortals, here in San Francisco. How did that come about?
My partner, Hannah Ekholm, is a choreographer and a contemporary dancer. She was in a trio piece with Isaac Hernández and Natalia Osipova, who are both hugely successful in the ballet world. I met Tamara Rojo, who's the director of the ballet here, through Isaac. Tamara was the director of the English National Ballet and had just gotten the job as a director here [San Francisco Ballet], and she asked me if I would be interested in doing anything for orchestra. She has a tenured orchestra at her disposal. I said, "Sure, that sounds great." We were at dinner and she was asking me about it, and it was another one of these situations where I thought she was joking, but she was quite serious. I said, "I'm not interested in doing a ten-minute piece. It's got to be the whole evening. It's got to be the full thing. All or nothing." She said, "Okay, do the whole evening then." I said, "Okay, fine. But I want all 70 players. I don't want a cut-down orchestra." She replied, "Okay, fine. You have carte blanche." The director of operations from San Francisco wrote to me two days later, saying, "Tamara passed me your email. Let's get going on this project." It all suddenly happened, and I needed a story to pin the ballet on. My original idea was to write a ballet about the scientist Oppenheimer. But it was 2022 when I started working on it, and Christopher Nolan announced his film by the same name. I thought, "I can't do that. I need to start from scratch." And then Hannah came through again, and she said, "The story you're trying to tell is ultimately a Pandora's box story. Maybe you should think about the fundamentals of the story that you're trying to tell." She'd been reading a book [Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths] by Natalie Haynes about the translational science of storytelling from Greek mythology. How a Greek myth, written in ancient Greek but translated now through a lens of modern life, is different from how it might have been interpreted by the Greeks. Natalie was making a case for a more accurate translation of the Pandora myth, which changes the way we see Pandora. We see Pandora's myth in the translation by Erasmus – the 18th-century translation that we all know – in which Pandora is this beautiful evil, where her positive attributes are objectified, and her negative attributes are moralized. And that, in Greek, is not actually true. She's described merely as an oxymoron, a beautiful/ugly, a good/bad. That distinction is something that has been ironed out by Natalie in her book. That was the story I thought I would try and tackle. A more precise telling of the story that gives Pandora a little agency. I divided it into 12 movements of hooks of the story that I went into to pin themes on. It took me about a year; six months of moaning about it and six months writing it. And three months zoned in. I think that's how it usually works – months of confusion, months of coming up with ideas that are a bit nebulous, and finally pinning it down in the last few months. We performed it and it went very well, so now we are doing it again. It's good fun. I wanted to incorporate electronics into the orchestra. When I see electronics weave their way into orchestras, it always feels to me like it's orchestra and electronics. But I wanted the electronics to be very much a part of the sound of the orchestra. I don't know if I achieved it, but that's my intention. There are parts where the Buchla gates, for example, are triggering the woodwinds. The woodwinds leave the pit halfway through the show and go into another room backstage where they play in isolation into microphones that are mixed into three separate groups, which are sent to me in the pit. Those three groups go through three different gates in the Buchla. The percussion department next to me in the pit play [Roland] V-Drums pads, which trigger the opening of those gates, while I control the attack and decay on each one of those gates. Instead of them pinging an oscillator, they're pinging the returns of the woodwind that are playing in another room. The woodwinds can see, on camera, the conductor and the rhythm section. It's a simple idea, and it sounds cool, but my experience of the ballet is very different to anyone else's because I'm in the pit. I've never seen the ballet myself. There are some stressful moments when there are certain triggers I have to hit or the whole piece will crumble. I haven't actually got any backup for it, nor does the ballet. I don't think anyone understands that if something goes wrong with certain cues, then the whole piece will stop and all the dancers will stop. I don't know what to do in those situations. We haven't ever discussed it. It's quite funny. The director will say, "Let's go back to cue number 17," and I have to say, "That's not possible." I should figure that out at some point. Touch wood; three shows left.
You wrote the piece pretty much in its entirety and brought it to them?
Yeah. I wrote a giant score. I wrote it on paper, and Lara [Serafin] put it into Sibelius. There's a graphic score for the electronics as well. It's quite fun.
