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Interview (Lodown Magazine) [6.2022]

Written interview in late June 2022, with Lodown magazine.

  1. Jamie, to start with, there’s a temporal distance of six years between your new album “Infinite Window“ and the previous one - which in our fast-paced, pop cultural world feels like a lifetime. Was it a conscious decision of yours to slow down the release schedule? And what were you working on during that time besides scoring the Blade Runner anime soundtrack with Fly Lo?

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.