2023’s DRAGON COP is, in the words of it’s creators, “A love letter to 80’s/90’s Hong Kong and U.S. martial arts movies”. And it succeeds in doing so.
I can’t tell you how good and refreshing it was to see this movie after months of enduring bad and worse made films on my Prime account.

Dragon Cop’s eye for cinematography surpasses and triumphs over other independently made action films. A really well lit and good looking movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t handicap itself on puns and humor. Did I mention already that the action scenes are good too. Yes, there are actors in this film that can really execute choreography with precision. For being a short campy film, this is entertaining. Mixing elements of Martial Arts, Buddy-Cop films, Action films with straight to VHS levels of dialogue – It rocks. 

To summarize it in laymens terms, imagine your favorite Hong Kong Cynthia Rothrock film mixed with equal parts Lethal Weapon, Loaded Weapon 1, Replacement Killers, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Triple Impact (1992) and good splashes of Albert Pyun. 

The only negative I can take away from this film is that it is too short. Yes, Dragon Cop is actually the best possible trailer you could have for a full blown feature film/follow-up sequel. As you read this, the Mase Brothers are hard at work on Dragon Cop 2: Dragon’s Revenge. Absolutely something I am looking forward to seeing once it is completed.

I was blessed to be able to speak with the Mase Brothers about this project via social media and ask them a few questions.

I wanted a powerful theme for Dragon Cop like it was done in the movies of the 80s, and its title « Rise Of The Dragon » takes up all the codes of the genre! He really has an amazing voice. There is also talk of developing other songs in Dragon’s Revenge, the sequel to Dragon Cop, where the Colombian composer and longtime friend Meteor (already present on Cyborg Deadly Machine) will also be invited. I like being able to work with several artists from different countries, it’s really great and it would be impossible without the internet. In any case, I recommend that you go and discover its fabulous artists who are absolutely talented and quite unknown in the end.

But, believe it or not, this brilliant collaboration almost slipped through the cracks of history. Heck, even this interview almost didn’t happen!

“…would it be possible to reschedule the call for tomorrow? Eric’s been out of commission today with a migraine…” – Makeup and Vanity Set (hereafter referred to as MAVS)

My heart sank. I’d been interested in interviewing these two “reclusive” synth pioneers (separately) for years. But the truth is, in spite of MAVS infamous robber mask and Sferro’s disdain for being photographed, neither of them are truly reclusive. They’d just rather focus on what really matters – creating music – instead of being a “brand.” MAVS is also notoriously busy, often working on multiple film soundtracks and albums at once.

Sferro’s Only Known Photograph – Trust Me, I looked!

All that work and a surprise bout of COVID almost stopped this album from being produced. Thankfully, sometimes the stars align even in this, the darkest of timelines. Never say never.

Looking back it was kind of like a very nice,  “…you blew it.” – MAVS

So, what was the genesis of the album? How did you two come to work together?

Sferro: “I reached out to Matt just to see if he was busy…. if he had time to maybe do a track. I thought it was just gonna be a single track…and yeah, he’s a very busy guy so it took a while.”

MAVS: “I had a million things going on – and I just sort of sat on it. It was totally my fault. He had followed up a few times, and I said “I still want to do it!” but… it just kept slipping to like the bottom of the stack.”

I’ve loved Eric’s stuff for so long – and we have the Ohio connection – and I thought this would be super cool to do. So finally I scratched out some time and I sat down one day and did a track…and immediately after, I got COVID. So I was bedridden for a week, and Eric DM’d me on Instagram and said, “Hey, man if you’re not gonna do anything with these tracks, I think I’m just gonna… uh, finish them.” Looking back it was kind of like a very nice,  “…you blew it.”

Sferro: *Laughter*

MAVS: “So I replied back and was like, “NO no, no, no, no – I did one! I did one!” and I sent him a dropbox link and he was really into it. I got better from COVID, and we just… kept going. After that the record itself came together super fast. I mean, it took like three weeks.”

That’s a great story! But what’s this “Ohio connection”? I’m from Ohio myself.

MAVS: It’s funny, Eric and I have never met in person – but he actually lives in [Northern Ohio,] which is where I’m from. He’s actually super close to where my family lives.

Sferro: We had no idea until he posted a picture while visiting and I was like, “Oh Shit you’re like two minutes away from my house!”

MAVS: *Laughs* “Yeah, so we had flirted a few times by having our remixes featured on the same album. More recently we were both on the Demin Initiate (Remixes) album – but yeah we’d never worked together properly before this one.

A lot of people seem to think Demin’s work is actually a Com Truise side project.

MAVS: “I don’t know man…Having talked to Seth over the years, I know he’s into drum and bass and some other stuff. It would be kinda weird for him to just do another project so close to his sound, sonically.”

That tracks. So, other artists have started making more music in that “Com Truise” style and calling it “Datawave” – and your new album “Wavefinder” definitely seems to fit that category. Was that intentional? what’s your take on that?

MAVS: “Don’t get me wrong, I love Seth’s work – and the idea wasn’t just to make something derivative… But we had just finished the Demin remixes, and…man, I really loved Demin’s track. I didn’t want to deviate too much in the remix… because I just liked the sound. I was curious about it. I had never done anything in the sort of “Datawave” space.

The last couple records I’ve been working on have also been masted by Ben Braun – Hotel Pools. I’m a big fan of his music. So, I started listening to a lot more chillsynth… and one of the things I thought was really interesting about it is that the tempos are way slower… I started to think about the fact that it really took my back to my roots-roots. Like, as a kid, finding Autechre… you know, all those guys were Hip Hop guys. And I feel like, chillsynth, datawave, these kinds of artists have a similar root. They have one foot in that genre – that kind of “head nod” feeling. There’s something appealing about that.

So no, it wasn’t like, “Hey this sounds like datawave” – that was the last thing on my mind. It was more that I just enjoyed going back…so I thought, “How can we slow this down even more?” And then the when you slow things down, the resolution gets a little wider. So you can suddenly like, bit more, you know, interesting things and have more interesting sort of syncopation happening musically.

So later on when I started to dig into the stuff Eric had sent me, it just seemed like the logical progression, like the place to go. You always want to do something that’s exciting to you – you know? And so in that moment, that was what was exciting.”

I also felt like there were some strong 90s references in “Wavefinder,” and you seemed to have really delved into the 90s vibes on “Emotion Engine” too. Was that move away from the 80’s intentional – or a sort of spontaneous occurrence like the “datawave” sound?

Sferro: “I will say that at least one, maybe two of the tracks were actually “Emotion Engine” outtakes I had sent over…but [in general, it does feel like a progression.] I definitely don’t want to do the typical synthwave stuff anymore. I’ve done that, beaten that to death. It just kind of felt right and it’s what seemed attractive to me: an early 2000s, late 90s kind of thing.

I don’t think the next Sferro album will be datawave though. I think “Wavefinder” is really awesome, and I think it’s awesome as a collaboration – but I don’t think I’ll explore that direction myself. It’s not the direction I want to go. I think I’m going to lean more heavily toward the early 2000s kinda… well, you’ll see in the new Hyperlinked Dream Sync album! It’s more like, Portishead-y.

