Written interview with Riccardo Papacci, 26.10.2022
You were half of Vex'd. Can I ask you what your listening was that period?
So that was the probably end of 2003 to 2007.. Broadly I was listening to comparable stuff that I do now, just narrower and shallower I suppose since I had found less music at that point. The main difference was I was focused on London pirate radio, especially in 2003 - 2004, when the garage sound had changed into something more like grime but hadn’t found a formula.
I had become jaded about organized UK music scenes, because jungle drum & bass had become very commercial & grotesque. That music had been my big love, it meant everything to me, and I was broken hearted about what it had become. That spurred kind of anti-genre, anti-scene approach we had with Vex’d.
But outside of UK club music, my home listening was centred around hiphop, proggy cosmic music, romantic pop, early library electronic music, some r&b, some shoegaze indie, some jazz etc.. pretty similar to know. I think being in Vex’d and playing with a more abrasive sound lead us to explore some heavier metal & experimental drone type stuff. We aspired to bring in more of a melodic spacey synth sound into the project, but we hadn’t really figured out how to incorporate it. It was easier to keep it dark and aggressive. When we started branching out of dance music influences, the vision kind of fell apart, as often happens. I was really tired of the dark industrial hole we’d fallen into, we both were really unenthusiastic about dubstep, and our music was just way too disconnected from the music that I most loved. I didn’t hear much of myself in the music we were making, so I couldn’t justify continuing on with it.
Can you tell me your impressions of the rave scene of the pre-dubstep period - that is, the final phase, in my opinion.
We missed rave proper but we caught part of drum & bass where it was still fairly new club music. We saw some of the earlier Metalheadz & Full Cycle nights. Not all of that dated so well and it definitely felt that the golden period had already passed, but that mid to late 90s jungle period still feels unparalleled now, socially. That such radical, ferocious experimental music felt like part of the high street in every town, and suburbia, so omni present, so integrated into normal life, genuinely inclusive, in retrospect that was what was amazing and seems so impossible now. Like boundary-pushing dance music is much less accessible now, very closed, small, snobby really. It definitely shaped my sense of club music, it started and grows out of jungle for me, not house or techno. Jungle was also the first major way that hip hop integrated into club music, in the UK at least. Otherwise, I don’t know what i can say about it, it’s very well documented now.
Are you nostalgic for that period?
No. Not unless I come across a youtube video or rave recording, but I think a lot of gen Z kids feel a similar nostalgia when they encounter that footage. I do those times feel grateful to have seen some of it first-hand.
Would you like to tell me a little bit instead about your impressions of the dubstep scene and that period?
We felt uncomfortable within it, if I’m being honest. We intended to be a non-genre project and to be quite anti-scene in that sense, that was really core to us starting and being excited about our project. We were also hugely inspired by that fleeting post-garage, pre-grime phase, that 2002 - 2004 period. When a large part of it broke off and settled into dubstep as a brand almost, we quickly became really uninspired by what that was and where it was heading, and we felt trapped in it. But we were truly appreciative of those artists and DJs being interested in our productions, and inviting us to DJ at their nights & radio shows etc, generally being encouraging to us. We wanted them to do well too. We also realised that we would be responsible for taking their embryonic scene off-course if we got too identified with it, because we were using influences that they were carefully avoiding. And we really didn’t want to fuck up their careful scene-building efforts. So there was tension in being it, it was awkward, and despite all the mutual respect & well-wishing we had, we just weren’t very happy becoming situated within it. It’s one of the reasons we split up. We never really identified with the slow rigid half-step dub-influenced music, neither of us really listened to dubstep for enjoyment or inspiration at the time, and not at all since. So my impressions are a bit, they’re kind of thorny, difficult. I became interested in the space around it when it started to fracture apart, when people were trying to find ways out of it and it became tied up with the hip-hop beat scene,, when Hyperdub artists like Ikonika started making off-kilter more freeform, melodic music, which is when I started Kuedo. That was a fun moment, but most of those artists were deliberately pointing themselves away from it at that point. It was a thing to escape from.
Then you made Severant, which is one of the most important and especially beautiful records of the last few years. Had you gotten tired of dubstep? The record is very reflective and less dance. Did something particular happen or were they simply pieces you had been carrying around inside you for a while?
Thank you. So yeah I had entirely disconnected everything to do with dubstep for a few years already.
Some personal events happened in the years previously, my daughter was born very ill, her mother and I broke up. Severant was in large part me processing that, hence the reflective tone. It was all very domestic in that sense.
In Severant there is one reference point that seems to be constant: Blade Runner. Can you explain why that film is so important to you?
Not sure, is it constant? For me it only comes up a couple of times in the record, like I was never intending it to be a big musical reference point, definitely not any kind of homage. I was trying to write a slow disco lento vibe track with “Flight Path”, somehow it ended up like the Bladerunner outro theme. But there’s a lot of breezy almost summery pop influences there too. I had the soundtrack on an itunes playlist, that was an influence but then so was the 80s plastic street soul, hypnagogic pop, 4AD indie and mixtape coke rap that was on that playlist. Like I’ve watched the original film once in the last 11 years, I think there’s a risk of overstating the film’s importance to me. I really disliked the sequel. What I think does hold true is that I’ve been drawn to the idea of very human-centric near-future stories, where the sparkly sci-fi is just distant background ambience but the human experience is really close to the camera. Alien and BladeRunner 1 are two of the only films that really do that well. They’re intimate, set in small spaces. I think that’s what made it feel thematically relevant my music, for me. It’s just old-style film noir really, I get a similar vibe kick from films like Chinatown or Manhunter. Bluesy.
In an interview you were talking about the future in a very interesting way. You were saying that we think of the future as something abstract and distant, but only at certain moments do things happen that make you realize that you are inside the future, you are already immersed in it. Can I ask you what were the events or discoveries for you that gave you this feeling in the last decade?
I think we’re also all now very aware of the future not being separate & distant from us. That weird post-millenium early 2000s “end of history” moment, where an unfamiliar future felt like something that would never plausibly happen, I think that’s passed. There are obvious technological aspects like artificial intelligence, but I think more so the threat of system collapse with the climate crisis, and even the pandemic. Everyone feels Black Mirror’d now. But futurism, as an impression, is not something I very often chase with my music. I have done on occasion, like the “Assertion…” EP, but it’s not an integral or consistent part of the music.
