So when did you start writing music?
I've played the piano since I was a little kid and always was more interested in making up my own music than playing other peoples'. When I was 13 I stole a sampler from my school, got a computer, and hooked them up to our family computer. I think one second was the longest sample you could store in the sampler. The music I was making around that time was way better than the stuff I make today — it was serious fucking nerd prog rock because I was into Yes and shit around that time and all my tracks were about four hours long. It's been a slippery slope from there down to nerdy electronica as far as I can figure. I had a huge curly red mullet and big glasses and shit. Needless to say I wasn't being bothered by too many girls at that time, so I basically spent all my time making tracks. It's only when I figured out that if I cut my hair I could get some action that I cut my tracks down from half an hour to four minutes.
What's motivating you to make music at the moment?
Most of the time it's listening to music that I like and thinking, "Fuck, I could do that." The rest of the time it's listening to all the terribly uninspired music that people think is so great these days and me being an arrogant fuck and thinking, "Fuck, I could do that ... In a coma."
What kind of recording setup do you use to make your music?
A shitty PC, Acid v1.0, and Sound Forge. There are a couple reasons I use such limited resources to make my music. First, I don't have any money for fancy hardware, and second, I don't have any need for anything above and beyond what I'm using. I don't really feel that it is limiting me at all. As far as I can see all the software on the market performs essentially equivalent functions with some programs dressing them up in fancier ways. All I need is the ability to record sound, loop samples, chop them up, sequence them, and effect them. Any software will provide you with the ability to do this. Since it's only me making the music I don't need to be able to record lots of people playing at once or anything complicated like that. There are no live drums on either of the albums (all of them are made up of lots of different samples); there are live keyboards, guitars, some percussion (which I record while listening to a loop underneath to keep it in time). I don't use MIDI at all. I'm not convinced I would have been any happier with the results or do anything differently with really expensive equipment. Simple methods allow me to get ideas recorded and laid out together really quickly, which is the most important thing for me — so that I can hear how everything is developing and coming together. I also think that having limited technology often forces you to come up with your own ways of doing things that'll probably sound different rather than just using the same granulator plug-in that everyone uses so that you're music ends up sounding like everyone else's. The people I meet who want to ask me about making electronic music are too hung up on the technical side of things and not concerned enough with sounding unique. I think people think there's this magic formula that if they buy the right keyboard then all of a sudden they'll be the Neptunes or something. It doesn't work like that.
Were you already living in England when you made Start Breaking My Heart? No, I was living in Toronto.
I was in university and getting really into buying records again and listening to new music. I had gone to England the previous summer and gone to a festival where I met up with Kieran Hebden, who makes the Four Tet records and is a member of Fridge. His first Four Tet album Dialogue blew me away because it didn't sound like electronic music at all. I was also listening to shitloads of free jazz — Albert Ayler, Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, etc. My friends and I ran a club every month or so in Toronto and we flew Kieran in from London to play at it and basically hung out and made a lot of jokes about barbecuing and sorority girls and that's when I knew he was on the level. About that time Leaf decided they wanted to do an album and I was like, "Well, you can have all this new music I've made or I can dig up those hour long tracks I did when I was a kid and put them out as a collectors only cassette box set." For some reason they went for the new stuff.
So what are you doing now?
Same shit, different pile. I'm living in London and doing my PhD. I've just finished my second album Up In Flames and I'm really excited about it. I'm touring it with a full three person live show with two drum kits. Right now I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend and my guitarist and drummer.
When you're creating a song, what element do you usually start focusing on at first?
Always a melody. I usually just layer things on top of one another but I only really know that I've got a track worth finishing when there's a strong melody that ties it all together. I'm a big fan of "the hook" that's why I like pop music so much. Hopefully the music I make sticks in peoples' heads because there's a memorable melody in it. Who am I kidding? How can I compete with tracks like "Hot in Here"? That shit's infectious.
How do you know when the song is finished?
I probably don't until I listen to it again a couple months down the line and then I can tell if I think it needs something or not. Basically I just need a lot of time to distance myself from the track and then come back to it with a new pair of ears.