“I definitely don’t want to do the typical synthwave stuff anymore. I’ve done that, beaten that to death. It just kind of felt right and it’s what seemed attractive to me: an early 2000s, late 90s kind of thing.” – Sferro

BUT, I do think datwave is awesome. The term is still kinda fresh to me… honestly I only recently heard of it when we started making [Wavefinder.]”

Eric, you’ve mentioned in interviews that your workflow is mostly digital – and Matt, you seem to mostly like analog – or as you like to say, “Play with the noodles.” Did those difference cause any conflict?

MAVS: “First of all, in spite of the room around me, I’m not an analog purist. Whatever works, you know? If you can make cool stuff in GarageBand, go for it. I’m not precious about that. What’s exciting to me is figuring out new ways to approach a workflow.

MAVS In His Studio

Anyway, Eric had sent me fully formed ideas… that I thought was really cool, I dug it. But, it was different that what I’m used to and I had to totally reorient my thought process. I had to come out of that comfort zone and be challenged a little bit by someone else’s thought process – sonically.”

It was awesome trying to experiment while still being reverent to it too. It was it was fun – I had a blast working on it!”

“I’ve put out a lot of records, and when you go through that process, there’s always at least one thing that totally shits the bed….but with this one, none of that happened.”

Sferro: “That reminds me – at one point Matt was saying, “I think we need a couple songs in here without drums…” So I’d send some stuff over without drums… and then drums ended up on it. It just had to have it.”

MAVS: “Right? …Other times he would add stuff on the back end and send it back…. It was a total democracy the whole way through. We were just trying to make something that was exciting to the two of us.”

It sounds like perfect match! Was there anything that caused conflict? You know, caused some sort of problem?

MAVS: “The thing came together in a way that was the least forced, you know, like it, it all happened really fast, it all felt really good!”

Sferro: “That reminds me of one track in particular, I sent a demo over and said “Uh…I don’t know if this will work…. And Matt said “Never say never!” and then sent it back – and it sounded sick!”

MAVS: “Right? I gotta say… I’ve put out a lot of records, and when you go through that process, there’s always at least one thing that totally shits the bed. You’re forced to work with an artist you don’t want to work with, or you can’t release on a certain date, or there’s a huge backorder on vinyl…”

Right? Thanks Adele! 

MAVS + Sferro: *Laughter*

MAVS: “…but with this one, none of that happened. We went back and forth and thought, “Okay, we have an album here.” Then we sent it off to Ben Braun [Hotel Pools] to get it mastered, and that guy just knows how to make bass happen in ways that, well, I’m both comfortable and uncomfortable with! Then we started talking to Andrew from Stratford Court. Stratford Court was almost a shot in the dark… [I’m] a huge fan of the label. It’s so well curated. We waited a while, and then Andrew reached out and said he’d love to do it!”

And honestly, I was floored. I hadn’t sent it anywhere else, but I had a list of [labels]… I just figured you know, Stratford Court to me was like swinging for the fences…and there’s no preorder. It’s all ready to go on Friday.” [Today]

MAVS + Sferro Wavefinder Vinyl From Stratford Court Records

Sferro: “I really love how “into” the record [Andrew] seems. Every time he replies to an email he says how he’s like… ‘really excited about this.’ It’s so cool – it’s awesome!

I’m excited too – and not to spoil the review, but I really think this album is special. Do you two think you’ll be working together in the future?

MAVS: It’s funny with this record, this is the most PR I’ve done for a record in a long time. But I think it’s just because I’m proud of the thing we made, you know? I want to make sure that we do our due diligence to Stratford and present it to the world in the right way.

Really.. I’m just, I’m happy to make music. I’m happy to be able to process the all of the shit that’s happening around us through music…and I’m super happy to have somebody like Eric to collaborate with…

Sferro: “Likewise!”

MAVS: “…and to you know, to see it, see it go out into the world man. It’s all good at this point. So I’m just happy to be here.”

Sferro: “I mean, I have ideas for the future. Things I’ll bring up to Matt eventually, in due time.” *Laughs* But I’m just super stoked we got the opportunity to do this. Matt’s fucking awesome. He’s a super chill dude. I’ve loved his music forever. And it’s cool that some OG’s Got to work together. So… I’m stoked.

So perhaps this isn’t the end for this dangerous duo?

Sferro: “Never say never.”

Editors Note: There is so, so much more to this interview. Both MAVS and Sferro discussed their creative evolution, how they came to find electronic music and two kids stuck in Ohio, and how the digital age affects nostalgia, and their own approach when it comes to organic-feeling synthesis. For more of that, keep an eye out for my upcoming review of “Wavefinder” after it drops!

Before getting into the current EP which you’re about to release. I’d like to go back to the start of your career as a solo artist. Where were your musical goals and ambitions at as you moved on from Yellowcard to a solo career?

When Yellowcard first split up, I had been making plans. My original plan was to produce records for other artists, but I learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t necessarily where my heart was at, creatively. If I was going to put in hours and hours of hustling to create a new path for myself, that just wasn’t the way I wanted to go; going to shows five nights a week, doing the sales pitch to bands to get them to come in and work with you… It didn’t feel very fulfilling to me and everything just led me back to making my own music.

It really kickstarted when my buds in New Found Glory offered me a full US tour with them, as an opener and rhythm guitarist. They didn’t really specify what “opening” meant. They probably assumed I’d bring an acoustic guitar and play some Yellowcard songs and I did play some, but it was also a catalyst for me to think about having a record to sell at the merch booth. That’s what led me to record the first EP Thirteen. It was sort of a double-edged sword because I wanted something to have on the tour, but I also wanted to make something so far removed from Yellowcard and anything I’d done before that I knew the hard pop-punk fans on the tour were going to be weirded out. I could’ve leaned harder in the sounds of the past, but I decided to stick with what I thought was right. It was an EP of very stripped down, ambient acoustic tracks. It was hit-or-miss on the New Found Glory tour, for sure [laugh]. There were some nights that were really cool and some nights where I couldn’t hear myself playing because everyone was talking over what I was doing and totally uninterested. I was mentally prepared for that, though.

I started getting some more opportunities to tour, which led me to record a second EP, Virtue. That record took me all over the world and I got to open for Mayday Parade on a full US tour. I also did one solo headlining tour. At the end of all of it, I had to take stock of how much work I was doing to stay on the road and be touring full time versus the return and growth that was happening with it. The pandemic hit around the same time, forcing me off the road. During that time, I really honed in and focused on what I wanted to do, where I want to go.

I really have a desire to move into scoring for film and television, and you can hear the cinematic elements on Everything Except Desire because it’s the first time I didn’t have to consider touring. I was able to cut loose and let all of my influences, which have been primarily electronic, experimental, EDM… It’s been that way for many years, much more than rock n’ roll. I was able to experiment and not worry about how it would tour. Maybe I will play some shows with it, but what it has really done for me is get the ball rolling with a few tracks. I’m constantly creating now. I’m in my studio every day, practising scoring, creating ambient pieces and doing as much as I can to build a collection of songs to show to people and get closer to the goal of scoring film and TV. I think the sound of the EP was very much done with that in mind. I tried to think in a cinematic sense. It’s very movement-driven and I wanted it to feel like the EP had “scenes” that were developing and changing. Being forced into staying at home and working on these tracks really opened a floodgate for me and I’m in a totally new place, musically. I really enjoy what I’m doing and what I’m working towards.

