thruoutin - On & Off The Record

Three new releases in a short span of time. What's the deal with that? 

So I had a few things I got finished around the same time, and then recently, I've been working with a new online distributor named "Believe" and just found that a lot of things that they were doing worked a little bit better with what I wanted to do.

Once I started working with Believe, I just had a bunch of releases that were ready to go. So I kind of staggered them out, like, one every two months or something like that. And yeah, that's why there were maybe one or two a year, and then suddenly, things got a little bit more active. I just had more work that kind of piled up and was ready to go. 

But it's all very different work, right? 

Yeah. 

So… the first thing is the stuff that you were doing while at uni or something, right? 

Yeah, I guess that's the most recent thing I've released. 

And ironically, one of the oldest things you recorded...

… It's called Diarios de Xalapa. 

I went to school in Alabama, and my major was Spanish. So my second year, I went and studied in a city in Mexico called Xalapa for the immersive-study-abroad-type thing, and I just wanted to collect as much stuff as I could there. 

I brought a Dictaphone and took some notes, like literally writing out what I wanted. No software, just writing out on a piece of paper what I kind of wanted to do. So all this stuff was maybe put on Myspace or maybe it was shared with friends, but then it went on a hard drive, and then I never touched it again until…

...I was looking through some old files, and I was like, there's enough here for an album. And it's all from that time period. So I just went through and tried to salvage as many of these things as possible and recently put them out. But it was around like 2005 era, yeah.

Was listening back nostalgic?

Well, completely, because you have the actual recordings of where you were and the people you talked to. So it's like instant nostalgia. But then there's the secondary tier of it, hearing how I used to creatively put things together so much more, well, just like no real rhyme or reason. Just kind of like, recording something with clipping going on and, maybe, not going on four bars. Perhaps cutting off because I felt like it at that time, just really erratic stuff that I might not do now. I was learning.

I remember when I was in high school, aside from the mandatory Sibelius stuff (I still have PTSD from that - HOW can anyone make software so cumbersome and unintuitive?) I'd play around with "Soundforge" - the epitome of intuitive. What did you use? 

Similar...

...It was just a WAV editor; it was just exported without any kind of mixing or mastering.

So what's interesting about that album is that it's more bass focused than the stuff that you do now. And perhaps that's because your musical direction has changed over the years as well. But you were predominantly a bassist in the past, correct?

That's correct; bass was my first instrument, yeah. 

So… it makes sense that the earlier stuff would be more bass focused.

 Yeah, totally. So I think with everything I do, no matter if it's more on the clubby side of things, ambient or experimental, there's always some sort of live element that I add that's auxiliary to the software. So at that time, it was bass. It was really the only thing I had that made it a little more organic. 

Just going to leave this here; cheers Questlove. But, like… We're not just talking about the nostalgia here. Was there any sense of like, "Oh 💩, that's actually pretty cool; maybe something I'm doing now could use some of this!" 

Well, maybe to not be so uptight about all the technical things. When you go to write a song, that can be done later in the post-production. It's not like it has to be this certain frequency or compressed at that time and stuff that which I kind of do out of habit now. Just like, maybe take a step back and not worry about that stuff as much when writing a little bit less.

I think constrictions can be great, especially when you're figuring out something for the first time...

...There's a producer, Richard Devine; he used to get a synthesiser and just try to write an entire song with it. So the bass, maybe the drums, the leads and the pads — just use it to kind of understand what it does. So I take that the same way. Sometimes, whether it's a VST or a drum machine, try to do everything that you can with it to just explore. Sometimes it stops you from reaching for like a bunch of different things and muddying up the vision that you might have.

Apologies for turning this interview into an Instagram cliche, but… the more you duck around, the more you find out?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so with Diarios de Xalapa, you say that you basically found these files, but of course, the actual project files are long gone, software obsolete, so what, you just kind of remastered it with your new skills eighteen years later? 

So a lot of these files were... if they were WAVs, I was lucky. Most of them were mp3s and just normalised all the way to zero. Yeah. So no way to really undo anything, no stems, nothing like that. So yeah, it was a bit of like...

Obviously, an mp3 is always just going to be an mp3. There's no way to make the quality…more, but you can do things to sort of enhance it. I tried to salvage as much by reducing any type of frequencies that were fighting each other and then ran it through analogue gear, surgically trying to take things out that were harsh because there was no mixing. So actually, it's kind of like retroactively mixing it. 

Moving forwards to another of your recent releases, eugh, this is such a 💩 segue, but I'm gonna do it. 

"When you were in this town in Mexico in 2005, would you imagine that you would be in a green screen studio on the outskirts of Beijing, recording something about the moon?!"

No. I probably would have thought I'd be living in America right now. I don't know, it was my first little taste of living abroad, and it definitely influenced me to continue to live and travel, but I would never have thought that I would be here in China. I thought maybe I'd be somewhere else in Latin America. I had an idea for a little while that I might go to Venezuela and learn how to play some traditional music from there. But it was just a pipe dream. I never thought that I would be in Asia. So, yeah, it's funny how things work. 

So, Perilune started probably about a year ago. Around July 2022, I basically had a bunch of drones, ambient pads and then synth parts and my electric Pipa, with some ideas that I wanted to put together. A French guy I know named Lucas and his wife Yao Ling invited me to go up to their village in North Beijing. And so Lucas kind of designed this set that has this large circle that almost looks like a moon; they projection-mapped some visuals that Yao Ling did on it... 