For your records there has also been talk of retrofuturism, what do you think about this concept?
Yeah, it’s not a beautiful word is it? I don’t have much positive association with it. I’ve described retroism as a cosplay that I don’t want to get be part of. But I think it’s really interesting how the idea of the future is always changing, and seeing the visions that people create around it. Whether that’s previous generations of artists, or those being created in the current time, or those visions of the future that will be created by future generations. It says so much about those people in their time and place, and there’s something about that straining to imagine that carries a yearning affect in the artwork. I think religious art often carries a similar feeling. I think that sense of yearning is caught up with our idea of the horizon.
So it would miss the point if people think I'm making retro music. But I do think it’s honest to carry the past with you. I don’t relate at all to futurists who think everything should be new and unheard. I find the retro position and the futurist position to be similarly empty basically, they’re too far-orientated away from now. I think it’s real, complex and knotty, how we always carry the visions of the past with us and how that affects how we see the now. That I fully embrace.
It seems to me that in your albums, and in Infinite Window this is evident to me, there is an attempt to make technology something human and sensitive. Can you tell me something about that?
Yes, I mean musically I think I’m only interested in technology in how it affects our human experience. Personally I find some computer science fields interesting, like human computer interaction, empathetic technologies. But musically I’m only really writing about human experience, if there’s a technological aspect to my music then I mostly want it to be a background ambience to that. Philosophically I’m not a technologist in any sense.
Are you interested in philosophy? In general, what do you usually read and what has influenced you the most from a literary point of view?
Tried many times to find a philosophy book that grabbed me but I never really succeeded. One book that really left a mark was “Godel, Escher Bach”, although I definitely I understood very little of it. It shaped how I thought about systems and the emergence of meaning. There’s a book called“Star Maker”, it’s pretty boring and self-serious but I found something haunting about its description of the universe.
In 2011, thanks to people like James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin, Arca and others, and especially thanks to a record like Severant, this genre called Hi-Tech Electronics - a term coined by Adam Harper - was born. Is it a genre that you were passionate about and felt a part of, or is it something that didn't involve you too directly? I mean: do you think that something new has happened in recent years from the point of view of electronic music, or do you think it's simply a revival of years gone by and that maybe the last big revolution was really dubstep?
I’ve never heard that term before. I mean I think a lot of my music could be generically described as contemporary electronica or something broad like that. That seems to be what he’s describing? I think probably only that journalist could tell you. I think electronica is quite a functional term for describing loosely formulated electronic music that sits adjacent to club music. I’m not really closely following electronica or club music in that “what’s next” neophyte way anymore, I think part of starting Kuedo was to get away from that. There comes a point in your timeline as an artist that you need to hone in on what you have already taken in and your own direction, rather than be chasing emerging forms. UK drill doesn't fit into the typical understanding of electronic or dance music but in terms of UK music history, it feels like musically it synthesised and advanced so much of what dubstep, grime and jungle were separately trying to do, on a music production level, the rhythm and shapes of it. Different countries still have their own local club music developments. Electronic music as a broad wide thing, I don’t know, I’m not sure it ever really created its own advances, it’s too broad & diffuse of an idea perhaps. Maybe it always pulled from club music or pop or hip hop to move forward anywhere. I think genres need to be somewhat narrow and tight in their cultural definition of themselves to evolve. And I think a lot of the perceived musical developments in electronic music really came from people quickly exploring newly affordable technology products, and the racing into the uncharted territories they afforded. That’s not going to be a linear or even reliable process of evolution, it's more like explosions. And streaming collapsed everything into a single point where it’s hard to identify the social dynamics that created musical evolutions. Venture platform capitalism and cost of living has stripped away all the cultural propagation networks that drove music culture forward - club spaces, record stores, magazines, radio. So yeah sitting at home listening to the entire archive curated by Spotify, that’s having some effects on cultural production.
Can I ask you what you like musically about the last few years?
I mean in terms of new music, that jungle revival was fun, especially for younger kids applying giving a loose shoegaze emo impressionistic haze to it, making it as floaty headphone music rather than functional, stiff dj music. UK and Brooklyn drill was kind of spectacular as a production evolution. There’s been some really good new ambient artists with a collage approach, that kind of ambient Burial style. I really liked Sky H1’s album. I mean it seems like the artsy side of electronic music got a bit stuck didn’t it. In terms of my own listening, Ive been mostly listening to more traditional music this year, like indie bands, singer-songwriter music, pianomusic this year. I’m so more much interested in harmony and melody than production at the moment. I can imagine the pandemic had that effect quite widely. Like anyone in the streaming music era, have random rabbit holes that I go into for a short period, like a quick dive intro stoner rock, academic sound art, or whatever. Ryuichi Sakamoto, HTRK, and Frank Ocean are artists I’ve been returning to over and over in the last couple years.
I know you really like the R&B of The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, and Solange. How do you position yourself with mainstream music? Would you like to do something more pop? For example, last year I really liked Jam City's record, Pillowland, which at the end of the day is a pop record in its own right, although he has a background in some ways similar to yours.
I guess I don’t really write music from a self-aware idea of where I should positioned on the musical map. Perhaps if I did I might make more definite efforts to move to a particular place? I don't know, I have been thinking about this recently, since I’ve been pretty surprised by the genres that have been used to describe the last album, but then that’s been the case for previous albums too. I think partly, my output doesn’t closely match the inputs, and perhaps it shouldn’t do, or it would be all over the place. If I were to deliberately close that gap between what I’m most inspired by musically and my actual production output, then yes there probably would be more vocal songs, recorded instruments. But also people’s expectations also guide how they process something, and so the pop inputs that are already there are instead misunderstood as IDM references or something. That can be, a little frustrating. After Infinite Window I am starting to feel like maybe I should communicate the inputs more deliberately.
I know that in addition to making music you also work with brands like Huawei. Do you do this just for "work" or is it something that also gives you input artistically? I mean, seeing certain Huawei commercials with super tech products and your music kind of give me that future feeling I was talking about just above.