How would you describe this EP if you were to translate it into visual form?

As electronic music does, the whole thing has a certain “pulse” to it. A good example of seeing it visualized is the music video for ‘Face in a Frame’, directed by Stefano Bertelli (Seenfilm : www.seenfilm.com ). The way he used light flares and flashes is one good way to describe it. It’s got pulsing flourishes of light. I tried to make it very colourful with the sounds that I was choosing and the layers that I was adding. I’ve had a lot of experience in the last few years working in the space of electronic music. My close friend Ryan Mendez from Yellowcard and I have been working on a project called JEDHA, which is strictly instrumental experimental EDM. I’ve had a lot of experience working with him building these big, lush soundscapes. This was the opportunity for me to translate a lot of that experience into my solo stuff. My favourite song on the record is the last song ‘Union Chapel’, and one of my favourite moments on the record is when the bass and kick hit at the end of the song to take you out after you had been lost in the trance of the piano arpeggio. It may be a cliché visual, but it does feel like this warm blanket that comes over you at the end of the EP, to cruise you out at the end of your journey.

Back in 2014, you released the album Lift A Sail, which marked quite a departure from Yellowcard’s established sound through its inclusion of electronic elements. Looking back, how did that experience affect your approach to writing electronic music?

That is my favourite Yellowcard record, contrary to popular opinion [laugh]. It’s a very personal record for me and it was a time when my musical palette was shifting so dramatically away from Rock n’ Roll and into Post Rock and ambient EDM. Ryan Mendez has had such a cool, broad palette of musical influences from a very young age. He’s into original Aphex Twin and old Daft Punk. I, on the other hand, grew up fully as a rock n’ roll fan that I had a stigma connected to electronic music, like many people I’ve talked to still have. It still exists. There’s still an idea that it’s not made with ‘real instruments’, and I was that way for a long time too.

Around the time of Viva La Vida, Coldplay started working with Jon Hopkins, and Ryan Mendez is a huge, longtime fan of him. Around that time, Ryan helped me connect the dots from Coldplay to Jon Hopkins by giving me a copy of Immunity. I had never heard and seen a piece of music like the title track on that Jon Hopkins. It just changed my whole perception of electronic composition. It changed everything for me. I started asking for more recommendations went down the rabbit hole of playlists and recommended artists. That all led to Lift a Sail. I was so inspired by these influences but we still had to make a rock record.

Ryan being the more knowledgeable person in the world of electronic music, we tasked each other with him writing the nastiest riffs for the intros and choruses whereas I was in ‘Studio B’ pressing buttons. I was building loops, experimenting with sub-bass and all kinds of stuff I had never done to use for the less intense sections of the songs on the album. I played almost no guitar on that album. I spent most of that record writing lyrics and producing my first ever loop and beats. We ended up with this interesting hybrid record that no one really understood [laugh], but we loved it and I still love it! It was the first record that felt like I was genuinely standing on my own two feet as a writer, as opposed to writing within a genre. I don’t want to minimize or say that the records don’t have value, it’s just that there was this undeniable shift that happened with Lift a Sail. When Yellowcard broke up, Ryan and I immediately decided to make electronic music together. Four years later, we’ve just finished a full-length record, we’re doing a remix for a big band and we’ve been hired to score the first season of a new show for a massive brand. It’s starting to happen for us! It’s funny that you mention Lift a Sail, I appreciate it because that is where it started for me, from a writing and production standpoint.

The first thing that struck me on the album, compositionally, is the heavy emphasis on ambience and space. Vocals are sparse, the arrangements feel quite stripped down and you really give each idea the breathing space it needs.

I owe a lot of what you’re picking up on to the artists that I listen to. I’ve been on a crash course of learning how to make great music through their albums and learning how to create that sense of space. Part of what you’re sensing comes from two things. First, there’s the way the EP was composed in the middle of that summer during the pandemic and I was by myself in the studio, very focused on this specific batch of songs. The songs do feel like they grew up from the same roots. Secondly, there’s the cinematic element of it that I’ve been learning as I’ve worked towards this goal. I pay attention to what showrunners, music directors and editors are looking for. While this wasn’t something that I was writing for a show or a film, I was conscious of how hand in hand this type of ambient electronic music goes with visuals. I wanted to make sure that each song would rise to these places and take moments to breathe because when an editor is looking at a waveform, they’ll just delete the message if the waveform doesn’t look right.

You’ve lived in quite a lot of different places. You’ve been moving around!

Too much! I even lived in Osaka for about two months when I was producing a record in 2019. I left home when I was 19 for the first time to go to California with a band I was playing in. I went home, ended up playing in Yellowcard, moved back to California for a couple of years before going to Manhattan for a year. I moved back to California again… My family is on the east coast and my job was on the west coast, so I struggled throughout my life to find where I’m going to settle. And here I am moving again!

As an album that has such a strong sense of space, would it be fair to say that location  physically affects the places you end up emotionally and how you express them?

Being so nomadic has always inspired my music. It’s helped me as a creator to have new experiences in new places, meeting new people, new people, new bars … it’s always helped me not get stuck in rut as a writer. When my environment is constantly changing it helps my music change as well. I think it’s particularly true for this EP because it was made during such an unsettling time. I was feeling very unsure because I would normally try to do is knock out one or two tours a year, which provides me with the opportunity to be home working on scoring and composing, which isn’t paying me yet. I’m just making stuff right now and hoping that someday it will go somewhere. When the lockdown happened, I was in California and had no place to go and I was freaking out, so I moved back to Florida for a bit. As a result, this EP has so much exploration of self in it. There’s not much storytelling, it’s really about self-reflection. I had to make a choice when I got to Florida to wallow in this stress, anxiety, sadness and fear, or turn it into something good. At the beginning of the pandemic and before leaving for Florida, a lifelong friend of mine got stuck at my house with me in California for a whole month. He’s very active and expresses to everyone he knows how important meditation is in his life, so I started doing it with him. It was the key to my success through the pandemic. When I got to Florida, I was really bummed, I was excited to live in LA again and start to work towards film composing, and here I was back at square one. So meditation really helped me to let those thoughts pass through and not let them consume me and direct my path. This allowed me to compose with such a clear mind. Had I not gone through those moves and those shifts, I wouldn’t have had those dark thoughts to overcome which poured into this record. I think it’s always been a part of me as a songwriter. Maybe even more so now than ever.

Was it a particular challenge to distil your thoughts into so few words for this record or was it a natural byproduct of the songwriting process?

I think it fits into what we were talking about with JEDHA. We’ve learned so much about restraint and refining a loop or synth melody so much that it’s all that it needs to be, it doesn’t need to change later or have another layer added. Vocally, there was very much a sense that I didn’t need to add any more. There’s peace in this. ‘Face in a Frame’ is such a different style of writing for me; to have the same verse happen twice in a song. It felt right, like the things I was learning about composing this style of music bled over into the vocals, using them more as an instrument than a “storytelling element” in a song. I was pretty conscious of that, yeah.

