If I mention blasting M.E.S.H.’s Scythians in the whip back in 2014, it’s going to sound like I’m having an old head moment, pining for a particular era of 2010s electronic music. Ten years is a span of time that makes it easy to feel as if both everything and nothing has changed. That EP was arguably one of the earliest records that refocused the PAN record label from the noise basement to somewhere in the corner of the archetypal “club”—both contested contexts that, at the time, existed as areas of influence and intrigue. Over the past decade, records from M.E.S.H.’s James Whipple have come sporadically but significantly. Across them all, the music has arrived as barometric to our cultural weather. Now operating under the name Hesaitix, which is a retooling of the title of M.E.S.H.’s last album, his new record Noctian Airgap allows us to peer through a gap—a partial view of oceanic possibility and gilded atmosphere, vanishing outward. The record sounds unmoored from the careful path that might have contained Whipple’s previous course. 

In the not so distant past, we might have spent time discoursing about electronic music’s utopian and dystopian subtext as it moved toward its machinic future: “This sounds futuristic.” In 2024, we’re often left mitigating our nostalgia for this version of the future. Noctian Airgap, Whipple’s self-proclaimed “nostalgia record,” is still incredibly sci-fi, collapsing a lot of this anxiety through its confidence to exist simply as extremely sick electronic music. The acid-washed tonality and rusted hues are still there. Rhythms still emerge from texture like asteroids denting the hull of a ship. Birdsong glides over cybernetic voices and player piano. The music still sounds like a Zoom H6 extracting dances from the cosmos. 

But, with Noctian Airgap, I hear Whipple playing the “New Game+,” returning to the story mode highly leveled with all upgrades intact, working in a cultural context of greater difficulty. Here, we have a year-end exchange, conversing in-situ between the “mindfulness software mines” of the West Coast and the frigid gaps of the Alps. Long live electronica.

On 2017’s Hesaitix, I heard a fidelity that was new to me—a hybrid of organic sound recorded in real time, and synthetic sounds that were beginning to become indistinguishable. This is on full display on Noctian Airgap. What’s the process for producing these sounds? 

Hesaitix: We all start out saddled with the neuroses of the previous generation right? There used to be this analog vs. digital thing, coming from the Gen X authenticity thing. We want dust. Then it’s the 2010s and we’re epicly being so HD, embracing artifice, talking about hyperreality in EU grant proposals. I however am a peaceful person and a reconciler of opposites. On a technical level though I think it started because I work quietly. When a sound doesn’t have a big impact volume-wise, you want to articulate it and make it substantial in other ways. I have to be convinced by a sound’s independent existence.

It makes sense that you work quietly. You can hear the dust in HD. With having to be convinced about a sound, how does it end up winning you over? 

It’s sort of like when an image has the suggestion that there’s more outside the frame. Some sounds just have that enigmatic aspect.

I was joking to friends that this hybrid sound was the M.E.S.H. special sauce, the “Hesaitic touch.” There’s some poetic text on your website: “A sound can be both formless and over-rendered, like a boneless but fleshy hand from a life drawing class. What agent could set these broken sounds in motion? A laugh behind an evil curtain. A drummer that’s cool and grotesque, a detuned siren. A brushfire under a full moon.” And you’re the grotesque drummer? 

You know when an artist is bad at making images, but the objects in the images look really developed and substantial? That’s how I used to feel about the sounds I made. Like they were stupid but felt real. And they had to be arranged with a new logic that suited them. It’s like the issues with generative AI video. There will be convincing objects and actors but as the frames progress they don’t relate to each other properly.

Maybe this is why so many people called your music “deconstructed”? Because you had to switch up the progression/logic to suit the sounds you're making? 

I guess so. I always read the word “deconstructed” in the Jordan Peterson helium balloon voice. But yeah, that era was so weirdly front-loaded with discourse, when people were often making very emotive, personal stuff.

I saw a tweet that said “a movie this good doesn’t exist yet” about the track “Santaorsae (Black Dolphin).” I felt similarly. To me, your music demonstrates the thrill of hallucinating sound, music as a kind of imagined cinema. I know you’ve scored films for Metahaven and other artists. What’s your relationship between composing and “the cinematic.” 

My early stuff had a lot of Zimmerism to it in a jokey way. Like this Nolan/Zimmer stark auteur “high production value” arch-formalist vibe. I love embracing my own middlebrowdom. I’m not super into film music though, or electronic music that sounds like licensing-bait. Maybe it’s more about the aestheticization of reality or one’s life. Aestheticization sounds too distant, it’s more just meaning-making. Being keyed into experience, brief synchronicities of sight and sound, really short moments of hyper-awareness rising out of an oceanic stupor. Reaching for Reality+.