Yes, it’s day job work. Commercial design obviously has creatively rewarding aspects, and I enjoy the technical challenges that often come along with sound design work, like when there’s virtual reality or game technology involved. Aesthetically there can be some really nice moments like you mention, especially when working with talented visual designers who are pushing their tools. But no one reasonably expects brand-driven work to create the same depth of experience as standalone music or artwork. Everyone accepts that it’s advertising.
Would you like to give your thoughts on the current political issue? I would like your take on the contemporary. I know it's a silly question: where do you think the world is going?
I mean does anyone have an upbeat answer to that? I guess I was thinking about that when working with the artists on the Infinite Window cover. Even in the most post-human scenario, most likely there’ll still be something growing, some continuation of the story.
Written interview in late June 2022, with Lodown magazine.
i very nearly released this as an EP at the end of 2018 a couple years after Slow Knife. The drum parts were mostly sketched out around then. I decided I wanted to push it into a full album though, but I needed a block of time to get into that, and just couldn't find that in 2019, too much going on with other work. 2020 was fucked, pandemic with no childcare, day job, I didn't touch it. I got a stretch to work on it in spring summer 2021 and finished it end of Autumn. It takes ages to release things sometimes.
I did deliberately concentrate on client audio & music work for a few years after Slow Knife. Had a kid coming, I wanted to be around to parent rather than tour, & I felt I needed a change of inputs and process. Mostly advertising and brand work, trade shows, installations, and sometimes interesting technical challenges, like virtual reality or public installation projects. I worked a technical audio position for a while. So yes that was a decision to focus elsewhere than artist releases. But it wasn't a permanent one. And during that time I did some scoring commissions that were directly related to my artist project, like some films for the dutch directors Metahaven, gallery installations and a couple of films with Flying Lotus, including that Blade Runner anime. Those helped keep me connected to the Kuedo project creatively, and those projects help develop my own writing process too. I reconnected with what I loved about music too, became less concerned with whatever new hype wave was passing in and out, and much more keyed into what music I truly resonate with, from any era. In doing that found myself falling in love with music again honestly. Of course, there's a conversation you can have about whether the eternal archive of streaming music is a net good for music culture, but that's another topic.
**\02. Speaking of Fly Lo: was that collaboration the reason for you to join the Brainfeeder family and leave Plant Mu after quite some time?***
Yeah, after working with him I sent Lotus some new tracks and asked if he'd be interested in putting them out on Brainfeeder. He was considerate about whether Planet Mu were comfortable with us having that discussion. For me, I had literally not released a full record with any label other than Planet Mu since 2004. It was a loyalty that no one was really asking of me ha. I'll respect & be thankful to Mu forever. They have a hardcore, true, non-commercial spirit of music, which is very rare now, and there's a long friendship & trust there. At the same, you gain new perspectives when you experience other modes of working, other characters, other group energies. It had been very organic and fun working with Steve (FlyLo) on scoring music together, so I was happy to spend time with the label. American culture is so different from UK culture, we're so gloomy and sceptical in comparison ha. That's what gives rise to UK music culture, which I identify very much with, but it's enjoyable working with a sunny California crew.
**\03. As I understood it, some of the tracks on your new album are based on sketches that stretch back almost ten years. What was the reason for you to re-visit these recordings… did you somehow feel that they demand a second chance, so to speak? And how challenging was the task to fill them with new life since your head right now probably is in a very different place than ten years ago?***
Perhaps a large part of it was, I just didn't really know how to finish at that time of writing. Often I think it was that my music composition skills were quite rudimentary like I hadn't learned any theory during my first album, I had just been using instinct. So I could get stuck quite easily, and often not see pathways out of musical problems, or lines towards what I was hearing in my head. It's like not having many tools to work with. I'd both taught myself and practised more every year since, and it became much more do-able to pick up and finish up these outlines that I'd quickly sketched out years before. Its strange, how we think music ages quickly. Production styles can age quickly - the effects and textures - but melodic ideas age on a totally different timeline. In both cases it's often non-linear, like some things can sound quickly a couple years later, but then sound really compelling a couple years further down the line, maybe even better than when you first encountered it. The context stays in flux, and some things pop out at not the right time. They might make more sense later. If an idea is decent, if it has life in it and feels somewhat truth-y, then it is going to have some staying power. When I started music production, I used to think that only new music had the most value. In retrospect, there wasn't any real wisdom in that take. Being a neophyte, its kind of a sugar rush, quick but short-lived rush. Yeah new music has a certain kicking power to it, but there's no way of knowing how lasting and real something is until it's lived in and aged in the world. This is the kind of thing you say as you get older ha. It's just a perspective that becomes more available as you stack up years. There's benefits to time passing, long views, the ageing process brings certain gifts you know. I mean it's also absolutely brutal too obviously.
Probably other things too were pushing me away from working on them, perhaps at the time I felt that a synth-heavy sound was getting super prevalent. In retrospect, that shouldn't be much of a factor, like your own relationship & excitement with music should matter first. But it's weird how external doubts can slip into your head. After a few years I looked back and was like, I am feeling these tracks more than ever, not finishing them just feels wrong. For perspective though, we're talking mostly like minute long sketches, or live synth jam recordings. The two beat tracks were totally re-produced from scratch, I just carried over the melodic lead and basic chords, they were just starting points. Not much baggage to carry.
it was a strange experience working with a previous version of me, like hearing younger me record live keyboard parts, and understanding & respecting what I was trying to do, and extending that path. It was a collaboration dynamic, but over time, and with a different version of yourself. It did feel a bit like jumping back and forth in time loops. It slowed the process down a bit, particularly with reviving old Ableton sessions. But creatively it was positive, on a personal level it was positive too. I made some peace with that earlier version of myself, someone who just couldn't find the confidence to finish what they were working on at that time.
I don't want to overstate that aspect though. Most of the album is from the last few years. A had a little beat writing rush in 2018 and then most of it was written & produced in 2021.