You’ve stated before that you’ve been a fan of video games for a long time. Yellowcard’s music has even been featured in a number of videogames throughout the years and you’ve done a couple of gaming streams over Twitch. What are some of the games you grew up playing? Have you ever been into a game that happened to feature one of your songs?

As a lucky kid, I never wanted for anything. I wasn’t spoilt rotten, but I had a great life as a kid and I had a Nintendo. I’m an eighties kid and I was the prime age for the NES when it came out. That said, I was such an imaginative, theatrical, outdoors kind of kid that I didn’t play the Nintendo anywhere near as much as other kids around me. I loved it but it was never my instinct. I was more of a worldbuilding imaginative type of kid, acting out movies I liked and stuff. I wasn’t so much into Mario at all. I loved Kung-Fu, I loved Contra and I loved The Legend of Zelda. I didn’t get the SNES but I got a Sega Genesis and so I was obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog. Then came the N64 with Ocarina of Time, the most iconic game of all time. I actually played it at a buddy’s house a month ago, along with Goldeneye! I still have memories of sitting on the floor with friends and playing 4-way split-screen Goldeneye. Those were the glory days! After that, I’ve been an Xbox player. We got free Xboxes. One of our songs was featured in SSX3, so they gave us consoles to be able to play it. That was when I got back into gaming after high school. The thing about gaming now is that I never got into competitive online gaming because I was on tour and we never had Internet. For a long time, we played video games all the time. We had consoles on the bus and that was a huge time passing activity. FIFA tournaments were bloodthirsty! It was so hardcore! With the pandemic, my social interaction throughout the lockdown was playing Call of Duty with other band friends. I was dragged into it because I thought I’d be terrible at it, but it became more about the hang, spending time with friends. In turn, I actually became addicted to it. I’m actually trying to ration what days of the week I let myself get on a game because I love it. I’m a PC gamer now and I think my favourite game now is Warzone. I also really got into F1 Racing. I want to get a racing rig in my new house if I can and be able to race with an ultrawide setup [laugh]. I love it! So I was a spotty, touch-and-go gamer throughout my life.

Closing off, can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?

I’ll go with the pandemic theme. First, Some Kind of Peace by Ólafur Arnalds has been a sanctuary for me. I still listen to it regularly. All of his work is incredible. He made the record during the pandemic and had to work with the string players at a distance and whatnot. You can really feel the solitude in the recordings.

For books, I’m actually reading Dune right now and I’m obsessed! It’s the fastest I’ve ever read a 600-page book in my life. If I’m thinking all-time favourites, I think I’d have to say The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think I read that book on one cross-country flight. I’ve read it several times since.

For movies, I’m not allowed to say Star Wars. It can’t count. I’m going to go with what I think is one of the greatest feats of filmmaking in History. I’m much more of a film person than a book person. I think the greatest film is Schindler’s List. I just can’t think of a film that carries more weight and is more beautifully shot. It perfectly encompasses everything a film is supposed to do. It’s heartbreaking, it’s funny, it’s beautiful… the script is incredible and the score is unbelievable.

Everything Except Desire is out now on all streaming platforms.

At what point did you decide that radio would become central to this new Starcadian chapter?

It was on Christmas of 2012! I had just wrapped up Sunset Blood, which was my first foray into electronic music. I was literally learning the concepts of synths as I was writing songs. As I was writing the album, I realized that it was shaping up into a mythology. It was during that time that I started writing the first iteration of ‘Satellites’. As I was writing the mythology and planning what I would do with Midnight Signals, I realized that it would all culminate into the concept of Radio Galaxy: frequencies, feedback loops, time loops, causalities…

Has ‘Satellites’ kept the same role and position in the Starcadian narrative?

It has. That song is pretty key to tying everything from the first single ‘He^rt’ to Radio Galaxy. It forms a loop. The way I formed it in my head is that Midnight Signals I and Radio Galaxy form their own loop, and the entire trilogy is Sunset Blood looping back into Radio Galaxy, like a sub-loop and a loop. There are subtle mirrors and reflections between all three albums to tie them together. I have this obsession with Leitmotivs and I made sure I put all of my creative efforts into coming up with them in beginning and distributing them as I formed more and more of the consecutive albums.

 To what extent do you let musical experimentations guide or change the narrative you set out to tell?

Funnily, I did it the most on Sunset Blood and cut it off after Saturdaze. I had a massive collection of songs in the beginning that I retrofitted into a narrative. Once I did that, I started actually building a narrative, which was spurred by doing the ‘He^rt’ video. Ever since then, I’ve basically been laying down a set number of tracks, each with a brief description of how they sound, their cadence, tempo, their narrative lows and highs. I will basically write to that. I also have a pretty comprehensive sketch library where I pick stuff, but when it comes to the narrative I think the overarching story defines things more than the sketches I have at my disposal.

Would you say this approach helps you or is it merely a necessity for the vision you’re aiming for?

I feel it’s a wonderful way to sabotage yourself if you really want to deliver something fast. This is the best way to not do that because it adds the complication of making sure everything ties together and stays consistent. It’s tough when you want to break off and write a bossa nova song or a spaghetti western song. The more weird and extreme the music, the more I’m into it. I relax to the weirdest shit I can find. Whenever I see a framework, I have a tendency to kick sand at it and build things upside down. That’s my instinct at all times. That’s something I keep to myself, I don’t put it on the audience. I fight that battle in me, and hopefully, the resulting product is somewhere in between commercial and completely uncommercial weirdness.

 What was it like working on this album with Rob O’ Neil? There must have been some extra constraints in creating an album at such a particular time.

You would think it would hinder us, but the reality is that this is how we’ve always worked. We used to work together before moving to LA. Back in 2010, he texted me telling me he had just found a cockpit for 200$, and that’s basically where it all came from. I never saw him once during the filming of ‘He^rt’. He bought the cockpit, he shot the raw footage and I edited it together, added the visual effects, and that was it! The only time we didn’t shoot something separately was on Freak Night. I flew out to LA in December 2019, which was very lucky timing. We narrowly missed the pandemic.

Other than it being, in my opinion, your most ambitious album to date, I also feel like Radio Galaxy sounds more diverse, dynamic and somehow more guitar-oriented. How would you describe the arrangement and writing process compared to your previous albums?

You’re completely right, it’s definitely a lot more guitar-oriented. I originally played the guitar, I didn’t play the synth or the keys at all, but there was a point in the mid-2000s’ where society decided that we were over guitar music. I think it was during the unfortunate time of dubstep and EDM hitting the charts, which unfortunately shoved guitar out of the door. On the other hand, it also allowed me to open my mind to different instruments and different production techniques, which led to Sunset Blood.

 I never quite left the guitar, but I put it down for a little bit. Radio Galaxy marks me coming back in contact with my guitar playing roots, connecting to the spirit of Soundgarden. There’s a lot of Soundgarden on this album. The first CD I bought was Superunknown and it completely defined the way I write lyrics and music, the way I think about signatures and bars… You can definitely hear it on ‘Gutter’, for instance.

I’m still learning how to be a musician and how to write songs and albums. Radio Galaxy is me simplifying but also expanding at the same time, starting with a strict pentatonic guitar-minded way of composing, doing the chord progressions with my hands and leading with my voice rather than writing completely with my fingers on the keyboard and thinking about it in an Ableton, music-production way. It was very freeing. It gave me a new lease in songwriting life. I believe it’s really important for a writing musician to put down their preferred instrument and pick a completely different one. It will completely change the way you structure songs and stories and lyrics.