...and I sat in the middle and played this 20-minute kind of improvisation loop thing and played Pipa over these ambient parts...

...And then they just kind of did their thing and filmed it. So it was like a three-way collaboration. 

Where did the drones come from? What spawned it? What gave you the idea? 

Usually how I make drones is through synthesisers or VSTs that I run through tape. Or I'll use the synthesisers or pads that I run through guitar amps and re-amp them. So the drones for this are actually from a residency I did in Aranya, like right at the very, very beginning, right before all "that stuff" started. I had this material but didn't really have any way to... release it.

 So what I did is, I organised them in Ableton in… like a way to like… freeform blend these pads in and out and then I had a synthesiser on the side to add sub-bass and then on top would, like, riff on the Pipa, and that was the technical part of how the music was made. 

I use Ableton in the "Session View", which works as a sampler or at least a trigger for samples. And I just kind of have like samples on loop that maybe have some effects going on, and can have, like, maybe five going on at a time but fade them in and out. 

One might be the root note, a fourth, a fifth, the octave…whatever I want to do, so when I'm putting in those pads, they kind of make chords and stuff, but they're all evolving and modulating at different rates and… yeah, stuff like that. 

So that's the "ambience" sorted; let's talk about your Pipa. 

The e-Pipa. 

The e-Pipa. I think the first time we chatted, you had just got a new one made or something...

Sorry about the watermarks, Will. Anyway, the one you have now is very, very nifty, right? 

Yeah, that was also; that's gotta be early 2019 when I got this current Pipa. It's the newest version and the one that I'm most satisfied with out of the other versions I've tried to work with. 

Ah, there it is, next to Yukes' e-Guzheng! Do you have to get them custom-made, or is there someone that does it? Is there a market for… e-Pipas? 

There's no brand that I know of that just sells an e-Pipa where you can just go online and buy it, nor brick-and-mortar. For every single electric Pipa, I've worked with someone to design it with them. 

For the very early e-Pipa(s), I was just putting a contact mic on it and running that, which was fine. But later on, I experimented with guitar pickups, and the current version has a guitar pickup and 3D printed tuners, so I can really get the tuning to sync better with electronic music. That was a big thing. Stuff getting out of tune is/was not great for pads. 

The O.G. peg is more like a wooden wedge, isn't it? 

Right. It's a wooden peg that, depending on humidity or just someone bumping into it or just playing, gets out of tune. And that's the beauty of some acoustic instruments. They have their own warp that they get over time, but I just needed something that was going to be a little more reliable, like how an electric guitar stays in tune a little bit better than a violin. 

Another lazy segue... From '05 nostalgia to sonic explorations in time and space, or from wooden pegs to 3D printed precision, we're looking to the future, and some say the future is NOW! The future is our...digital-era...of...music... let's talk about your "club stuff"!

Okay, so there was one I released in late February called Ghost Lineage. That was a vinyl on New Noise. For me, that was kind of like my big boy of the year. 

It straddles experimental ambient and "Gqom", which is a South African style of dance music. There are a lot of collaborations with that, but seven tracks and mostly more club-oriented music. 

Okay. So again, we've got three very, very different releases in succession of one another. 

The contrast is obvious, but what are the similarities between them do you think? 

Well, I think the biggest thing is that if you want to listen to all of them and analyse, you could come up with "a sound", but… Let's say that I wanted to really focus on techno and really just bunker down and be a techno artist. There's nothing wrong with that. But for me, I never wanted to have every release be one genre or one thing. I always wanted to kind of mix things together. So is there "my own" sound? I hope that there is, but I'm not asking people to sit there and analyse and find it...

...So... what's next on the horizon? 

...I don't know; there are a couple of daunting folders of E.Ps and stuff like that in the queue. There are at least four albums I have that are in various stages of being completed… 

...There's an album I wrote a while back which was kind of rough ideas and loops, which I'm going back and fleshing out the arrangements - I got some consultation on it from DJ Earl…

…Yeah, that's a footwork album, but it's…not footwork? It's 160BPM with footwork beats, but it's got a lot of stuff over it... 

Then there's some more stuff that I did in Aranya, which is leaning more toward what I would consider free jazz, but it's not that. The reason I say this is because it's similar instrumentation - drum kit, upright bass, a Nord organ, e-Pipa, and pads through guitar amps. 

There are four tracks with that… anyway, there's always a file or folder of things that I haven't finished…

…ah, they're the worst, and the worst thing is, once you actually get around to starting whatever it is you've been putting off, flow-state beckons, and before you know it, three hours have gone! 

Totally. 

Deviating from our actual chat, I'm not going to lie; with the Dragon Boat Festival just gone and preparing to leave and stuff, it was tempting to let this be another addition to the daunting desktop reminders, but that's not how this conversation ended. Snapping back to the transcription, was there anything you'd like to add? 

It's just rad that we get to chat and talk about stuff; we see each other at shows and stuff, but it's nice to actually sit and get stuff on the record, and it's been a while since the last LoReLi-related thing, so it's cool to be back on it! 

Thanks, Brad, you're a good egg. 

**The recording/transcription finishes here, but our chat continues for another 2.5 glasses, in which anything and everything is covered, from ex-band-mate for both of us, Champion Leccy's rise to hip-star-dom (pictured earlier in this post) to "the most punchable instruments" via "proper" Mexican food and more band stuff. It was a great hangover.**