**\04. I know this kinda sucks, but I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the album title? What is it referring to? Does it summarize that we’re all facing an infinite, bleak future now that we fucked up the planet for good?***
I mean I wouldn't want to put a fine point on it.. I would like all the titles to be suggestive without being definitive, it takes the fun out of listening to be instructed on exactly how it should be received. But... yeah the words are obviously about time, windows of time ha. I mean that feels pretty applicable to the context you're describing. I'm not trying to only point to something bleak though. Like we could be facing an amazing future, it's just we keep being quite useless at coordinating and making sense of things. It's a very tense & cosmic point to be, sensing scales tip out of balance, like we're all being forced to think about planetary time scales, vast future time scales being determined within this tiny scale of our lifetime. I'm also very interested in the sensation of something being large scale and small intimate scale simultaneously. By that I just mean, I often feel alright about what I've made if it presents as something big and spacey, but is more truthfully about something small and personal, to me at least. So maybe it appears externally like grandiose sci-fi in its production style, but the actual emotional internal content is sourced from domestic life, personal interactions & relationships. I say that also because if something is to be emotionally affecting in a way that feels truthful, then it has to have real-life put into it, you just can't avoid that. I don't know, when I think of the title, things unfold in different directions, and another one of those things is generations, as in kids. I have kids, that shapes all of my thoughts. It's very cosmic seeing the past reborn in the present and in the future, as humans. And this notion of time feeding back on itself, it was baked into the recording process too.
**\05. The general vibe of the album is fairly dystopian. Would you say that the album has a kind of narrative superstructure though?***
Hm I don't know if I agree about dystopian, I'm not sure that feels fully accurate. It starts pretty happy, and ends very happy. There's big rays of warmth & playfulness that pass over it, peaceful sections. One song is inspired by taking my kid to primary school for the first time, another about falling in love at first sight. So there's definitely pro-topian, optimistic moments in there. But yeah there's shadowy stretches, and parts where it feels like the building is on fire and collapsing. And yeah I did focus pretty hard on creating a narrative sequence. I didn't care for some conceptual storyline conceit, I tried that on Slow Knife and I don't feel it worked out as I wanted. What I did want was a musically led narrative that worked as an end-to-end piece, just the simple idea of an album that was meant to be listened to all the way through. I wanted to state a belief in the complete album as a form. I'm not saying it succeeded but wanted to try for it. I wanted to make something that felt like it had hallways and courtyards to move through. All the sequencing decisions and editing were around that end-to-end paradigm.
I also made more of an attempt to carry that through with the visual aesthetic than on previous releases. The artists were all very supportive & positive while we worked on that. Monja & Vincent threw a bunch of ideas at it until we found the right image, and Raf the designer pulled the parts together beautifully at the end. I'm very lucky to have worked with such great people.
**\06. I was wondering, if you’re preferring to compose on analog or digital synths? And please tell me a bit about your gear park in general…***
Honestly I've almost only ever worked on digital plugins. My gear is just a laptop with a bunch of midi keyboards and drum pads plugged in There's a DX7 and Juno 60 that I had for like a few months only on the last track of the album, everything else is digital. If I have space then I like to have a handful of keyboards plugged in so I can play multiple parts and sounds at the same time. I can't play quite like Vangelis obviously but that's the prefered studio mode for me in so far as having different sounds on a few keyboards within reach, on a smaller scale. I try to stay familiar and loyal with digital synths, develop a long relationship with them like you might with hardware. This project was done in Ableton but I don't advocate for that over any other DAW. I do all my own mixing but that's a budget constraint, I'd like for someone else to handle it, to have more perspectives involved. I often use specific tools like Reaper for techy sound design work but they didn't come into play here. I value being in real time and physical where possible, recording parts in real time, retaining some fleshy physicality in the process. Increasingly, I want my music to feel like recordings, rather than entirely a code sequence, or CGI render. I don't work with vocalists often, so that human recorded performance aspect is instead carried by recording keyboard solos.
Track by track comments, given to the press agent at Brainfeeder, 5.2022:
Sliding Through Our Fingers
“The music gives me a feeling of how time slides past us, how we try to hold it. I thought of sand sliding through open fingers. And how time is such a blurry moving stream, like we dream of our future lives, that open horizon turns into memories, how the current time keeps recalling the past to us. How we just sail through time, no matter how we feel about that. ”
Harlequin Hallway
“Series of tracks I sketched out in 2018ish but didnt know what to do with. I tried them as a trio and they fell into place, took on a proggy aspect, feels like a rotating triangle to me, or three connected rooms. ”
Time Glide
“Initially a short sketch from 2012. I didn't know how to finish it at the time, my music theory didn't go much further than what a minor scale was. Tried again in 2018, I could understand the chord progressions now and make an arrangement. Came back in 2021 with a bit of counterpoint knowledge and could quickly finish it up. It reminds me of taking my child to their first day of primary school, what a trip that was for us both, optimism and anxiety, time folding into a circle. ”
Aeolian Bodies
“Was initially a small loop from 2013, similar story to Time Glide. Slightly inhuman, puzzling timing on the main pattern. Feels like a place with long shadows to me, I think of surreal Richard Bofill type architecture, or sandy landscapes, some place you might wake from. I came back to it in 2021 and was quickly able to compose into a finished song”
Shadow Dance
“I thought of twilight, like a final dance, something closing”
Encounter(vanish)
“short but feels like more than an interlude to me, its when i added this that album started to pull together as a whole”
Infinite Window
“I thought of an infinity inside us, like falling into ourselves, or falling into each other, somehow”
Paradise Water
“Written in of those magic sessions that comes together quickly in almost one take. I thought of clear water running over rocks or ceramics”
Skybleed Magic
“This was seeded from a couple of tracks I made for a score, a film I worked on with Flying Lotus. I rewrote it for the album. It made me think of self destructive tendencies”
Cracked Face Panel
“The ageing process is brutal, and a trip. Also, an image of a skeleton in a life support suit on a very hot planet.”
Never / Para Sempre
“The last section reminds me of a personal tragedy I went through that seemed to end on a positive note, although real stories are never really concluded. It makes me think of how things can become very terrible but on some level be okay too”
A transcript of a phone interview for the Czech magazine Seznam Zprávy in September 2022. Google translated the answers back to English, probably reads weird in places. Interview by Jonas Zboril.
"What will the world look like after all this." That's a sentence I found on your blog where you write about the inspirations for the new record Infinite Window . Is this an album about a dark future?
I guess I'm not really writing about the future. I am seriously interested in how we are now. Of course, the future somehow gets involved in this, as well as earlier ideas about the future.