And you recorded it at LucasFilms' Skywalker Sound last summer?
Yeah, the ballet has a relationship with them.
And that was a live performance of the Buchla and everything?
Yeah, but I did do the Buchla again afterwards and some finessing. I did the mix. I might have bitten off more than I can chew. I like the mix in isolation. But when I listen to it as part of the canon of orchestral music, I think what I'm trying to do is something different. I listen to certain recordings of orchestras and they sound amazing. Then I listen to the recording of this, and I like the sound of it, but the two of them together don't fit. There's something I was trying to achieve that was putting the strings in your face on the recording, not treating it like a typical two [mics] up orchestral recording. It was very much close mic’d. I want the sound of the strings from far away that you get from mics being far away, but I also want to hear them in your face. I'm trying to achieve two things at the same time. You can't necessarily have both. There are difficulties with that I think I've learned from. If you amp the string mics up that much then the snare drum is gonna explode every time it comes in because it's so distant. There's so much distance in the snare now because the string mics are so high up. The balance is off, and I'm constantly battling the mix to try and get separation. I wish I'd put the percussion in a booth. I wish I'd done that. During the recording, I was thinking, "It sounds amazing," but during the mixing, I was realizing I'd painted myself into a corner with the mix. I stand by the recording. I like it, but I have learned a lot from doing it. There are things I would do differently next time, if there is ever a next time – a separation that I'd like to achieve.
Do you still have time to work on it some more? I know the first single is out.
Oh, it's done, but I'm never happy with a mix of anything!
That's why making music stays interesting.
It's a process. I'm always out there saying, "I don't know what I'm doing," because I'm not a professional engineer in any way. I don't have any formal training, but a lot of people don't. So, my process of mixing comes from a very simplistic place. "Is that too loud? Is that too quiet?" I apply that to a symphony orchestra and it suddenly gets a little bit complicated, because you turn one thing up and you're turning something else up and you're changing the spatial relationships. It gets overwhelming at some point. And again, my computer couldn't handle running such a huge session. And I start composing more as well. I'm adding instruments and start recording extra bits and replacing bits.
Do you ever think about bringing in another mixer towards the end? Or are you so deep in it you feel you have to finish it?
Yeah, that's what happens. When I'm almost at the end, I'm thinking, "Why do I do this to myself? What am I doing?" I'm such a megalomaniac. There you go. And my best friends are mixing engineers. David Wrench and Marta Salogni [Tape Op #153]; I'm on a pub quiz team with those two. I see them every week, and we never talk about mixing. I should ask them for some tips. That would be good. David's done a bunch of [Dolby] Atmos mixes for me. In fact, he's done the Atmos mix for this piece, so the recommendation is to listen to the Atmos mix, because it'll be far superior to my mix. That's the only time I'll ever say to listen to an Atmos mix. I don't get Atmos. What the hell is that about?
Visuals seem important to you. Ballet is a visual medium. When I saw your Oakland show last summer, you had live visual artists. I know there's also a film of the Promises cover art out.
I love any art that I've come to fully know, deconstruct, and gravitate towards. Music is actually harder for me, because I always try to deconstruct it, whether I like it or not or have an emotional reaction to it. But there's a part of my noggin that's always thinking, "That's an interesting chord, and that's an amazing use of harmony there. That's a G-flat minor nine with a sharp 11," or whatever. Visual arts, film, food, and things that I can't technically grasp always appeal to me. Sometimes it's just transcendental because I can't fathom how something could be created with so much beauty. Julie Mehretu [Promises' cover artist] had a massive exhibition at the Whitney [Museum of American Art], which was slated to happen during the pandemic but no one could go. I bought the book from the exhibition. That book had been open on the page that had the painting Congress for months in my house. I would always look at it. I love this painting. When I finished writing Promises, that painting got in my head because it's so three-dimensional. I love her work. When it came to sorting the artwork out for the album, I thought, "I can ask her." She immediately replied, "One-hundred percent, yes," and within half an hour we had the rights to use the image. She's the absolute best to work with. And then I watched this film, The Wave, which is an image of a blue painting, a wave that you slowly pan in on. And I thought we should do the same thing for Promises and start with this single motif, which I always found myself gravitating towards. As you pull back from that motif, that's the film. It's a simple film. When we did the show at Hollywood Bowl, the Broad Gallery, who are the custodians of the painting, rehung the painting in the gallery whilst the show was going on. People could go and see the painting, which was so cool. For my live shows, Akiko [Nakayama] is a visual artist who paints in a tiny petri dish and has a camera above it. She improvises, and her understanding of material and fluid dynamics influences what she paints. She has such an understanding of the behavior before she does it. She's like a jazz musician; she goes on stage with a blank canvas and improvises. Her medium is light and fluid, so what better person to invite and to show her work? Other people have done it, but I thought, "This is the most obvious thing. If you're doing any sort of semi-improvised electronic music and you need a visual element, then get someone who does exactly the same thing, but in a different medium." She joins me on tour and flies from Japan every show. It's a lot of travel.