 Some songs even feel like they could be played by a full band.

I think that comes from shedding some of the layers. Sunset Blood with maximalist, layered decadence and Midnight Signals pulled it back a little bit. As you grow, you try to learn to be more scalpel-like with your compositions and instrumentation and shed the layers. I think that this was me subconsciously thinking in band terms.

Musicians talk a lot about the ‘rule of threes’ where you should at all times hear three distinct elements to a song. You don’t need more, the human mind can only focus on three. That principle somehow bore itself into my brain and I held myself from adding too much stuff. Tracks like ‘Lovebeats’ have very few layers. It’s just something where I just wanted to get the point across as simply as I could.

 Another noticeable shift marked by this album is its red album cover, a radical departure from the predominantly blue tones of previous releases.

It’s funny that for all the meticulous planning I do, that’s the one thing I didn’t notice until I put the album up on Bandcamp for pre-order. I told myself “Huh, there’s a distinct lack of blue in this, sh-t!” *laughs*.

I would love to say that it was intentional, but it was probably just another subconscious way of shedding the same thing. Midnight Signals was more in the same pool as Sunset Blood, but it was a small, subtle attempt to nudge people out of it with songs like ‘Polyana’ and ‘Trapped in America’, stuff that wasn’t necessarily 80s-inspired or in my usual sound. It was very intentionally peppered there to prepare people for songs like ‘I Demoni’ or Shadowcatcher from last year. It was a gentle way of pulling the listeners in the direction that I want to go towards while keeping my style. I think it was the same deal from a visual perspective. I love dark blues, but this cover felt more like the panic attack that I wanted some of the songs to feel like.

 The song ‘Neonhead’ sounds like a term you’d use to describe a fan of retro-synth music, the same way metal fans are referred to as “metalheads”.  The line ‘I am Neonhead’ even reminds me of the opening quote in Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Does any of this make sense to you?

You’re pretty close! I really enjoyed writing the lyrics to that song. The reason why I call these songs “ear-movies” is that I like to put myself in that mental space when I write them. For this song, I got stuck in this Lovecraftian, neon-soaked cosmic horror world as I was writing it. The metal and Synthwave worlds have such a big overlap, so I put myself in the shoes of 15-year-old metalhead-me and how badass it felt singing ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’. That’s what I was aiming for.

To me, ‘Neonhead’ is the sound of a neon-soaked live show 20 000 leagues under the sea, surrounded by bioluminescent Lovecraftian monsters.

 Whereas some of your previous songs such as Trapped in America carried a serious message through a heavy, ominously themed track, it seems like some of your harshest bits of social criticism on this album derive their power from the fact that they’re set to such upbeat, funky tracks. Was there a conscious decision to play on this counterpoint?

Absolutely! I actually got a tweet from a fan today that illustrated this point pretty well: “Only Starcadian can make music that kinda calls me out but also makes me dance to my own flaws”. That’s more or less what I was going for.

I’m not going to sit on a twitter-throne and judge people for specific things, I’m going to call it out with a bit of comedy and satire. Neither ‘Culture’ nor ‘Propaganda’ are me chiding people telling them to not appropriate or start a youtube channel. It’s all stupid. The offensive things that people do are stupid, and the way you’re reacting to them, even though you’re correct, is stupid. It’s all stupid and pointless. So just dance.

It is interesting that a lot of people read ‘Culture’ and ‘Propaganda’ as a critique of Republicans and Far-right people. It’s more about the 15-year-old teenagers that ape and assimilate working-class culture, turning it into an expensive hobby while the actual working class is suffering because of those upper-middle-class families. These kids will make a Youtube channel where they talk about self-fulfilment, self-healing grifts and hustles. It’s all done on the blood of people that don’t do that kind of stuff; people that make your coffee and lunch, drive you to work, clean the building that you work in…

 The Internet is a weird place to be in, hence the lyric “the web’s a big mistake”. I feel like your only two options are to either go full alt-right incel, which is the worst possible option you can have, or get into left-wing socialist twitter, where moderation and common sense is out the window.

It’s a very bizarre landscape to release any kind of art into. The only way to break out of that binary classification of art is to adopt this jester-like ribbing of both sides of the argument.

 People are lonelier than ever. We’re starving for real conversation, real contact and the only way to do that is to post a hot take for people to interact with you. Democratized art is just piling up, desperately slicing throats and punching babies to get to the top. When I was a kid, “selling out” was a bad word. Right now, people would kill for a sponsorship or promoted video. It’s embarrassing. But because that’s a reality, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to say something genuinely stupid, controversial and out of bounds to get people to talk about you.

 Amongst the most notable features of this album are the inclusion of new instruments, most notably on ‘Cannibal Gods’. How did these enter the picture in terms of arrangement?

I found myself in the middle east during that same Christmas in 2012 as I was writing ‘Satellites’. I spent a lot of time there as a child. I’m from Greece, which is a big melting pot of Middle-Eastern and European cultures due to it being conquered by the Turks, Venetians, Moors etc. So a lot of our music is based on Middle-eastern instruments. For instance, the Oud is the predecessor of the Bouzouki, which is a Greek instrument.

 It was natural for me to at least do a song where I have a lot of instrumentation that I’m comfortable and familiar with. While I was in the Middle East, I started writing tidbits of that song and trying to imagine what would a Justice song sound like if it was written by Tinariwen. That more or less describes my influences: the Middle-Eastern cultures that I grew up with and French Electronic music.

As with ‘Neonhead’, the phrase ‘Cannibal Gods’ bopped into my head as yet another Lovecraftian cosmic horror vision.

That particular song’s arrangement of traditional instruments and modern sounds actually reminded me of Sepultura.

I love Sepultura! One of the big influences on this album was Sepultura and Mixhell, which is Igor Cavalera and his wife Laima Leyton’s current band. I actually played with them in the Underworld in London. They’re the nicest people on the planet! They have this song called Antigalactic which I’m obsessed with and that was very much inspiring a lot of the songs on this album. One of my favourite albums of all time is also Against by Sepultura. It’s very percussive, full of unimaginable triplets and syncopations. It definitely inspired quite a bit of Radio Galaxy. 

Without a doubt the craziest track on the album is the second to last song, “I Demoni”, named after the Italian translation of Dostoïevky’s novel. It feels very Giallo-esque with some Italian Prog influences. How did this song come about?

It’s definitely inspired by Giallo and Night of the Demons. I think this song marks the first time I thought to myself: “F-ck it, I’m just going to make the music I really want to make and not think of it in terms of aesthetics and vibes”. That made it fit even better into the album, weirdly. This is purely distilled Morricone, Mr.Bungle, Goblin and the oodles of metal that I listen to. I approached it as a Goblin song being produced by the band Jamaica. Visually, the song is essentially a splatter-fest in a room full of demons in the last ten minutes of a Giallo movie. 

Last time we met, you mentioned that your next songs were going to have some Mr.Bungle influences. Listening to this track, it finally started to make sense. Stylistically, it is easily the most radical shift you’ve done so far.

