INTERVIEW WITH AMON TOBIN

"You need a certain amount of synthesized confidence to finish something. It might be some kind of delusion to get it actually done and complete."

I talked about creativity with Amon Tobin, Brazilian electronic musician, composer and producer. Here's what he said.

Let's begin with questions about you personally. What do you create?

I feel like a lot of the time we maybe give ourselves a little bit too much credit in the creation. We describe ourselves as creating like we're making life. And, I feel like the thing we can really take credit for is editing. Like the decisions we make about what to leave in and what to leave out and in what order and sequence things appear and what stories that might tell. What meaning we sort of give to that. 

Like, I'm not inventing any new notes. I'm not inventing any new chords. No one is right. We're kind of taking the raw materials that exist and reassembling them into shapes that kind of make sense or that can sort of express something we're trying to express. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.

And what are you working on recently that you're excited about?

Well, I don't know. I guess I'm just always sort of experimenting and trying to learn. And then what comes out of that tends to be, I don't know. It's like when you're just plowing through, trying to figure stuff out and in that process, somewhere along the line, something comes out and you're sort of amazed that it's even there in the room with you. Right? It's just like this thing that's appeared while you were doing something else and that tends to be my process. 

So that's what I'm doing all the time. I'm very excited about learning new things, and there's just an endless supply of things to learn. 

What is your signature or what distinguishes your work from everyone else's?

I have no idea. I think maybe that's something to ask people who listen to it, right? You know what's funny is, I feel like a lot of the time, the things that you mean to say or express or what you do aren't really relevant to the ears that are listening to it. I guess when you hear something, it might have nothing to do with what the intention was of the person who made it. So somebody might find some real deep meaning with something you make or might discard it completely and think it's irrelevant and rubbish and it's sort of more to do with them. 

I guess if somebody finds something compelling in what I or anyone else does, it's probably more to do with them. If they find something special or different about something, it's probably less to do with my intention.

Ok. And when do you do your most creative work? And why do you think that is?

I think it's mostly when I don't really know what I'm doing, which is a lot of the time. When I'm in that sort of state of discovery where I don't really fully understand my tools. And things haven't been clearly defined and nailed down. I think that's a really good place to be. When you're kind of in the exploratory state, when you’re unsure of what the limitations are and you don't feel very safe and when you feel like you're at risk and you're out of your depth. All of those things. 

I think when you're in a state of discomfort and excitement and uncertainty, I think that's probably when you're doing your best work. At least that's been the case for me.

That's an interesting cocktail of ingredients.

Well, don't you think that discomfort might be kind of necessary to making anything meaningful? If you're growing, you're generally in an uncomfortable state. Right? If you're learning, it's because you don't know something and you don't feel entirely comfortable. I think if you're progressing in any way, it's because you're kind of marching out into the unknown and that's not a very comfortable place to be. So I do feel like it's kind of important to recognize that, that your discomfort is probably a healthy creative ingredient.

I like it. How much of your day are you actively engaged in your creative work?

I guess whenever I'm not pulled into being a grown up and doing my taxes and getting food and doing all the things you need to do as a human, right? Yeah, any time I'm not doing that stuff, the maintenance of your body, maintenance of your life, then I'm doing the stuff I'd like to do.

You have a very distinct style. Which of your influences can you see reflected in your own work?

You know what? Your style of interviewing is really throwing me a little bit. I think I'm just kind of… I need to adjust a little bit.

I'm sorry.

No, no, don't. I'm not criticizing at all. I'm just taking some time to adjust to it. It feels there's like a gap. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm not sure if I'm… It feels very… Right now, I feel like I'm interacting with some AI. But maybe it's just because you know what you're going to ask me and I've got no idea what's going on. So I'm just, I'm just kind of not prepared. Let me think for a second. Let me think. So. What influences of my own do I see reflected in my own work?

Like, what influences, what people or things that influenced you can you see reflected in your work?

I don't know. I mean, I guess there's all the things I've stolen, right? The things that I've loved that kind of become part of what I've… Things I've looked up to and I've admired and I try to emulate or I don't know. How specific could I get with any of that? Because it's all probably a lot of stuff that I don't even really see. Things that probably came in that I wasn't aware of. Right? Do you make music at all?

I do. I'm a hobbyist and that’s kind of the point of this specific question is like, I like things like, say the Bad Brains. But for whatever reason that doesn't get reflected in my work at all. My work ends up being more peaceful or like say the Postal Service, for example. Like some of your influences actually you can see reflected in your own work and some of your influences are things you like, but they just don't make it into your work at all.

