Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #03 (Guest Q&A w/Datassette)
This is an entry in the Track-By-Track series for my mix for The Ghost - see the index.
Track-By-Track is a series that looks back at records you will have heard in my mixes, one by one in the order they were played. Who made them, and when? How did I come across them? And what do they make me feel?
Today’s post features a guest Q&A with Datassette: coder, gear head, tweeter, and one of my favourite makers of intelligent-but-chaotic, silly-but-serious, unpredictable-but-(usually)-danceable tunes. It’s this dialectical character and sense of humour that has always attracted me to his music, including the rough-but-smooth 2006 track I included in my Ghostcast, ‘Moomin’.
I recently sent him a few questions about recording/editing processes, generative music and fonts, and he was kind enough to answer them properly. It’s a great read!
‘Moomin’ was released 15 years ago. What do you remember about making and releasing the track, if anything?
A. Think it was recorded in late 2004 and released a couple of years later. From what I can remember, most sounds were coming from an AKAI S1000 sampler, with an Elektron SIDStation (Commodore 64 Sound Chip) for the bass and some ancient VST for the strings. All sequenced in Cubase, mixed down to stereo on a crap 8 channel mixer with some outboard FX, and recorded back into the computer. I remember it took quite a few attempts to record because my frankenstein computer at the time - with fans as loud as a hairdryer - kept overheating and rebooting itself halfway through the track. Before sending it off for release I put the final mix through a ridiculous broadcast compressor, which I think sounds pretty awful now!
Datassette - Moomin (Spacebar Sentiments, 2006)
All the tracks on your latest album Void Fill Product (2020) are the result of hardware jams, for the most part recorded to tape, which you then edited down to size Teo Macero-style. How do you decide where to cut? How do you know when to stop?
It's much more fun working that way, you're forced to commit to decisions there and then because you can't change them later, you have to hit record while something is sounding good, or you'll lose it forever. It's the antithesis of opening an old DAW project and endlessly fiddling with details.
There's something really appealing about capturing a unique set of conditions that will never happen again. When you've got multiple signal paths feeding into each other and back into themselves, and with generative / semi-random sequences spewing out all the rhythm and note data, things get unpredictable, sounds become fragile. The point where only a 0.01 change of a probability slider could result in dramatically different rhythm, or a tiny nudge on an aux send could start a cascade of unstoppable howling, that's where the interesting stuff happens.
There isn't really much choice in the editing process, with all that chaos going on, it's usually just a case of cutting out all the crap bits and arranging what's left into something that sounds like it was supposed to happen like that all along :)
Your 2012 EP People Without Mouths contains two track titles that suggest giving up control to the machines (or the gods): ‘Bayesian Funk’, which to me sounds like a computer trying to write ‘I Feel For You’ from first principles, and ‘Partita For Unattended Computer’. What role does this relinquishing of control play in your music making? How far can you take it while still feeling like the composer?
The thing about generative music (at least the way I approach it) is that you're selecting very specific aspects of the music to be opened up to randomness, and you're constraining the randomness to very specific min and max values, or setting up multiple options for the computer that you know will always work musically no matter what choice it makes. The more aspects you can open up to chance the more interesting it gets, but the whole thing becomes harder to balance. Most of the time you're listening to a giant mess until you find that sweet spot where suddenly everything just works, it's sort of magical. You're striving for these super rare conditions where something can loop for an hour and produce amazing little fills and solos and things that you'd never come up with manually. You might not be making all the low level decisions about which notes to play or whatever, but it's still you.
Incidentally, ‘Bayesian Funk’ puts me in mind of the OpenAI Jukebox project and my favourite clip from it, this version of Rick Astley that slowly goes mad. Not sure you're aware of it?
Yes! I got completely obsessed with this thing last year. Check out the Machine Learning Special for the MISC.WAVES radio show, mostly constructed from edited OpenAI Jukebox output, Spleeter stems, and other generative bits and pieces. Headphones recommended:
OpenAI Jukebox is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure - some of the sound worlds it spits out are absolutely dripping with organic detail, sometimes it sounds like a live feed from the Kingdom of Hades, and sometimes it generates complete fully-formed belters out of nowhere, albeit in mono and covered in fuzz.
I can't wait to hear how Machine Learning music progresses over the next 10 years - more sophisticated controls, multiple networks interlinked, with much larger sets of training data, and all generated in real time. I guess real music made by humans will always be appealing and never fully disappear, but imagine being able to dial in your exact music taste and listen to an endless stream of brand new material that never repeats, and then press a button and have it transform into something totally different, or have Louis Armstrong start scatting over it or whatever. Not to mention all the weird hybrids and sounds from ‘latent spaces’ that we'll get to hear. It's going to be insane.
One of the most challenging but satisfying things I'm finding about running a label is giving feedback to producers when I have absolutely zero technical knowledge. Do you seek technical and/or non-technical feedback on your music while you're making it and, if so, how and who from?
Not necessarily feedback on works-in-progress, but I have a few threads with other music making friends where we show-n-tell and give honest feedback to help decide which tracks are keepers. It's always good to get opinions from people you trust when putting tracklists together for releases.
I believe you are a font fan. What font would you choose for the following contexts, and why?
1) A letter written to your local MP
2) A passive aggressive notice stuck on the fridge at the office (remember them?)
3) The instruction booklet for a sequel to your game Super Space Rubbish
The IBM line printer typeface from HAL 9000's diagnostic display screens in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
What are you up to now and next that you'd like people to know about?
EP coming out this Autumn of high tempo works, can't announce details yet, but I guess they could be called ‘fast and weird bangers’ :)
Also have a more ambient-ish tape album coming out on Misc. in the next couple of months, really happy with both of these releases.
Looking forward to playing out again too, plague permitting, starting with Proximo at Corsica Studios on September 10th.
Big thanks to Datassette for taking the time!