That’s not going anywhere. The next time I feel like doing something like that, I feel like it will go even further. I don’t know what ‘further’ would sound like, though. It all goes back to that ‘itch’ of wanting to do an album that everyone’s going to either hate or get super confused by. How much you curb that instinct defines you as an artist, I find. If you don’t have that instinct, that’s just weird. Aesthetics is basically how much you allow your mind to deviate from what’s expected of you.

To finish off, can you give us an album, book and film recommendation?

It’s sad because I used to read two books at a time, but Radio Galaxy took up so much of my time that it took up most of the time I wasn’t spending on work. I did listen to an audiobook of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind. It’s about the rise and creation of New Hollywood, started by Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas… it’s a monumental telling of how New Hollywood took over.

While I was doing Midnight Signals, I kept noticing that my ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist kept recommending New Disco to me. Ever since then, all of my recommendations are Joe Jackson, Dr.Feelgood… all power-pop, punk, metal and guitar music in general. I think I’m finding my inspiration in guitar music again, just like the good old days.

Film-wise, I’m still in the same space as before. I’m done with American cinema. I think I’m firmly entrenched in Asian and European cinema. I’m just exhausted by Marvel. I’m even exhausted by A24.

My absolute favourite filmmakers right now are Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. They made a movie called Resolution and a sequel called Endless. Their first two movies are the most groundbreaking films I’ve seen in a long time. It doesn’t get more meta than those movies. They delve into the nature of films and their viewers, looping and rewatching a film. It very much informed Radio Galaxy and the whole mythology. Their stuff is incredibly exciting and it’s uncategorizable. I don’t think those two films can ever be popular, but they’re a mine for ideas.

 Thank you to Starcadian for taking the time to answer our questions!

 Starcadian ‘Radio Galaxy’ is out now via Bandcamp and Spotify.

For those unfamiliar with your work: where are you from and what is it that first drew you towards electronic music?

Hi, I’m Miles Matrix, a Synthwave / 80s Electro producer based in Vienna. I’m also a Synthwave DJ. I’ve been living in Vienna for about ten years now. I was born in Gibraltar but grew up in Germany after our family moved around Europe including France for a while.

I’ve been into electronic music all of my life really. Some of my first cassettes were 80s Electro, or “breakdance music”. I also had some cassette compilations where some artists covered popular tracks as synthesizer instrumental pieces, so I got into the sound very early. My taste in music is pretty eclectic, I am a huge Oasis fan too for example but electronic music has probably been the most steady constant in my life. I remember in the 90s, in my teens, I used to listen to recordings from the Love Parade and dance on my own to all the Techno, turning my desk light on and off again, to imitate a strobe.

The liner notes for LA BOUM mention a mixtape that introduced you to “Breakdance Music”. What brought you to consider fully embracing this sound for this latest album?

Yeah, that was a cassette a classmate of mine recorded for me in primary school. He was into breakdance, and while I couldn’t dance myself, I loved the music a lot. It was only years later I realized that was actually old-school electro, basically one of the origins of the dance music we listen to today. I never stopped loving the sound, and after a couple of albums where I was going for a more traditional Synthwave sound, now was the time for me to go down this route. And I must say I feel pretty happy on this road and I can imagine exploring this Electro sound even more on upcoming releases. There’s something very refreshing in this sound.

LA BOUM by Miles Matrix

Can you tell us a little about the gear you used to bring the 80s’ Electro sound back to life?

So I think the most important aspect in production was dedicating myself to some minimalism. As a synthwave producer, you tend to go all-in on FX and soundscapes, trying to be very cinematic or dark, which very often results in a million tracks in the DAW. Obviously, this approach wouldn’t be very authentic for a sound rooted in the 80s. But far more importantly it actually boosted my creative energies having to work with a limited amount of tracks. It forces you to focus on the essential parts of a song. It’s a challenge from a composition perspective as you can’t cheat your way around boring parts with “more FX / more pads / more sounds”.

My approach was to deconstruct what old-school Electro is made of. Essentially, it boils down to these parts: A groovy bassline, an infectious hook, reverb and delay, and most importantly: percussion. Electro gets its groove from an offbeat kick and the snare playing regularly on the 2 and 4. From there you can get really creative with hi-hats, cymbals, cowbell, rim shots and percussive effects. The percussion is the most important part of Electro.

In terms of gear, I had a hybrid approach. I composed a couple of my album songs on my Roland MC-101 and TR-08, giving them a finishing touch in my DAW. But also in the DAW I worked with authentic samples from the 808, 909, 727 and 505. The synths I used were nothing special because I was going for a raw sound, and based on the feedback so far, it really worked out.

Currently, I am working on translating the album to a hardware gear-only live set with my MC-101 and TR-08 and Monotribe. The concept is to have one continuous set and to that end, I am remixing every album song for a live performance to give it a bigger club touch. We are currently in lockdown but I can’t wait to perform the album live!

What are the aspects of NYC Club music and Breakdance music that hit you in ways that more modern dance or hip hop music fail to do?

I wouldn’t say “old music” is per se better or modern music worse. I listen to a lot of current electronic music. But I find myself returning to the “olden times” a lot. In terms of what I like to produce myself, this sweet spot in the 80s where acts like Newcleus, Egyptian Lover, Hashim and others were redefining electronic music, very much inspired by Kraftwerk on the one hand and disco and early hip hop culture on the other hand, this sweet spot really gets me. I love it.

Tell us a little about the songs ‘COUNTACH THIS!’ and ‘CUPCAKES’. What’s the story about these tracks about Lambos and Cupcakes?

Hahaha, it’s so funny to see the reactions to these particular songs. I know this is a very disappointing answer but there isn’t a huge story behind them, to be honest. Here’s the thing: When producing the instrumentals I tend to give them working titles, mostly some random word I come up with on the spot, which in this case was “Cupcakes” and “Lambo #5” respectively. And then I basically just started ad-libbing to the beats and that’s how the lyrics came about. I then sent them through a text-to-speech software and voilà. Countach this is of course a pun based on MC Hammer’s hit, but it just fit so perfectly. And Cupcakes, well, let’s just say I got carried away while ad-libbing…

If you were to book 5 artists from that classic 80s era for the perfect Breakdancing music night, who would you choose?

Damn, only 5??? That’s tough. I think I’d book Chris “The Glove” Taylor to DJ the night. I’d want Egyptian Lover, Newcleus and Cybotron to perform, with Ice-T emceeing the event. I think that would be so dope!

Closing off with the question I ask at the end of every interview: name one of your favorite albums, movies and books.

Tough again, haha. It always depends on the mood I’m in but I’ll give it a try. Album: The Crystal Method – Vegas. Movie: Jerry Maguire. Book: The Cartel Trilogy by Don Winslow!

Thanks to Miles Matrix for taking the time to answer our questions!

Miles Matrix ‘La BOUM’ is out now via Bandcamp and will be released on Spotify in December.

First off, can you explain how the concept behind Cryostasis came to you?   

The whole idea came after my father passed away last February. At that time, I started to think a lot about the mental process of dying and what actually happens to our consciousness. After asking myself the classic questions (“What do we feel? Where do we go?”), I started to develop the concept of cryosleeping as an analogy of death in the form of a long and pleasant dream that leads to our final destination. In essence, Cryostasis is a personal homage to my father and a metaphor about death.