I also had a Nolan/Zimmer infatuation, in a jokey way. But in daily life it can get pretty serious, the Zimmerization of like … your walk to work. “Time” from Inception playing over your morning coffee routine could be pretty heartbreaking, a dark Reality+. 

I guess what I mean though is not so much like the mundane becoming transcendent, but more like the transcendent becoming real, right now or soon, and it’s touchable and spacious. Writing this makes me want to slam my head against the wall for being pretentious, but I just love music man. I had to think a lot about thought because I had a stroke in 2020, which along with C*VID took me out of the niche electronic music trenches all this time. Thinking about actual unconsciousness and the relative unconsciousness of daily life. The voice on the first track says, “I’ve got a Walkman in my head / It can play any song / But I can’t think of any.” 

There’s touches of downbeat and trip hop on Noctian Airgap. The album’s eponymous track and “Wallet / Face” even reminded me of Clipse and The Neptunes. Do you think about genres when going into producing? Are they footnotes? Waypoints?

I’m kind of dumb about music in the sense that I don’t remember names of things or get into genealogies of sound enthusiastically. Sometimes I like the memory more even if it’s inaccurate. Like not taking pictures when you travel and just making weird notes to yourself to remember things by. There are some records that are “seminal” to me that I don’t fully remember. That said, it’s a nostalgia record in some sense. Some melange of IDM, illbient, shoegaze, Gescom, tech-step production techniques, Durutti, The Fragile, Finnish deep techno RealPlayer streams, this CD my brother burned for me when I was 17.

Morton Feldman has a quote: “Music is essentially built upon memory structures. We do not hear what we hear … only what we remember.” A memory of a burned teenage CD could become a more important compositional tool then say, x or y VST. 

Yea definitely. I teach sometimes now and even when thinking about arranging and mixing, I’m always returning to this idea of cognitive bandwidth. Like how many things can you be aware of at any given time, how do you shape the listening experience around that. On this record I really tried to let things play out more over time, instead of cramming in ideas. 

I know you’ve done a lot of visual design as well—those posters for the Janus party a decade plus ago. Like the album art of Noctian Airgap, the visuals of your records point at horizon lines, planes, gaps, thresholds, and gates but also weather—wind, acid rain.

I had this vision of moonless paleoöceans, gray sediments concealing dead-end fossils. I guess it’s true that there’s always this portal/threshold-crossing trope, something that’s always been there with electronic music and that I’ve always loved a lot.

Does the science-fiction background that has framed some of your records lend itself to these kinds of settings? For your record Piteous Gate I know you were influenced by Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. What’s the literature review for Noctian Airgap? 

There are some connections to a book I started writing in 2020, but it’s all loose. I really wanted to use more spoken word. I trained vocal models from all the vocal samples I’ve used in the past. So the male voice on “Volunteer” and “Wallet / Face” is actually the same guy from “Epithet” and “Captivated.” 

The spoken word moments on this record have varying degrees of legibility. You can piece together what they’re saying at times, other times they’re obscured in the sediment. Speaks to what you were saying earlier about “more being outside the frame.” Especially with spoken word, we also need that enigmatic aspect?

I was thinking about it like the way vocal samples were used in those old electronica records. You know, something from a nature documentary, a voicemail. But then engineering those moments. And I’m speaking the “sample” into the microphone based on my own text, which is repeated back by the vocal model with the same inflection. The voice in “Wallet / Face” is just reading back captions from the Instagram Explore page. I also made this mixing preset called “Audio Coming From Someone’s Phone In The Other Room” and I buried some things in the mix with that. It’s one of the saddest sounds in the world.

The sound design on “Black Line” really blurs whether we’re hearing a physical or synthesized string instrument. The Nina bonus track “Ultraguitar” is similar—a souped up guitar on loop. It’s honestly one of my favorite tracks of yours.

That’s funny because they are very different sources. On “Black Line” it’s from a few layered sample-based libraries, played on a keyboard. On “Ultraguitar” it’s fully synthesized, a pretty sketchy and discordant Karplus-Strong patch I made. I had to write the melody based on which notes wouldn’t feedback horribly. “Black Line” was originally made for an installation that was part of the Ojai Jail Arts Initiative in 2022. 

It feels like 2024 is a far cry away from the “neofuturist aesthetic” or “deconstructed club” or whatever else we were waxing on about during the reign of Scythians in the 2010s. There’s a quote on the record, “18,000 is young.” To me Noctian Airgap feels out of time, timeless. Do you feel free from some of those decade descriptors? Rather than arriving at the Piteous Gate, we’re flying free out of the Noctian Airgap?  

My early records definitely came from some kind of dissatisfaction, reacting to something, asserting individuality in some annoying way. Now I’m an epic mature guy doing mid-career stuff. There’s always something propositional about music like this because it’s unclear where it should exist. But maybe it’s important for artists to crystallize sensibilities or sensorium-worlds as future training data. This is not a cope. I definitely do feel free.