My work is often described as science fiction. Actually, the comparison doesn't fit me anymore. Sure, I enjoy making dystopian, dark music, but I always feel like it's missing something. The albums Severant and Slow Knife were simply about what it's like to be alive, in relationships. Maybe it gets lost on those records because they don't have lyrics. Lyrics can make the human aspects of music visible. My music, on the other hand, can seem more abstract.
When I compose music, I think about personal things. In order for my music to resonate with the listener, I have to put myself into it, I have to put my life, a lot of personal experiences, memories and relationships into it. I think it's relationships and how we feel about others that I try to capture in my music.
So Infinite Window is about relationships? About everyday things?
No it is not. There are a few tracks where I think about my relationship with my partner, with my children and so on. Otherwise, everyday life is not the central theme of the new record. It's about the feeling of being at some sort of existential tipping point. Not just for us, but for the entire planet. That's what Infinite Window is about.
Do you remember when that tipping point occurred? I grew up in the nineties. Everyone told me, “You live in a wonderful world.” I wonder when that changed. The great historical turning point was perhaps September 11. But maybe that anxiety came simply the moment we became parents?
Yes, it could be that. This will definitely shift your perspective. But it's obviously something bigger too. We all feel the change. It's incredibly complicated. Many catastrophic vectors are concurring in the present, and all are extremely complex. Moreover, they somehow interact with each other.
I can't evaluate it clearly. But I think pop culture in general hit that tipping point in the last decade. The naivety of the zero years was gone. At least from today's perspective, the 2000s seem rather naive.
September 11th was certainly a pivotal moment. It disrupted our sense of security that we felt in the West. For a long time we thought we would be fine geopolitically. Security was not a topic we had to think about until then.
I think what's very interesting about this time after the millennium is how we've lost interest in the future. It can be seen in Hollywood productions as well as in music. Retro ruled.
But to get back to your question. I think the tipping point came in the 1990s. And now it seems that we are all thinking about the uncertain future.
What gives you hope? Is music a good tool to stay sane?
Of course. In this respect, I mainly use music as a listener. It gives me hope when I hear something beautiful. Music helped me a lot during the pandemic, for example. It kept me mentally and emotionally healthy. Which makes me think that maybe I should be more concerned with how my music makes people feel.
I can tell you what I experience when I listen to your music. I feel safe. When I hear your songs, I see a world that isn't exactly pretty, but at the same time I feel like I'm ready for it.
The cover of your new record Infinite Window may feature a wasteland, but we're looking at it from the inside. Something human remained. Likewise, your music remains emotional. That means someone is always watching. Someone still cares in the world.
I just saw that cover live for the first time. The vinyls arrived ten minutes ago.
What you say is very encouraging. I never wanted to portray the future or the present in a negative light. My music tends to have dark and sometimes aggressive moments, but it's not meant to be a statement about the state of the world.
I imagine a world in which a few people survived. If such a world underwent a radical change, but some people remained on it, our emotions would also be preserved. The positive experiences we have with each other. And if they don't behave? So we used to have them and that was beautiful.
Well, if the scenario of the future is post-humanistic and the world has been taken over by artificial life... then it is also a kind of life, and there is something comforting about it. After our story comes another story. Which we could in some way relate to.
In other words, beauty remains in each of those possible future scenarios.
And then there is actually one more option. That we can do it. That disaster won't come, that we'll more or less continue unscathed. Maybe it's still possible? I don't know.
As for the cover - originally there were people. That landscape is human. I wanted it to resemble a body. And then there are the columns. They suggest some human activity.
You mentioned artificial intelligence. I feel like this is a growing topic. After all, the Lunchmeat festival, at which you will perform on Thursday, also deals with it.
I definitely think about artificial intelligence often. But I never experimented with it much, it didn't seem productive. It's interesting when some concept of the future starts to materialize in the everyday world. This is because it often loses its potential for radical change. I think that happened with artificial intelligence as well.
In 2015, I released a record about artificial intelligence & cybernetics. I had high expectations then. Now artificial intelligence is really coming, and it doesn't seem nearly as exciting as I imagined years ago.
And what were your expectations? How did she disappoint you?
I think it is simply a tool for corporate use. That's trite. This does not mean that artificial intelligence therefore has no potential to create culture. It's still possible that AI will create something new, unknown, something we haven't thought of. Just the current manifestation through market forces, that's a bit boring.
And besides: art created by artificial intelligence hasn't yet evoked anything positive in me.
I feel that AI is a huge technological success, but the cultural output is not much yet. Not that artificial intelligence has to justify itself with art. There will definitely be people who will develop a deep relationship with artificial intelligence and will be able to create great art together. For now, it's more like flirting.
I think memes are a good way to spread the popularity of AI, increasing the potential for those deep relationships you talk about. I'm amused that the first thing AI people create are jokes.
But I also read about a writer who writes novels somewhat to order. She recently started working with an artificial intelligence that gives her plot advice and writes novels with her.
Yes, working with technologists is sometimes full of terribly menial tasks, slow, antsy work. Of course, AI can simply help humans by relieving them of such tasks.
But I'm still wondering why AI art doesn't do anything for me. It's not the product per se. The knowledge that there are no human hours of work behind it, that they did not put much of themselves into the crafting of it, probably prevents me from experiencing much from it.
I remember seeing dog images from Google Deep Dream. I felt like AI came alive. People still think that. The last time it occurred to the developers of Google, remember ?
I remember. I think artificial intelligence will eventually make us appreciate the human. I didn't realise until seeing AI art how much I cared that someone worked hard on the art, put themselves into it. I only found that out thanks to AI. I can imagine that people will train the AI so well that it becomes an image of their identity. I would really enjoy having a tool that knows me well enough to help me express myself better. But we're not that far yet.
There is no AI personhood yet, it's all atomized tools, but it does those separate tasks insanely well. Sometimes you can be overcome with existential anxiety when you see that artificial intelligence can do something perfectly that we thought only we could do. In such moments, the question arises: What does it actually mean to be human? I've always been very interested in that.
I've been thinking about this ever since I saw the Google Deep Dream images you talked about. They were very simple from today's point of view. I thought to myself anyway, “This is how dreams work!” Artificial intelligence has told us something about how we dream.
I didn't realize that your albums are actually quite similar. Somehow they sound inhuman, but that's why they say a lot about what it is to be human.