It explores how our brains, instead of shutting down, start a frantic and beautiful journey through an interstellar endless dream. In this sense, I decided to create an album with only one song that goes through different sections and moods to illustrate the different stages of this dream.

From a compositional standpoint, how did you approach writing an album centred around dreams and frozen time?

This was a challenging yet rewarding experience because I had to change a lot of my creative process and the usual tools I use to achieve what I had in mind. First, I decided to keep drums at minimum. Also, I wanted it to be more melodic than my previous albums, and I worked more than ever in chord progressions and sound design to create that dreamy atmosphere. All was unexplored territory for me, but I think it translated into an album that sounds like nothing I have done before.

What’s your relationship with the world of dreams and astral projection?

I dream a lot. It’s one of my favourite things in life. I would be dreaming the whole day if I could, really!

Actually, in my teens, I went to high school in the afternoon. It sucked, but at least I could sleep a bit more in the morning. One of these days, I was dreaming that I was in a closed room full of smoke. I could barely breathe, and there was a strange and loud noise, like that of a waterfall. I suddenly woke up and there was actually a lot of smoke in my room. Also, the sound of the waterfall was still there in real life. I followed the smoke and the sound and discovered that the boiler had fallen down and was on fire. The sound was actually the water from the broken pipe hitting a window. It was crazy how that dream warned me that something strange was going on. I guess I can say that dreams have literally saved my life.

Are you a lucid dreamer?

I might say I am a lucid dreamer, but that would not be very accurate. Some years ago, I started to take control of my dreams, but only when they become annoying. So, I dream like everyone else, not knowing that I am dreaming at all, but when bad stuff starts to happen, I suddenly realize that I am dreaming. So, only when a dream starts to become a nightmare, I become a lucid dreamer and take control most of the time.

Are there any plans to release any music videos for this album?

Yes! On November 26 I will also release a visualizer with the whole album on my YouTube channel.

Describe the best context (listening conditions) to listen to Cryostasis.

The best way to enjoy Cryostasis is by putting your headphones on, laying down, pressing the play button and closing your eyes.

Finishing off with the question I end every interview with: name one of your favourite albums, movies and books.

Favourite albums: Blade Runner OST by Vangelis, Radiohead – OK Computer and Opeth – Damnation.

Movies: Blade Runner, American Beauty and Schindler’s List.

Books: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Demian and Foundation Saga

Thank you very much for the interview. See you in the stars!

Thank you to AT for taking the time to answer our questions!

 Don’t forget to check out ‘Cryostasis’ on Bandcamp and Spotify.

Although he’s been producing music since at least 2015, “Wanderers” is The G’s first release with NewRetroWave (his previous fantastic releases “Cosmopolis” and “Concrete Island” being released on TimeSlave Recordings.) To celebrate this astounding album, we reached out to The G for an interview to get a peek behind the scenes at his equipment, production style, and how he makes the magic happen!

The G’s Background and Production Style

Thanks for doing the interview! Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I’ve been making synthesizer music since I was 12. My parents got me a Roland D-50 from one of those guys who’s always selling stuff out of the garage – unopened and still in the box! Who knows where it came from.

Anyway, I had no idea how to program it so I just did stuff until it sounded cool. Then I got more into guitar and started playing in bands. Later, in college, I discovered techno and house music and decided I wanted to do that. So I took a bunch of studio engineering classes and taught myself how to spin records. I started DJing at local clubs in Michigan and producing a bit. So I’ve been working on stuff since then. 

A couple years ago I went back to some of those old tunes and realized they are basically me trying to make synthwave before I knew what that was. It’s all ‘80s synth sounds and LinnDrum samples. It’s just that I was trying to shoehorn it into a techno framework back then.

“When I first listened to those, I knew I’d found what I was looking for.”

What initially drew you into Synthwave and its subgenres?

I was working on a thing called Cyberpunk Revisited for a science fiction blog. It was a retrospective on the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s, as well as related media. I wanted to find music that could go along with writing. I’ve always loved Cybotron, and eventually, I found a Spotify playlist that had the whole album “Enter“ on it. It’s basically cyberpunk itself – “Enter” came out at almost the exact same time as “Neuromancer.”

Anyway, the playlist also featured “88:88“ by Makeup & Vanity Set and “Skull and Shark” by Lazerhawk. When I first listened to those, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Not just music to write to – this was the sound I had always been looking for. I went down the similar artists’ rabbit hole and discovered all the other big names of that era. Then the smaller ones. After a few months, I was spending more or less every night trying to make some of my own.

What is your go-to production gear?

I use a combination of hardware and software. Basically, hardware is more fun but software is more convenient. On the hardware side, right now I have a Roland Ju-06, Sequential OB-6 and ASM Hydrasynth, but when I did “Wanderers” I was also using a Roland JX-3P. It’s all over the record – that opening arpeggio in “Wanderers” and the chords in “Can’t Wait,” for example. I’ve got a few guitars and a bunch of pedals. I’m obsessed with pedals. 

All that said, I do use a lot of software. Logic is my main DAW, though I sometimes produce in Reason too. I love U-He’s plugin synths, like Diva and Repro. They sound so big and full, though also a bit too clean – but you can always dirty things up with effects. I really like TAL’s U-No-Lx, which is a Roland Juno emulation, and I’m a big fan of OP-X Pro II by Sonic Projects. OP-X doesn’t sound exactly like the Oberheim synths it’s trying to emulate, but it does a great job capturing oscillator drift and the “warming” effects of age that you get with vintage analog hardware. For creative effects and sound processing, I use a lot of stuff by Soundtoys, FabFilter, UAD, Softube, Brainworx and BABY Audio. A bit of Waves too, but I find their plugins are really hit or miss.

“A lot of pros will tell you that’s ass-backwards…”

How do you go about creating music – what’s your process?

So I usually start with an arpeggio or chord progression – something I get in my head. I throw a kick drum underneath it, then a snare. Then I start messing around with bass progressions to see what hooks. I usually build that up to a loop, then decide if I want parts (like a pop song) or shifts in pattern (like a dance track). I do both. The arrangement I choose is determined more by the vibe than anything else. Whatever works, basically. 

I’m a tinkerer – so I’m working on the mix as I go along. A lot of pros will tell you that’s ass-backwards, that you should put the track down and then mix as a separate process. But I’m an audio engineer at heart, so I can’t help myself. It’s just fun to me. And I can’t focus if the mix sounds off.

How “Wanderers” Came To Be

“Wanderers” takes synthwave back to its roots. What made you want to go in that direction now, when so many others are branching out and incorporating new genres into synthwave?

I’ve always loved synthwave in its purest form. “Deja Vu” by FM Attack, “Plug and Play” by Betamaxx or basically anything from Timecop1983. The synths are so lush and shimmery, the music so evocative – it’s like you’re being transported to another place and time. A place and time that may never have really existed, but it’s also capturing something genuine. Steve OSC recently said on Twitter that synthwave isn’t reflective of the actual ‘80s, but the ‘80s how people remember it. That rings true for me, and I think it fits “Wanderers” pretty well. The ‘80s were really the last time when people dreamed big about the future. And in the end, that’s what the album is about. Staring up at the stars and dreaming about the future, and the futures lost. 