I see. Isn't that interesting? I find that really interesting because I have the same experience where I might have things that I listen to and even if I think “Man, I wanna make something like that”, what comes out? Even if I think it sounds like that, other people will listen to it and be like, “Well, no. It doesn't sound anything like that.” And I think there’s a kind of a your own lens and your own experiences maybe. So they distort the influence so much that it becomes your own voice, right? That distortion becomes your voice maybe. 

So, I think about like Bollywood, right? I have a massive Bollywood collection and there's all these Bollywood records that are like funk or hip hop. And you listen to these incredible Bollywood musicians, like really proficient musicians, that were interpreting something like hip hop or funk. And of course, it has some elements of that, but it sounds nothing like funk and nothing like hip hop. There's a sort of distorted lens and it becomes something really interesting. Instead, it becomes this sort of something that's misinterpreted. 

And I feel like maybe we do that as well. Maybe we think what we're listening to is really clear and we can interpret that really transparently, but maybe art, our interpretation, is quite corrupted with our own biases and I don't know, whatever impurities kind of get in there. And what comes out is nothing like what went in. But that's a good thing because it makes it our voice, unintentionally. Do you think?

Maybe, yeah. I think that's excellent that what you called your impurities kind of make your flavor.

Yeah, I think so. Ad I think that that's a big part of what makes us have a voice is our experiences, right? Which are not necessarily unique but certainly particular to us and those things tend to color what we see and hear and certainly what we express on the other side. Yeah, which is why I asked you the question if you make music, because I'm sure that if you do, you experience that too, right? Where you think this is what I'm going to make. I love this thing. I want to do that. And even when you try and copy something, there's something that breaks down, and you end up making something more personal.

Yeah, we ourselves are filters of the world.

Right. Right. Exactly.

This might be the first interview I've seen with you in which we don't ask questions about what kind of gear you use. We're more concerned with the man behind the synthesizers and the record label, and we want to know about your processes and what goes on in your beautiful brain.

That's very kind. Now I really hope I didn't come off critical. You know what it is? That sometimes you have conversations with people and other times you're answering questions and they come in waves and now I feel like we're talking a bit more and I feel like I'm understanding a bit more what's going on. Whereas just at the start, it seemed like there were kind of waves of questions there wasn't like a grade between them. But it's fine. I'm also in a weird state of mind, frankly. It's five in the afternoon and I think at any moment I might have a little nap. So sorry if I'm a little bit spaced out. But please, let's go on. Tell me, what else did you want to know? 

Ok. These are questions around process and these specific questions are about getting started. So when you're creating something from scratch, how do you start?

Yeah, it's not like there's a process, right? I don't have like template or anything like that. But it's usually a sort of continuation. So let's say I'm making something while I'm making that thing, there will be little offshoots and ideas for other things that I want to do but don't fit into what I'm doing at the moment and they'll sort of serve as excited inspirations for what I want to try and do at some point. And I'll kind of store them somewhere in my head and be like, “All right, one day I really want to try and see where that goes.” 

And so it doesn't ever feel like a blank sheet, I guess is what I'm trying to say. There's always something that I've been wanting to try for ages, which I finally get to do. And yeah, so it's usually something like that and often there's just a question mark where I'm wondering what would happen if I did this or that or the other. And so I'm kind of trying to answer some little question at the beginning of a process. And it'll start that way. Yeah, I guess it can. But, yeah, it's usually a sort of rolling thing. If that makes sense.

Yeah, you're continuously, perpetually creative and one thing from the past feeds into your future projects.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot like that. Because I'm sure as well if you make music, you tend to open more doors. The more doors you open, it tends to be an unending sort of excited search for nothing going nowhere but lovely all the way.

Right. Yeah. In other interviews, you've said that you create a structure or a framework but allow it to be flexible enough to allow for play and spontaneity. So, does your structure evolve as you progress in your career?

Yeah, that definitely happened. It was more sort of like some kind of pragmatic solution to a problem I was having where I kind of at one point was becoming overly concerned with trying to  satisfy, as a sense, that I'd done exactly what I set out to do. Right? So, I have an idea like, “Oh, I want to make an acoustic model of some invented instrument” and I'd hammer away at that until it was exactly what was in my head. And then at the end of it, it was like terrible. 