Yeah. The first album Severant is actually a breakup album. It was about what it's like to have a child while separating from its other parent. She was about the disappointment of not having the family you wanted. And there was also escapism present, running to sci-fi movies
Slow Knife was a lot about depression. About getting out of difficult psychological zones. It was still about relationships, because of course these conditions affect relationships. Again, science fiction and fantasy were also present.
I think Infinite Window is about that intense presence, that turning point when we wonder how much longer we'll be here as humanity. But it is also about the fantastic images that come to mind when we say: the distant future.
I always want my records to have something that is true and at the same time something that is pure fantasy. I like that combination. When it just feels like a figment of the imagination, it just lacks chemistry.
I think it works. If it doesn't work, I don't listen to your music.
Interview for DJ Mag, with George Bass, 9.2022.
\1. Where have you been since Slow Knife? Aside from running the Knives label, there wasn’t much Kuedo output from 2016 until your resurfacing with The Sprawl soundtrack two years ago.
Following Slow Knife I focused on working on things for other people, commissioned sound design & music for production companies than my own music, particularly sound design. I was employed as a virtual reality sound designer for a while. Had a kid coming, I wanted to be around to parent rather than tour. But inevitably I started writing my own music again. There are also more time constraints, like some people can stay productive in the evenings when they have very young kids, honestly I'm just awe of them, that's a mystery to me. Then the pandemic took out any remaining spare time, since all kindergartens closed. So yeah things slowed. I nearly released this in 2018 or 2019 as an EP. But I committed to turn it into an album for Brainfeeder instead, and then the pandemic hit ha.
Those artist commissions also helped me stay connected to the Kuedo project creatively, and helped evolve my writing process too. After some time away from releases, I reconnected with what I loved about music itself and how the project relates to that.
\2. Your brand of electronica seems very cinematic, and shaped by movie scores. Were you a soundtrack collector as a kid, and did you ever think you might one day be a filmmaker instead of a musician?
Film directors, gallery artists, composers, performing musicians, that all felt out of bounds of reality. I think the only type of creative output that felt possible to me were hobbies like making a few tunes on the computer, writing some short sci-fi stories, or maybe doing some sci-fi visual stuff. Discovering arty world cinema was a huge coming-of-age moment for me as a teenager, but I didn't dare to think of myself as becoming involved with it. At that same time, I discovered jungle drum & bass and that totally hijacked any other idea of creative output. I just lived and died for it, I probably over-depended on it for identity. I saw people who seemed relatable being music producers and DJs, that became the singular model I had for expressing creativity I guess. For those years I probably saw soundtracks more as something to sample.
The first tunes I released were in that UK dance vein, grime garage jungle, and very quickly I felt the boundaries around that style of production. As in, hard beats and basslines with a few spooky sounds on top ha. That will always be incredibly gratifying to me but I quite sharply realized that I couldn't express so much within that. I became increasingly in awe of and intrigued by more visually and emotionally evocative records, whether that was Vangelis or Cocteau Twins. There were a lot of internal barriers in the way, both in terms of teaching myself how music worked and just daring to think of myself as composing rather than producing beats. There's a process of lifting self-limiting beliefs through practice, I guess, in literally any field. If I had gone down the path of visual illustration or fiction, I know I would've been trying to build the same worlds & experiences that I make with my music. I always wanted to build certain atmospheres and engage certain emotions. I think it's probably true that music production has a similarity to visual design, and that music composition has a similarity to storytelling.
\3. Severant was released in 2011 to very high praise, with listeners commenting on the musical nods to Giorgio Moroder’s Scarface theme, Wendy Carlos’ Tron cues, and the Blade Runner soundtrack. In the decade since then, there’s been an immense ‘80s musical revival with shows like Stranger Things and labels like Burning Witch making use of analogue synthscapes. Do you feel like you’re part of this movement – or that you may have accidentally triggered it?
I can't say I do, but it probably is true that all slightly pushed me away from using upfront synth sounds for a while, like I think that's part of the palette shift on the "..Surround Presence" EP. I had to get over that, I always deeply loved using fairly raw synthetic sounds and it's more true, exciting and productive to continue exploring and playing with those materials, rather than force myself to use different materials just because they've become more commonplace.
I know those things appear as deliberate references but I think it's more like, I get really affected by an aspect of what someone makes, and then try to figure out why it affected me so and how to incorporate that into what I do. Sometimes that process of study & ingestion can leave pretty obvious traces of the stimulus, very very much like how machine learning output sometimes reveals the training set. I just don't see the point in disguising it, I'm happy for traces to be left in there. You could maybe put it this way, I really embrace the idea that all creative works, past and present, are in constant intergenerational conversation with each other - two way, not just one way - I think that's beautiful and in that sense I'm happy to wear the inputs on my sleeve. I'm not so hyped by the idea of artists compiling references to their favourite media products within their work.. that feels too Ready Player One to me,. I know it might seem subtle but it's always felt core to me, as to whether you going to go in circles around the past, or whether you're going to move forward with it.
\4. How did you come to be involved with Flying Lotus on the score to Blade Runner 2022 Blackout? Was it a dream come true, or were you wary of following in the footsteps of Vangelis? I noticed you seemed a little hesitant to describe your music as “Blade Runner set to beats” when being introduced at the Boiler Room ten years ago.
It was exciting and intense since we only had a week to turn around the score. There wasn't any time to think it was just to hit the studio and start recording ideas. He emailed me out of the blue. I'm happy to follow in a few of the footsteps of artists I love and am stylistically indebted too. But yeah describing something as a derivative of something else, it just stops you from really seeing anything else in it. It reduces and contains the experience you might have had from it or the information you would otherwise have found in it.
\5. You say you abandoned an immediate sequel to Severant and instead made Slow Knife, which was more fluid and incorporated your sound design work. The new LP features some amazing drum programming – was it a deliberate return to something more rhythmic? Were you aiming for a sound that would fill floors after lockdown?
