Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
On weekdays, I try most days to wake up fairly early - sometimes I get the urge to work on music at night and that often goes late. Those days are exceptions. I like slow mornings so I take my time through the usual routine.
Right after breakfast, I sit in my workspace. The first task I like to take on for the day is to dig for music. It's a pleasant way to start the day and very important for my work. If it’s a good day in terms of finding music, it really sets the tone for the remainder.
The middle of the day is ideal for work calls or any other tasks / chores I may have pending. After some grub, I sit down to make some music. My evenings begin with some exercise, I try to get in four days out of the week as often as I can. I had stopped for a bunch of years and lost control of my diet - it’s necessary to not let that happen.
Weekends are the exact opposite. I let the routine go for a toss. The weekends I have to tour, the gig directs everything. It takes time to travel and of course energy - not to mention many times it's just a couple hours between landing time and set time. I love the rush of being in a new city every weekend and extremely grateful to get to play wherever I do.
Whenever I come home, I like to relax as much as possible before the week starts again. The weekends I'm free - I don’t mind a night (or two) out on the town, exploring restaurants with my girlfriend, getting out to the cinema or the bowling alley.
These are of course my most efficient days, I have many days where I prefer staring at the wall instead. No regrets.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that is particularly dear to you, please?
I released an EP on Nie Wieder Schlafen in 2019, called Fragments. The title track was the first time I ever used my Korg Minilogue in something that was actually released. The intro is this creepy, mysterious sequence on which I played with the cutoff filter and detune. I really enjoyed also infusing elements from within the box - such as plugins of all sorts, loops and samples. I feel all of them bring something to the table, whether its in terms of character, workflow or even inspiration.
This was the track that made me realize I like this mixed palette of techniques in my track. It was also the first time I used a microphone to record some highly reverberated falsettos. It really created a nice end product and has determined the basis of my workflow even till today. Would love for you to check it out too.
I also have a live project with my good friend and artist Jay Pei - under the moniker ‘Parallel’. This is a totally different process as it is the result of jams in the studio. I have played in bands before, but this was the first time Ive had successful attempts with another human (and more machines) in the workspace. It’s also easy to work with him because I feel we have a great personal equation and its very easy for us to be honest with each other.
Honesty is a strong pillar in any kind of collective creative process. We dont have too much of our live set up at the moment, but we did write a track that is a result of the same workflow.
Beyond this, I really appreciate comic books. I'm a huge fan of DC comics and no specific works in particular - the attention to detail in artwork and story writing always pushes me to strive for detail and maintain a narrative (of sorts) in my music.
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
The type of music determines my listening preference. There are tracks from my childhood, some are guilty pleasures and some tracks best enjoyed in complete solitude. However, there are types of music I love listening to with my friends, or in a dark room full of strangers and even in an open air festival in some beautiful location. So it's pretty much based on context.
In terms of music creation - I usually prefer to make music by myself. I'm not super fast with my decision making and a lot of my composition consists of editing and mouse clicking. I find that for a collaboration, there would have to be a heavy level of comfort with the other person - and for the other person to be patient with me.
I have realized though that leaving the editing for later and just shooting out a jam in the moment is the best way to work. The creative results in my experience have sometimes not clicked, but when it does its fantastic because it's a little more human than usual.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
If we go into the history of dance culture, many special moments in it have come during times of great cultural stress. Whenever world events and circumstances seem to get more tense, it leads a certain segment of people to dance floors for various reasons. Self exploration, hedonism, the search for a community or simply to be themselves.
I have always been inspired by this and wherever I have gone in the world, I have met like minded people exactly because of this. I have felt empowered by this as well and I truly feel I always want to make music that might soundtrack a situation like this. I write all kinds of dance music and I always want to make people have fun and in a space where there is a common acceptance along with a level of open mindedness. That of course is the dream.
There are many roles for music in society. Sometimes it is the soundtrack of our life, or sometimes a snapshot of a simple memory. In many cases it's even a shout for help, or a recording that unites nations or communities. More than me, whoever listens to my music could answer this part of the question better. I just know I want to make people dance and have fun.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
I know it might be a cliched thing but it was nice to have a band like Linkin Park during puberty. It’s a weird time with raging hormones, body issues, growing pains (both mental and physical) and it was an interesting adjustment to a life post my parent’s separation. Even though I know now that Chester Beddington’s lyrics came from deeper and darker spaces, it helped through much of my strange states of mind and even inspired me to start writing lyrics.
Probably the first time I lost a friend, I discovered this song called ‘Benighted’ by Opeth and it just became a timestamp of that time. The lyrics have nothing to do with it really, its just the mood of that song. It encapsulates amazingly how I felt at the time and the fact that I had it on repeat back then only further helps me remember.
Third and final instance - When I recently fell in love I wrote a track called ‘Virtuous Pursuit’. It was nice to write this track in such a state of mind. There's a special feeling in the air and I'm sure even others who write music would agree that it can sometimes result in a decent piece of music.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
The whole concept of sound comes from physics.
Frequency is the measure of vibration and the sound it creates, waveforms are the different types of sounds that exist in actuality that can also be artificially generated. Literally every analog device we use is the result of electrical energy converting to sonic energy. Even when we use softwares to make music, its tone generators and workstations are made on the basis of binary language and coding. It's been interlinked since the beginning of time.
When it comes to music, it is full of arithmetic. Understanding concepts like time signatures, tempo, polyrhythms etc. are made possible because of math - which is also a science.
That being said, music may or may not be limited to science - because it is also a process of emotion or ‘feel’. The understanding and study of music reveals many secrets that can help in channeling this feel in better ways. All music is sound, so that brings another extremely valuable perspective to it since everything needs to be impactfully balanced in the frequency spectrum. Science is the true revealer of all secrets - and especially in this case.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel asthough writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t do in normal mundane tasks?
I believe that even in processes like creating music, there are fun tasks and not so fun tasks. I absolutely love programming, composing and sound design. I hate session preparation, file organization and things like putting fades on audio clips. It’s all necessary at the end of the day.
When I went to audio school and was learning how to record drums, it was the most fun to set up and mic everything. Once we had the recordings, it was just the worst to sit and comp (or edit) those drums and even more so when the drummer was not tight. Similarly in mundane tasks, there are fun aspects. I think it's amazing what a french press can do and it's fun to use it, but not always a pleasure to grind the coffee beans. Even heading out to buy this said coffee can be fun for some, and not for others.
It’s just that the intention of mundane tasks is different for me from that of creating my music. I feel that it has no correlation. In fact I am more detailed and concerned about my music - than I am with everyday chores (haha).
When I was living alone abroad, I’d forget to eat on time. This is because I love eating food, not cooking it. With music it's the exact opposite!
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
Music is organized noise and it comes from the same available waveforms in different permutations and combinations. I know that it's a simple cause-effect for organized tone and notation to hit our brains and cause a reaction that secretes hormones like serotonin and dopamine. These hormones are further linked to the emotions we are said to experience.
Every person's emotional composition is very different and this is based on their experiences of life. The sound secreting hormones is the noumenon, while our understanding of it (defining the emotion, interpreting it) makes it a phenomenon. Beyond this explanation, I can't really think of anything else really.
All I know is that the first type of music any human ever created was rhythms - and the natural reaction was to dance. Dance is often a celebratory action. This was before we had scientists, audiophiles and psychologists investigating the matter. To be frank, not much has changed in this regard.