There is this sense of achievement through whatever processes. And I'd managed to get to where I wanted. But it was very suffocating creatively because when you're making something I think like music, you have to balance your objectives with a sense of play that does allow spontaneity and air into the room. And what I was doing was creating a sort of a vacuum where being a bit too controlling I was sure I could stand back at the end of the process and be very pleased with myself that I'd made what I'd set out to make. But there was a lifelessness to what I'd made because I hadn't allowed for that spontaneity to enter the process at all. So I made a very conscious decision to try and balance that a bit more. 

This is right around ISAM, when I made the record ISAM, which was a really technical record. I think even now, looking back, it's probably in terms of process and processing, it was the most kind of complicated and rigid record technically that I'd made. And I still love it. I really do. But  I recognized in it that there was a sense of play that was missing. It was very exact. Everything in there was exactly how I wanted it to be. But there were things missing which I thought were more about accidents, letting accidents in. 

So what I was saying is afterwards, I made a sort of conscious decision to try and let accidents back into the process. And one way of doing that was to have… Because I also really don't subscribe to this idea of just fucking noodling and jamming. I don't understand the attraction of that, other than maybe a sort of like maybe if you're a musician and you just want to play with other musicians. That’s fine, but I'm more interested in making a piece of music than performing it. Right? 

But basically what I thought would be a good compromise would be to make a structure. Like if you think of a skeleton, like a scaffolding for a piece of music that was well defined and rigid, but within that I would allow lots of accidents to happen. And so the structure would remain intact and it would be what I intended it to be, but inside it, there'd be lots of spontaneity and air and life. And so that's kind of where I ended up. I felt like that was more fun to do to begin with and also maybe more of an alive piece of music to listen to in the end.

That's an amazing point. If you adhere too rigidly to something, the best you could ever possibly get is what you had expected. Whereas if you, if you let it kinda do its own thing, then you may get more than you expected.

Yeah. But I do feel like in either direction you could probably lose sight of something worth doing. I feel like if you give in entirely to the sort of noodling moment, we've all done right. We've all got high and twiddled knobs or play guitar or whatever it is and it's a lovely thing to do. But in the end does anyone want to listen to that? I don't know if I do. I don't know if I want to listen to a drum circle. You know, I wouldn't mind being in the drum circle and playing, having a good time, but I don't want to hear that. 

So I feel like if you can have the structure of a piece of music that has intention. And I think intention is really important to me. If you have intention but allow play within that intention to happen, then maybe you can actually get the best of both worlds or at least some good compromise between those worlds.

OK. Another avenue… You have multiple aliases is that purely to help partition things for your audience or do they kind of allow you to more easily inhabit different facets of your psyche or your taste or personality?

A bit of both, I guess. I mean, it definitely started out as just a way to make it easier for people to digest or delineate or put into categories. Whatever people need to do. Because honestly, I really feel like it's all just sound and rhythm and I don't feel like there's any distinction between the different things that I do. But I know that they do fall into different categories of music, what people might expect from the music or what they might associate with the music. So just as a sort of courtesy, I tried to make the different aliases have different personalities and different aesthetics. But then as time went on, I also did find myself getting lost in those fantasies and enjoying that too. 

And it's like if you're making something and you want to keep it very focused, you can't really let too many elements inside. But you still have all those things you want to say. So, rather than just shutting them off, you can make different lanes for them and explore those things in parallel, right? So I could say, well, I am really interested in harmony. I'm also really interested in percussion, but those things don't always need to coexist in the same piece of music. 

I can maybe make a really distilled fucking study of percussion in a really very sort of pointed way and then do the same with harmony. Just give lots and lots of room for those things in their own lanes rather than trying to sort of smush everything together, you know? Yeah, I guess that's the function of it is to give everything room to really to have a lot of whatever it is without it being kind of diluted and mixed up with other things you're interested in. 

Moving on to questions of evolving the work when you have your initial idea, how do you nurture or coax or interrogate or cultivate it into a finished product?

I don't know. I think yeah, it's just instinctive. All that stuff's really just kind of… Fumble your way around it. You sort of know when something is done. I think you just sort of feel your way around that kind of thing.

When you have your initial idea, what do you do to your initial idea? How do you nurture it or interrogate it or coax it into a finished product? Like, how do you move it along in the process from the little seed of an idea into something more fleshed out?