Shadow Dance came from a sketch in 2013 I think, but the drums were so weakly worked out that I had to strip them totally out and build a new drum track. That probably inspired me as I sketched out the first two sections of Harlequin Hallway around the same month in 2018. With that in place, the release was going to have a strong beat orientation, so it needed more complimentary drums to complete it . In 2020 I roughed out beat sketches for the Infinite Window title track and that last Harlequin section. So yeah that one post Severant beat sketch sparked off a chain of beat tracks. It's that thing when something starts taking its own shape, you let it be what it wants to be - so long as you like where it's going. Most often when I write music for myself now it tends to be more beatless or song-like. But yeah I still get excited programming drums, and my sense of rhythm is very shaped by jungle and trap. That steady 4/4 house pulse never really took hold in me.
\6. You’ve said that around a third of the album came from rough sketches. When did you realise you were working towards a cohesive whole? Was there a common theme that suddenly sprang to mind while you were writing?
Around 2018 I was marking which unfinished tracks to finish and hit enough for a decent EP with a cohesive feel. Around late 2019-2020 I committed to writing more to turn it into an LP. I could clearly feel out the direction it wanted to go in, and whenever I tried to think of it in visual metaphors, something like odd architectural shapes in a sun-blasted landscape came to mind. Maybe something like that video game Journey. Some obvious eco-anxiety fuelling that but the textures already felt somehow sun-baked and weather-beaten. I leaned into that when I was producing and mixing it, I wanted it to feel more saturated and differentiated from previous releases in that way. Whereas with Slow Knife I was going for a glassy, cold, airy sound, here I aimed at a more rough, hot, sand-stone texture.
\7. You've maintained your music isn’t nostalgic, which is perhaps evidenced by the popularity of contemporary ‘80s-set shows like Cobra Kai with younger audiences who didn’t experience the era the first time around. Do you still feel that the smart cities and technological utopias we were promised in Cold War sci-fi will come to pass, or do you fear our future will be more like the scorched landscape depicted on the cover of Infinite Window?
I think I'm only romantic about the act of concept art itself, just departing from the current moment of normality and visioning far-flung extensions or alternatives to it. Any given time or place has people doing that. I'm not sure I've ever felt this melancholy of yesteryears futures not coming to fruition, though like anyone I feel curiosity and romance about some of the imaginative zones people opened up in different periods of time, and the specific sense of wonder they had. Getting caught up in retro cosplay though, I've only ever seen that a trap which I don't want to get baited into. I also don't want to be weirdly disdainful of past styles either. Like I love simple synth sounds, echo trails and warbly tape effects separately and in combination for their own merit, not because they remind me of 80s imagery. But im not going to avoid them in case they remind someone else of 80s vhs movies. And it is also fun and interesting to acknowledge and play with the hauntological ghosts that accumulate and lurk in us, how they are triggered by production styles. That is an important layer, I'm just wary of it. Like I'm very wary of lukewarm waters of the overly familiar, the done to death, the overly studied genre. I don't know. Really it just comes down to: do what feels exciting for you now and is genuinely worth sharing with people in the current time now.
About utopias, I mean every utopian vision contains a dystopia. I think you have to use utopias as an imaginative tool to break out of our ideas of normal, which are often oppressive and manipulative. But utopias are both boring and hard to trust. Dystopia isn't a particularly generous or useful thing to lean upon for art though. I'm not sure I'm very motivated to explore either of them as standalone subjects, but I'm really interested in how they interact with we live our lives. How our received or imagined visions of utopias and dystopias flicker over our actual lives as we go about them. That is something I do try to communicate with my music, in the track titles for example.
\8. Before recording as Kuedo, your work as part of Vex’d was more minimal grime and early dubstep. What persuaded you to adopt your current synthwave-heavy sound, and can we expect a similar gear change by the time of your fourth LP?
I was trying for that lighter synth sound pre-dated Vex'd. When I wasn't making jungle or dark garage I would fairly often try to make slow tracks that sounded like Vangelis with a pop or hip-hop vibe, they were just really bad. My first idea for a project with Roly a kind of spacey ambient synth-pop hip hop thing with vocals, it was a really bad idea. My production hero at that time in the mid-00s was El-P, who showed me that those proggy electronic sounds from 70s records could fully interact with modern production. When I said earlier that I'd hit a wall with UK hardcore production after the first few Vex'd releases, i knew I wanted to use more melodic minimal synth sounds and to write & record in a much faster, jammed-out way, without any "sound design" layers or steps, and to be more emotionally communicative honestly. With Severant in particular I'd been through some experiences in my personal life that gave me a subject to focus on and process. I just wanted at least one record where I could hear myself in it, because I hadn't found that when listening back to previous efforts. I also like the idea of music as having shared value for emotional processing, and you just have to put yourself in it for that to happen. Back to sound, I don't know, I'm not sure if there'll be major switch-ups. There's many production approaches I'd like to take on but it might be that I can offer more by focusing on extending a direction, rather than switching it up over and over. Like eventually you need to change something up to stay excited. You can also go deeper by focusing in rather than spreading out, though.
The following is a barely edited dump of thoughts that I threw at my press agent when asked me to say some words about the album, to help them to write a press release for it. They sent over a few simple questions as prompts.
Q: Inspirations for the album… Musical:
I was listening to a lot of that 70s organic spacey sound, like David Axelrod “The Human Abstract”, "Le Planet Savage" soundtrack, Aphrodite's Child, records that were loosely a sci fi concept but really groove based. Kind of a hippie sci fi. A lot of the more overtly spacey but earthy records from that period too, Tangerine Dream, Emerald Web, Vangelis' more mellow smokey rhodes keyboard jams. The drumless parts of Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack especially, that over the top, slightly comic, yearning, mysterious sound. But just as much I listened to a ton of super modern R&B songs, like The Weeknd and Rae Sremmurd's more starry eyed tracks, and Frank Ocean and Solange's amazing song writing, especially how intimate and tender their records feel. The melodies and feel of some indie rock like Cocteau Twins and Grouper, for the same reasons. YMO's synth pop too, the brightness, layers and bounce of it, some Fatima Yamaha tracks had a big impact too similarly.
The drum aspect mostly comes from a different place, that's all so obviously indebted to rap production, but also the longer history of uk music. The beat tracks were mostly produced around 2018 when uk producers were establishing that drill syncopation, which I was listening to a lot. My rhythm sense was totally made by uk jungle, its sense, skipping, syncopation. It was amazing to hear that in mainstream music again. And jungle producers like Sully still influence my beat production. So does Jlin.
