It's interesting that you started making jumpstyle, which is such a full-on rave kind of music.

I never heard that kind of music at a rave except for a few one-of parties in assembly halls that were usually used for bingo, and I remember it was the same 50 songs on repeat because no one really knew how to dig for tracks. Let’s just say it wasn’t the hotbed for underground electronic music. The main place my friends and I found those tracks were on an online forum for modded scooters and then we would listen to them on those gamer Logitech speakers or in cars with huge subwoofers. In the beginning it was mainly old school Italian hardstyle, but later on when I got into FL Studio it was jumpstyle. Thinking about it now I still gravitate towards simple repetitive melodies and I like to keep my sounds as dry as possible. I usually amplify rather than hide the digital artifacts that arise in production, which might be because I have a fairly nostalgic relationship to the spectral artifacts that come from mp3 compression as the max youtube quality at the time was 480p. I still have a soft spot for what we in Danish call “Brian” in relation to music. An art school student might translate it to performative hypermasculinity. Growing up and seeing those Brian guys around me never articulate any feelings and then get deeply into a track was both powerful and sad. I’m not sure if it is a thing in other countries, but in Denmark at big festivals it’s common practice for groups of guys waiting to watch a concert to break into a hooligan choir version of “Seven Nation Army.” It doesn’t matter if they’re waiting to see Yung Lean or Chase and Status. There’s something about those kinds of melodies that I find interesting. They’re simplistic to the brink of stupid, they have a tinge of children’s song, they stick in my brain, and, as with most other products of group thinking, I find them a little bit creepy.

You work a lot with generative composition and digital synthesis. How do you incorporate those methodologies when making a more club-focused track?

I felt really curious about what it would mean for my music to completely embrace digital synthesis and not rely on any samples or outboard gear. It has made my process a lot more fluid as there is zero setup time, and it also makes it possible to switch between projects a lot faster. At times when I am feeling easily bored I will have several Ableton projects open at once and switch back and forth as much as I want. During the writing of this record I also mixed some Smerz records and an Ingrate record, and the switching between projects worked well to keep my natural tendency to be sometimes overly detail-oriented in check when I am at a point in the process that demands perspective and context, which is often what arrangement and mixing is all about for me.

The fact that working on all the projects can blend together like that and the process is so malleable also made me way less anxious about changing and deleting stuff, which led to more interesting results as I would take more ruthless decisions. Whenever I get too into a project I start being overly protective of the starting point, which just rarely leads to something interesting. I always prioritize iteration over initial ideas and I think eliminating the use of sampled audio and sticking to MIDI all the way until the final bounce just made that feel a lot easier. I guess you can do that with everything that lives on a computer, but whenever I work with sampled audio I just tend to work more slowly and carefully. My friend Ingrate called it being a vector > raster.

A lot of the music that I like is focused on timbre as composition, so looking back on it, I think I was just inching closer to that approach. I ended up having sound design playing a more crucial role in the composition. It made my process slower in the beginning, but I realized that I was having much more fun listening to my own take on a high hat than listening to a sample. I just wanted to focus on doing whatever made me feel excited and most of the time that is mostly about exploring synthesis. To me, limitations always make the process more interesting, and with my limitation of only using synthesized sounds, I ended up finding a process that requires equal parts research and composition. It made me think a lot about how texture and structure relate and at what point one becomes the other. Like if I talk about not using samples to create sounds, am I then allowed to use wavetable or granular synthesis? Deciding whether something is a sample or not is basically a matter of time scale. I just want the music to be interesting both on the time scale of texture and the time scale of structure.

Setting up the limitations, I also immediately started breaking them, but I think I still work well from that starting point. Because that is just what it is, a starting point. I never set out with a fully formed idea that I then create via my tools. I agree with Mark Fell’s critique (in Structure and Synthesis) of this romantic concept that the artist has a divine idea only to be translated into the material world be means of the tools, as that mode of operation makes the tools become almost insignificant and makes you ignore all the interesting discoveries that could arise in the process of using a tool. Another way to put it is that to be lucky might just be to pay attention to the stuff that wasn't supposed to happen along the way.

Getting into Max/MSP and programming has helped me to learn different approaches to making sound, but I think it mostly changed my perspective a bit in the sense that I just started noticing more clearly how a DAW is built and what kind of decisions have already been made for me. I think it’s kind of like how ideology operates, where it exerts the most power over you by making you not think about certain things. I made some tools and synths that I use once in a while, but I am highly focused on speed and reliability and I just haven’t spent enough time to make my instruments better than what is out there already.

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