I guess, in a really sort of practical sense, you take it like a big block that you chisel away at, right? But in a more sort of creative sense, I guess, you just keep sort of asking it questions until it's run out of answers and then there you go. Yeah, it's probably something like that. I don't really know. So much of this stuff happens subconsciously as well. You must know that making music too. I feel like it wouldn't be quite right to answer questions like that being like, “Well, I know exactly what I'm doing” right? Here's my process. 

Because a lot of the time I'm kind of surrendering myself to states of mind that aren't really necessarily even that conscious and I don't really have a lucid grasp of what I'm doing at each moment. Sometimes a whole day will go past and I won't even realize it, because I'm not really thinking, right? Yeah, I don't know. I think you start off with some plans, and you try and stick with them, and in the end hopefully something good comes out of it. But what happens in between a lot of it's a bit of a mystery and no drugs needed for that, by the way, at all. I'm really talking about just really concentrating and getting lost in a moment, I suppose.

OK, that's fair enough. What percentage of your creative time is spent prototyping or experimenting?

Most of it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, because otherwise I'd be making the same things over and over which wouldn't be a lot of fun. So, yeah, I'd say most of the time.

And when you have multiple ideas about something, what makes one idea more promising than another?

I don't know. Maybe it's just that something that excites you at that moment for whatever reason. And often it will be a bad decision. It will be a terrible choice. And you won't realize till after. I do think it's important though to follow those threads and kind of commit to a sense of excitement, and then even if you're wrong at the other side of it, it hasn't been wasted. You've probably picked up some things along the way. 

You have to sort of dive in and commit. But I wouldn't say like my choices of what to commit to are always very reliably accurate or fruitful. I'm better at that than I used to be. I used to be, and I guess maybe that's more experience, wrong more times than not. And now I'm still wrong a lot but less than I was before, maybe about what to commit to.

Yeah, but you make another good point about either you get it right or you learn something and sometimes you don't know the difference between the two.

Yeah. And often you'll get something right, but it will be pointless. Like you'll make something and it will turn out just the way you thought but it's not actually very good or interesting. So, yeah. I guess it's different when you work with other people. When you work with a group of people or you collaborate, there's probably a lot more certainty in a kind of committee sense of where to go. 

If you work by yourself, I think a lot of it is left to chance because you can feel one way at one moment and completely different about the same thing the next. Right? So, yeah. A lot of these things are quite nebulous and mysterious, which is great. I think that's how they probably need to be.

I think you're, you're illuminating some things for me though. You're dropping little kernels of truth.

That's good. I guess, yeah. It's such an interesting process. I think because you're always examining things about yourself while you're trying to learn about what you're making. And it's always interesting to talk to people about how they do things because on some level you can relate. So yeah, hopefully there's some things that make sense.

When you're making something, at what point do you test your assumptions or challenge your creative choices?

Do you mean look at what you've done more sort of critically?

Yeah, like when you go into I guess it would be editing mode or critical mode.

Yeah, I definitely kind of surrender to the idea that what I'm doing is vitally important and really worth doing for the whole time. I'm doing it and then immediately afterwards, when I start doing the next thing, I'll listen back to it and I'll have a very different perspective on it, and I'll realize that it was completely worthless. Or maybe not, maybe it was good. Right? During that process, I'm not really very good at looking objectively at it. I think if I was, I'd be too sort of unsure to ever finish anything. 

I think you need to have a certain amount of synthesized confidence to finish something. It might be some kind of delusion to get it actually done and complete. And then when it's done and working on the next thing you're doing, you can look back at it and go “All right. OK. What do I really think of this?” And then you can make decisions. I think about it, maybe even go back and change some things about it. Yeah, I'd say usually after the fact.

That's amazing. That one really resonates with me because a long time ago when I used to do painting or drawing, I would work on something and I would be so excited about what I was working on. And it was the greatest thing that anyone has ever drawn or painted. And then the second I finished it and moved on to the next thing, I would sometimes literally throw the thing in the garbage because I didn't like it anymore. And the new thing I'm working on is the greatest thing that's ever been created.

Absolutely. I think people even incorporate that kind of thing into that process. Quite on purpose. I've heard of engineers that will bring people in from the street to listen to a mix at a certain point after they finished it, not because they want their opinion, but because just having someone else's ears in the room will give them a different perspective on what they've just made. And there's something about working on the next thing you're doing. That gives you sort of permission to look back at what you've made more objectively I think. 