I also just need a certain amount of heavier, harder, tense music to balance out all the floatier stuff I listen to. Whether its stoner metal like Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, or gloomy hip hop like Mobb Deep, or intense early Dillinja tracks. Those musics might be very separate socially but there’s often deep similarities in spirit and energy.
Q: Inspirations for the album… Non-Musical?
I really concentrated on music firstly, the recorded music that speaks to me now, and why it speaks to me at this moment in time.
I thought about music sensations I most resonated with, and what it meant to make them. I thought a lot about the people who supported the early Kuedo work, I wanted them to hear it and feel that it was for them. I found myself thinking less about the idea of the cutting edge in music, and turning more to what I deeply enjoy listening to, or to what’s really endured through history, even if it’s new to me. I realised that old music can speak to the current moment as well or better than new music. Particularly in terms of ecological, planetary anxieties, and hopes too.
In order to write an affecting melody or chord sequence, you need to pull from your own emotions and experience, there’s no way around that. So the deeply personal and lived will always be in there, if you’re trying to make something emotionally useful to other people at least. I am trying to do that.
Also when I write music, I’m far more interested in chasing the sensations of music I love, rather than referencing other music like an archivist. I think that different sensations of music resonate with us more, depending on what’s happening within and around us, personally and socially. I think it’s essential to be tuned into that, and how that is shaping you. What resonates now. Not what resonated before.
I tried very hard to make a release that flows from front to back as a sequence, too. I kind of obsessed about that. I wanted the idea of a whole album to work, to at least really attempt to endorse that idea. I wanted an album that had halls and corridors, for the tracks to feel like connected places, to move through.
I also used visual material as much less of a spark or crutch than I did previously. I feel like so much of the sci fi imagery I’ve consumed is now mapped to music and triggered by music, and I know where to find the music that conveys those visual signals. I get such a visual reaction to music now. Non musical feels contained within music for me now, ridiculous as that sounds. Music feels like a dancing, kinetic, metaphor, of everything else, containing it all. I love it lol.
Q: Who influences your production style? Particularly in relation to this record
In terms of the nuts and bolts of production technique, I guess I’m split between thinking about what makes spacey synth driven music production work, what makes rap and uk jungle work, and what makes pop and R&B work. The pop production of Frank Ocean, Solange Knowles, Tears For Fears, YMO. I had mostly finished the album production when it came out but Flying Lotus’ Yatsuke was a big inspiration and encouragement to me. I related to it deeply as a production, as a picture of sound. It’s one of my very favourite soundtrack albums.
I’m a parent so that experience is always influencing me when I write. A lot of the feelings in my music that people might call nostalgic, that’s never quite felt accurate to me. It feels more accurate to say they’re about childhood itself.
Q: Please could you provide a quote about your creative relationship with Raf Rennie?
I’ve been a fan of Raf Rennie since the mid 2010s, I’m really buzzed to work with him. We’d already worked on a design for a forthcoming re-release of Severant, and we felt we had a good shared language & understanding of each other. Some similar inspirations too, the original Alien film is a shared inspiration. He developed the Kuedo logo into his own full typeface, “Giger”. To me, his work has a minimalist, composed, slightly detached vibe, in a Kubrick-like way. I really like how it works around a more relaxed and expressive illustration, like Monja & Vincent’s.
Q: Anything interesting to say about how you linked with Monja & Vincent who did the album cover illustration?
I met Monja & Vincent when they asked if I could contribute any music to their graduate animation short. They said they the art style had been somewhat influenced by my music, which was incredible to me. I found the art they showed me so inspiring for my own music, it helped me write my own stuff. (I’m not sure what the status is of their film btw). So I asked them if they would be interested in making an image for the album.
Q: Between the music and the art is there a sort of world-building going on?
When it came to the art we initially tried some world building with visual motifs and iconography but it quickly felt too closed and specific, like making a place too defined, inhabited and pre-configured, owned. It should feel open and redefinable for whoever’s listening.
I didn’t have a conceptual conceit when I made the tracks or sequenced the album. But whenever I needed an image to anchor or aim toward, the images that came were something about the world after all this, if we almost lost everything, hot dry landscapes, remnants of this time, the wonder of this current green world, our relation to future generations, the waves of time. When I was mixing it, I imagined it feeling weathered by time, or out of place in time, like something crash landed, or excavated, half buried in the sand.
Q: How did you link with Flying Lotus and end up signing your album to Brainfeeder?
I met Lotus when he contacted me to see if I wanted to work on a short animated Bladerunner spin off back in 2017, directed by the Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe. We worked together for one crazy week on it, and it was a blast, really inspiring and fun. We worked again on another film shortly after, which was again was a really enjoyable and energising experience.
Q: Any anecdotes about the recording/composing process?
The whole album is strewn across almost a decade. Much of it was rough preliminary sketches from like 2012, 2014, 2018. Turning these into finished tracks and assembling them into a unified album, into something that moved as one body, that was a complex experience. It felt like negotiating with previous versions of myself, down corridors of time. Some were decent melodic ideas that I just didn’t have the compositional ability to develop into a full arrangement back then, I just didn’t grasp harmony well enough to realise them at the time. Almost a third of the album comes from rough sketches I had written for a second Kuedo album that never was. LIke the last track is two audio recordings stitched together of me playing synths late at night, back in 2013, during a brief period where I had a couple of hardware synths. They were single improvised single takes straight to single audio track, with blatant mistakes that I couldn't polish. A little odd hearing a much younger me trying to get better at playing keys, and then me now playing along with that again. Felt like time travelling.
In that process, I probably made some peace with that earlier version of myself too, for not having the confidence to finish it at the time. Most of the heavier drum tracks were written around 2018. In early 2021 I started the process of imagining an album release, writing what still needed to be written, arranging, mixing, finishing it up.
Image credits:
1: Alain Garaguer "La Planet Sauvage OST" album cover
2: Emerald Webb "Dragon Wings and Wizard Tales", album cover
3: Aphrodite's Child "666" album cover
4: Fumito Ueda artwork from the game Ico (referencing Giorgio de Chirico)
5: Horacio Salinas Blanch, cover for Spanish edition of a Philip K Dick book
6: Agnes Lawrence Pelton "The Primal Wing"