You seem to thrive on collaboration, and you seem open to learning. I thought it was interesting how excited you were to have Suzanne [Ciani] as a guest with you in the pit at last night's ballet performance. "Maybe I'll learn a few tricks," you said.
Most of my learning is very much from afar. People teach me without even knowing. I'll listen to a certain record and think, "That's amazing. How do they do that?" But I'll never find out. I try and assimilate or try and do something similar, and something else comes out of it. As a process, I quite enjoy that. Suzanne's been on my radar forever. I mean, the whole thing with Buchla and me is that I saw a photograph of one, and I thought, "That looks amazing." I hadn't even heard it. I was thinking, "I need to check that out." Then I heard Morton Subotnick [Tape Op #155] and Suzanne Ciani. I called up Buchla & Associates, and Don Buchla picked up the phone. It was the strangest conversation, because he was explaining what it does. Imagine, I'm calling up, I don't know anything, and this was before the internet was going off about this. Don asked, "What's your address?" I gave him my address. The conversation ended, and he sent me five modules in a case. About six months later, he called me up and asked, "What do you think?" I said, "I've made some of the best music ever on this thing." He says, "Do you want to buy it?" I replied, "Yeah, it's appropriate that maybe I buy it." And that started my relationship with that instrument. Now it's growing out of control. I don't like to get too many modules, because every time you add a single module it resets your entire instrument into an entirely new thing. You're not just adding one thing; you're upsetting the entire balance of the instrument. Suddenly that bunch of patching you do on one unit is opened up because you've got this other unit that now controls the voltage in some other way, which will modify that. The possibilities with that kind of system become exponential. I don't think the music I make now with the Buchla sounds more interesting than when I had just five units.
Have you used any of Buchla's digital instruments, like the 700?
I have the VST of it by Modosc Designs [ID700, Tape Op #146], which is phenomenal. So powerful. In fact, the snare drum from the ballet comes from that. I was trying to make it on the 700, but I wanted it to be reliable and reproducible. Rick Smith in Vancouver [Knobs Electronics] had a hardware 700 and I tried it. I love the sound of those things. I would love to get one. Actually, no. I wouldn't love to get one of those now. I'm trying not to have as much gear. I'm trying.
I have the ID700 on my iPad, and I love that synth and the iPad in general as an instrument with the 2D control surface.
I've got my old iPad that I've run Lemur on, because I made a controller for my Rhodes Chroma, which has made it so much more usable. I can fade between two presets on the Chroma, which is so sick. It's funny: we made it available to the Rhodes Chroma community board, and not a single person replied on the post. I was like, "You guys are missing out. We've made the most crazy app for this." So we took it down.
Your work is an interesting balance between very structured elements and improvisation. How do you see that balance, and what do you enjoy about each aspect?
I’m always looking for novelty in my process. I absolutely loved DJ'ing for a long time. Now, I like DJ'ing, but it's like a computer game. I've played that game loads and now I'm looking for the new thing. I'd like to write another piece for orchestra. Maybe something bigger. I don't know. I'm just looking for interesting things to explore. I take it so seriously and study so that I can do the best job. It’s interesting. I'm always looking for novelty. I think that's it; I get bored quite easily, maybe.