But also, I do find that thing about sharing it with other people can give you that permission too. Like I know, for example, if I finish a mix and I'll just email the mix to someone I know or a mastering engineer or something. I don't really need them to respond to the email before I've identified half a dozen things that are completely wrong with that mix. Just the action of sending it, the pressing send, gives me some sort of objective view on what I've done. Does that resonate at all? Like let's say you finish a painting and you bring someone into the room. Suddenly you can see it more through their eyes than your own.

Yeah, you lose the feeling of being alone. Then it gives the work a sense of community, even if it's just one person or whatever it is. It's born and out into the world then and it's not just in your head or from your hands.

Yeah. By that same token, I think we do need though to sort of maintain the illusion that we are doing something really worthwhile while we're doing it and not to be interrupted by criticism or outside perspective while something is being worked on. Because it will create levels of doubt that might not be helpful. Yeah, it's a peculiar thing. I think making stuff, you're constantly tricking yourself. Just in a practical way.

I like that. Don't, don't mess with something while it's in the womb.

Right. Yeah. Definitely not. At least see it through before you bought it.

Yeah. Honing your craft is a nonlinear process. Sometimes you make leaps and bounds. To what events or practices would you attribute your greatest gains and skill?

It sounds very lofty. I think honestly just like incremental practice. I definitely feel like I'd have benefited from some sort of more traditional education in terms of like how to mix, how to engineer. Because as exciting as it sounds to discover everything through mistakes, I think it often is unnecessary. You can waste a lot of time, years, doing things the wrong way, imagining that there's no wrong way to do them when in fact, there is a wrong way to do them. 

People who make music love to talk about how there's no wrong way to do anything, and it's not really true. There are some things that are just objectively unhelpful. And certainly with sound, which is based on some pretty solid mathematics, you can talk about your preferences sonically all day long and the objective things, but there are some fundamental truths that are self evident. So, yeah. I think I could have benefited a lot from some just some academic learning. Some basic rules being taught and absorbed and then applied over time. But so for me it was just a long drawn out process and it's obviously still ongoing and it's still just like, “Oh my God. How do they not fucking know this?” 

I don't know. It's a real slow crawl.

Moving on to questions about finishing a piece of work. How do you know when something's done?

I think that's just instinctive and couldn't be more personal, right? It's your thing and when it feels right. I guess it all comes down to intention. Again, I think one of the most frustrating things to me is when your intention is misunderstood. 

So let's say that I make something without any percussion in it or any drums and the listener might say, “This is great. It would be so much better with drums” and you just go, “Why are you walking into my Mexican restaurant demanding Chinese food?” Do you know what I mean? What's happening here? This is what I meant to do. I feel like that's a big, big part of it. 

When something's finished, when it's kind of got to the point where you want it to be. More often than not, it's close to where you'd want it to be and not quite, and that in five years you'd be able to make this thing so much better. And you look back on it and see how imperfect and unfinished it was, but it’s never completely at odds with your intention. It's never gonna have drums if you didn't want drums in it.

Ok. And for you, what makes a creative project successful?

I think again, very personal. I think if you've sort of got it as something realized that you wanted to realize. I think then it's successful. I have so many tracks where I've had a personal mission within that track and it might be something that nobody else would even really care about or notice. But to me there was something that I wanted to do that I managed to pull off that happened in that track. It just feels immensely satisfying. And then the song itself might be invisible. Well, certainly that element of it might be invisible too listeners. But to me, it really was a sense of achievement of just personal achievement. I'd say it's somewhere in that world.

Moving on to questions about inspiration and collaboration. Where do you find your inspiration?

Usually from things I'm listening to or watching or like anybody, right? You just kind of absorb what's going on and that ends up being the things that... Yeah, probably that.

Ok. When, and where do your lightning bolt ideas occur? Like epiphanies or aha moments.

Oh, yeah. I do. I get those a lot and it could be any number of things. It could be just something you sort of trip over and you just suddenly know how to do something even by accident that you weren't looking for. Or it could be something that you've been searching for for a long time and sort of uncovered. And now you have to find a way to apply it, an excuse to use a word that you found that you love, in a sentence. That kind of thing. 

But in a song, I don't know. I mean, it's all over the place, right? It's like a little crackling universe of lightning bolts.

Ok. And what role if any does feedback play in your creativity?

Oh, like people listening?

Yeah. Yeah. Like your audience or critics or whoever gives you feedback.

