DIRECTIVE IX
electronic artist “EGOSTASIS” shares with us his process and ponderings, as he moves towards a new sound with his music.
Hi everyone, Torkel here. The following is predominantly a self-conducted interview from a Pollyverse member and long-term creative collaborator who goes by many names… squawk75, HYRTHNTHSN, s u d o z n, John, staticrelay, exit, and now with his newest project; EGOSTASIS.
He is an exceedingly talented musician, and with the release of his first album under this new alias, he felt the need to reflect upon his musical journey and process thus far - in order to evolve.
This personal creative insight, and self-discussion of musical direction; is vividly interesting to me, especially as a fellow struggling artist. So thank you kindly to John for sharing this very personal reflection with us all, and I hope that it helps prompt you to have your own positive contemplations after reading it.
Why do you feel like the project needs a new direction?
I have been using Ableton Live on and off for over 10 years now. But unfortunately that doesn’t mean I’ve mastered the program. When I got back into it with the COVID extended trial of Live 11 suite, I had 1 goal; to make something resembling music, and have fun. While I have achieved both of these goals, recently I’ve been finding a lack of joy from using the same techniques/sounds/effects.
While I could go further with the program, I’m beginning to find the limitations of the program specifically for me and the type of music I want to create. I’ve developed habits in the songwriting process, and am in a mind space where I feel like I’m doing the same thing with these - at times not so efficient and useful habits. While this has garnered a new sound and evolved over time, I do feel like in order to find the excitement of discovery that I once had with electronic music, I need to go back to my roots a bit.
(From Torkel)
What was your first physical DAW or piece of music making hardware?
I suppose, to go way back; it was really the piano. I started learning around age 8. My parents bought an electric Yamaha piano, mainly so you could plug in headphones and save everyone’s sanity while you practiced scales for half an hour.
However this electric Yamaha was also a bit like a DAW. You could discover all these styles of music with its backing tracks, load midi disks (floppy disks), and have the piano play for you - a concept I found amazing as a kid. Also it would have to have 100’s of different sounds and drums. So naturally playing around with this piano I would discover all these instruments and their names. You could record stuff to be played back, a lot of little riffs went into the internal memory. I even tried midi sequencing by hand, but it was super laborious; maybe an hour’s work for two bars of a single-line melody. You could play with effects such as reverb and delay. My point is this really was like using a DAW; it covered all the bases.
Like anyone interested in music production and had a computer; I tried a lot of software DAWs. FL studio, reason, and Ableton Live were the main contenders for EDM at the time. However Live was the big new shiny DAW at the time. A young teenage me liked the idea of playing live sets, and more importantly there were a lot of resources out there for learning this electronic music focused DAW, so I decided to focus on that.
What got you into making electronic music/EDM?
I love the sound of synths. Most of my knowledge on how synths work was from reading the manual that came with a plugin for the Novation Bass station. It went over the basics of subtractive synthesis; how envelopes work, what an LFO does, how important filters are, and the basic signal flow of it all. It wasn’t until I got my first piece of hardware though, that I could get a hands-on use for my knowledge.
The Korg Monotribe had a simple one voice subtractive synth, a 3-4 part drum synth, and an 8 button, 1 bar sequencer. All tied together into a portable box that you could run off 6 AA batteries. And it was affordable. Most importantly, it was completely analogue. I’d plug in my headphones to this little device, and be blown away by how rich the waveform sounded. How the slight crackle and haze of the circuitry impacted the sound. I’d found my new favourite hobby. I snapped up heaps of Korg Volcas, an Arturia minibrute, too much stuff really; as I soon discovered that getting the sound into my software DAW and recordable, was a real headache. So when I took a break and came back to music production, keeping everything on the PC felt very freeing, and let me develop my arrangement and composition skills faster than ever before.
(From Torkel)
How do new aliases help with reinventing your own sound?
To me, an alias should embody a concept. While the name isn’t super important, it could be your own name. What makes for a good body of work is a cohesive sound, while some artists will vary the sound from album to album etc. It will still stay under the same alias, so it stays recognisable. Though some artists have thrown this concept out the window.
When I create an alias. I’d sorta like for it to be the full package. A concept, a palette of timbres, a certain genre or styles of arrangement. While I make music though, I very rarely think in terms of this; which I should probably start doing, to improve. I like saying that my music making is like broad strokes of throwing paint at a large canvas and seeing how it lands. I worry about categorisation later, once I step back and analyse meaning, after the fact. To me this is raw expression.
While EGOSTASIS is my latest alias, it has the most full bodied concept to date. I have pretty vivid concepts in my mind on how it should sound. Whereas before with my other projects, they were born of more abstract concepts that I would build around later.
In any case, the goal with EGOSTASIS will be to keep doing what I’m doing, but in a different process. Now I have a concrete idea of how it should sound with my debut album/ep. I now try and almost recreate that sound with new tools. Hopefully bringing to life something more intricate and vivid.
https://soundcloud.com/squawk75