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.