Well, I think that you have a lot of people that you look up to and you respect can give you really useful feedback. But again, like we were saying before, it's so important to have a sort of delusion while you're making stuff. It probably helps shape your decisions going forward a bit more, right? It's like having a character trait that you're unaware of that somebody could pull you aside and be like “I don’t know if you realize you do this” and you kind of go, “Oh, all right.” And you maybe adjust for that. 

But it has to come from somebody you trust and somebody you respect. Not so much just some random person. But that's observation about how you should maybe be course correct. So, I'd say in that area pretty much zero. But if there's somebody who I think can really help me, then I'll try very hard to listen to what they have to say.

For you, what is the hardest part of creation?

It changes all the time, and I think at the moment the hardest part it's more to do with the landscape. How the landscape has changed because I've been doing this for a while. And, I think there's a sense now, not just for me, but I think for most musicians and artists that there's the ripple effect of what you're doing is less prominent, sometimes entirely invisible. So you can feel often like what you're making has no impact and therefore no meaning. 

Whereas, I think that if you're throwing skimming rocks on a pond and you're kind of getting a lot of joy from that, from watching that happen and from the sensation of it. I think it's very different from if you're just kind of launching pebbles into space.

I like that.

So I think it can be very difficult to understand where the things you're making, what the point of it is if the landscape is so completely open and unreflective, which is kind of how it feels at the moment. Like it doesn't feel like there's a lot of reflection, because it's so open and infinite. Does that make sense or not?

It does. Absolutely. Mhm. How do you make progress when you're blocked or feel like you're at a dead end?

I never feel like that at all, honestly. I never feel blocked. I just feel sometimes like my challenge is more trying to understand why. Any of this, what's driving it really? But the drive itself is just kind of there. 

Yeah, that's a gift. I've gotten that a couple of times and it's, it's from very prolific, very curious people who seem to never get blocked.

Yeah. I mean, that's not to say that that the output is golden. I'm sure I make a lot of shit, and I'm in a sort of run or a fevered run of creativity. But there isn't a block ever. It's just, yeah. How many hours can you squeeze out of a day? It's a lot more of a challenge.

How do you avoid ruts or preconceptions or rehashing things?

I think again, it's the same thing. I don't have issues with that. I just think because there's too much to explore and there's too much to get stuck in something already explored. I can't imagine getting stuck in a rut honestly.

That's a good thing too. In other interviews you've mentioned that you purposely make your process inconvenient. How do you complicate things for yourself and how does that shape your work?

Yeah. I think I usually do it with the equipment I use. And I should say, I'm not some sort of masochist. I do think there's a real price for convenience and it's a sort of impoverished experience. I guess if you think of the most convenient thing, it's just like a frictionless experience. Right? Which is a glass, lobotomized kind of gliding along happily with no interruptions. And you don't know if you're alive or dead and friction is all the color. And it's all the experience and all the discomfort that makes everything worthwhile. Otherwise, you just got a straight line between when you're born and you're dead. Right? That's the frictionless experience, and the friction I think is all the life in between. So I try and make as much of that as possible. And it usually ends up being simple things like, instead of using something that would get the job done quickly, you look for something that would make it as much fun as possible, but might not be very reliable. Like using analog equipment or using tools you're not familiar with.

Right. Uh huh. Yeah, I'm thinking of a Roland Space Echo right now.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, things that don't necessarily behave reliably the same way every time and that you have to have conversations with and negotiate with and slow you down but surprise you. It just sort of inject contours into your otherwise very sort of glacial trajectory, and I think that's it's just making sure that you're enjoying yourself and not just trying to get something done. It's more like a job, right? Where you've got a task… I guess exists in music as well. 

If you work in scoring or something where you have a deadline and you have to make a piece of music that does a specific thing and you need that thing to be done reliably within a certain time frame, but that isn’t what we're talking about. Or at least not what I'm talking about. I'm trying to do things which aren't really about the end result. Honestly, they're kind of more about everything in between. And the end result is like a bonus. It's like a thing you get as a sort of added little prize at the end. But the thing that has really happened is all the whole process itself has been the reward of it and the frustration of it and just the life of it all.

Can you think of a time that a constraint was beneficial to your creativity?

Yeah, all the time. But funnily enough, it's sort of more like your subversive instinct kicks in. Like, for instance, if I've had to do any kind of commercial work. But in the past, I'll find that those constraints sort of, a little demon, a little creative demon… That has a million ideas that are irrelevant to the task. And those are often really great ideas. So I end up being quite grateful to the rigid task at hand for waking up this little gremlin that's trying to distract me with all kinds of things that aren't helpful at that moment. I think it's good. And in a practical way, I think it's very, very useful as well. Especially now when we have of course like infinite ways to do things with software and the limitations aren't really… It's not like, “Oh, I can't get this instrument.” You can. It's in a plug in somewhere, right? 

So I think what's useful sometimes is to make your own little limitations to work inside. Something quite tight, so that you can try and escape out of those boundaries. Because I definitely feel like a lot of the time, trying to escape from little parameters, whether they're self imposed or imposed by something else is where a lot of great of work happens. I often think of like scratch DJ s. When I think about that, I think about people like Cuba or Kid Koala working with 1210s, the Technics turntables, and how limited those tools were and how creative they had to be to escape the limitations of those tools. The amount of stuff that they could do with that sort of rigid, physical constraint. That to me was like a great illustration of creativity, the sort of escape. Well, yeah, you could play a record on this or you could do this or you could do that or you could do a million things to escape the confines of what it's supposed to do when you're working on stuff.

What's a telltale sign that it's time to abandon an idea?

Honestly, again, you just kind of feel it. I feel like I'll sometimes give something up completely and then come back and see maybe what was in it. And sometimes I'll be certain that it was the best thing I could possibly be doing and there's no amount of work that will make it go from more than a kernel to ever being more than that. I do think you need to be really quite sort of ruthless about it and not be scared to just stop and start on something else. The moment it starts becoming a chore… That's not entirely true. Like sometimes you kind of push and push and push but when it's really just like, “Oh God, really? I don't want to do this anymore” maybe at least take a little step away from it.

Yeah. You've worked in NFT’s and visual media and things of that nature. So you have other interests other than music. What do you think that different creative fields have in common?

What different fields?

Well, is there anything in common between your music and the visual arts you do?

I got into Unreal Engine in the last year or so, and I've been amazed how many similarities there are. Just like problem solving. Like trying to make a physical model in sound is really similar to trying to make a something with physics constraints in a 3D engine or modeling environment. So, yeah. I feel like there's a lot that's transferable in those, in those areas. No, for sure. Yeah, I think you can probably apply that kind of mentality of just being interested in things to a whole bunch of stuff and find common ground.

Is there any skill or technique from a different field that you'd like to bring into your own work?

I mean, I don't know if that's transferable. Like, I don't know if I could literally take a visual, something I learned from modeling the 3d object, into sound necessarily. I don't know, but I'm sure there's lots of common ground into how they could be. I mean, obviously I made shows which tried to marry the two things to some extent. But, yeah, I'm not sure.

That's fair enough. Ok. Is there anyone else that you could think of that we should perhaps talk to for this project?

Wow. A lot of people come to mind. But I mean, what specifically are you trying to get to? I'm not very good at listening to Josh when it comes to what the fuck I'm meant to be doing with podcasts or interviews. So give me a little bit more context. Like, what's your objective?

I just don't know if you could think of anybody who could perhaps illuminate different corners of the creative process.

Sure. An interesting person to speak to that thinks a lot about this kind of thing while they do it. Do you know Patrick Watson?

I have not heard that name before.

Yeah, he's a French Canadian singer-songwriter. But he's very thoughtful and thinks a lot about a lot of the things you've been asking me about.

I'm sure a million names will flood in after we hang up as well. I can always suggest over email or something.

And my last question is a doozy. It's difficult to choose between your children, but what is your favorite work that you've done so far in your career?

I think it's a track called On A Hilltop Sat The Moon, probably. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

That's a good one.

Yeah, I think, like we said before, something that kind of ticked a lot of boxes for what I was trying to do. So whether that translates to anyone else, I don't know. But yeah, I'm really proud of that and the Figuroa record as well. I have a real sense of astonishment that that thing actually came to be. So I more sort of stood back just surprised by it all.

Yeah, those are good picks. I want to thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule and your creative work to speak with me and like I said before, I apologize for kind of coming at you from left field. I know this is a very different sort of interview than you normally do. So I apologize for that.

No, not at all. Please don't. You've been great. I'm not very good at interviews in general. So I'm trying to keep up and adjust, but thank you for your time.

Thank you so much, and have a good evening.

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