At the same time, I am bringing in some external influences that aren’t that common in synthwave. A few of the songs – like “Away” or “Spiral” – incorporate sounds, textures and techniques from Dreampop, which is another one of my favorite genres. “Gardens of the Moon” and “Remember” have elements of post-punk, specifically The Chameleons. About half the songs feature guitar – and acoustic drums aren’t something you hear much in synthwave. So in that sense I am trying to do something different. But I’m not saying you’re wrong – for me at least, “Wanderers” sort of is and isn’t purist synthwave at the same time. Like Schroedinger’s cat I guess!

“I’ve always loved synthwave in its purest form.”

Your last album, “Concrete Island” had a much darker, more late 70s early 80s vibe with nods to Vangelis – why the change in tone now?

I get a lot of ideas, but only some of them gel. For “Concrete Island” I had something really specific in mind – I wanted to score the soundtrack to an imagined film, a post-apocalyptic art film set in 2017 but made in 1983. The kind of thing David Cronenberg would have directed. Black and white, slow-moving and atmospheric as hell. 

As much as possible, I tried to only use sounds and effects that were available at that time. Old Oberheim, Roland, and Sequential Circuits synths, mainly. Analog delays and plate reverbs for the effects. Most of the drums were generated on a Roland Jupiter-8 and a Prophet 5, then sampled.  

“Wanderers” emerged more organically. I had a couple of pop songs and a couple of harder, darker tunes. They didn’t have the same energy or vibe, but I was making them with the same sounds – so they did kind of make sense together. And then it occurred to me: most synthwave albums give you ten songs with one vibe. Chill, dark, dreamy or whatever. And there’s nothing wrong with that approach – Concrete Island is like that too, after all. But when you go back to classic albums of the ‘80s, that’s almost never the case. You get upbeat songs after downtempo songs, or angry songs that fade out into ballads – all in 45 minutes. The best albums of that era take you on an emotional journey, the kind of journey most people go through in life. I wanted to make something that had an emotional range. Something that takes you on a journey.

Did any of your gear or process change when creating “Wanderers?”

Definitely. I started the album way back in 2017, and was originally planning to release it in 2018 – before “Concrete Island.” But what I had at that point was fairly primitive compared to “Wanderers.” So I’m definitely glad I took my time. 

There was also a big delay in the middle, which sort of reset the production process for me. Basically, in mid-2018 I moved back to LA from Singapore. There was a lot going on and I had to sell a bunch of gear too. Stuff that just wasn’t going to make it in a cargo container across the Pacific. Plus I had access to some vintage synths when I was in Singapore, which I didn’t have anymore after the move. So I spent a lot of time sampling into Logic. Then, after I arrived in LA, I got some new gear – like the OB-6 and Hydrasynth. I wanted to really learn them well, and that took time too. 

Process-wise, well, I’d done one vocal track before, “Stars that Fade,” which is a collaboration with Vandal Moon. “Wanderers” has five vocal tracks – two with Michelle B, one with JJ Mist, another one with Vandal Moon and then one where I’m singing myself. Producing and mixing vocals is one of the hardest things to do well. At least, it is for me. 

And the album features a lot of elements I’ve never done before on a synthwave record. The drums are a mix of electronic and acoustic, there’s a ton of guitar and I consciously borrowed some effects techniques from shoegaze, which you can hear most clearly on “Away” and “Spiral.”

The Future

People are saying “Synthwave is Dead” nowadays – and yet here you are creating really fantastic tunes that remind me of the early days of the genre. Where do you think the genre as a whole is headed?  

Appreciate that! I have a lot of love for the genre’s early history, so I definitely take that as a compliment. 

To answer your question, I don’t think synthwave is dead, dying, fading, or anything at all like that. It’s thriving, actually. Off the top of my head, I can think of 30+ synthwave artists making fantastic music right now. It’s just that the scene has been around for a while now – so the thrill of newness has faded, and you’ve also got an avalanche of releases. As a listener and fan, that can get fatiguing.

I think a few things have been going on the last few years, all of which are related to that. First, the idea of synthwave has been growing more diffuse. There are more things synthwave can be and still be considered synthwave. A lot of the best records these days are mixing in stuff from outside the genre, but it’s still recognizable as synthwave. 

Second, the scene has started coalescing around labels that do physical releases. It’s hard to get noticed if you aren’t on one of those platforms. It’s not impossible, just harder. And you probably have to pay for professional services. Meanwhile, traditional netlabels are dying. Collectors want something tactile: vinyl, cassettes – even minidiscs are back.

“I don’t think synthwave is dead, dying, fading, or anything at all like that. It’s thriving, actually.”

The most successful labels right now all do physical releases. NRW, Fixt Neon, Timeslave Recordings, Electric Dream Records, Electronic Purification Records. There are probably more but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. You also have the big independent acts like The Midnight, Gunship and FM-84, but I think it would be harder to embark on that path in 2021 than it was in 2015. At a high level, I expect both of these processes to continue. I also expect that we’ll start to see more nostalgia for first wave synthwave. Kavinsky, College, the Valerie Collective, early Miami Nights 1984 or FM Attack. We’ll probably start seeing acts that are specifically trying to sound like that.

Besides your previous releases Cosmopolis and Concrete Island, what other synthwave related projects have you worked on?

I’ve also got an EP out on Timeslave Recordings called The Pacific Coast. It’s palm trees and pool party music that I made in 2016. Sounds fairly primitive when I listen to it now, but simplicity can be fun too. Looking beyond synthwave, I’ve got a shoegaze project that I’m working on. I’m very excited about where it’s at right now, but we won’t launch it until 2022.

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What can you tell us about the concept behind this new chapter for WOLFCLUB?

We’ve always tried to make cinematic sounding music, songs that you can imagine playing in the scenes of a movie. For this record, we have leant further into that concept and written it as if it were some soundtrack to an imagined or lost film. I was really interested in blending our favourite genres together to try and experiment with our sound more, mashing synthwave and indie rock with our usual melodic vocal lines.

What does Just Drive Pt.1 represent musically within the context of your discography so far?

The new records overall sound is still us but a little bit further down the road. I’ve often written songs on the guitar and then transposed the notes, chords, melody lines into the computer onto synthesizers. This time we decided to leave a lot of those guitar lines in to add a different feel and texture, so that they intermingle with the usual synth and analogue bass sounds we use. We’ve collaborated with some amazing new vocalists as well as some of our past favourites.

Driving and cars have been somewhat of a staple theme in your discography. From your point of view, what is it about the idea of driving that lends itself so well to the eighties retrowave mood?

It’s the idea of escape, getting away, going on a journey into a fantasy world soundtracked by nostalgia. The driving basslines have the feel of movement, of going someplace elsewhere.

Can you name some of your go-to driving music?

Bloc Party, Miami Nights 1984, Com Truise, Lazerhawk, Chvrches, Timecop1984

Do you have a favourite driving game?

I loved Mario kart as a kid and recently found a website online where you can play retro games, so I kind of lost myself for a few days revisiting those old tracks. 

Can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?

Sonic Youth – Candle: The album really blew my mind when I first heard it, all this intense wall of noise, I try to capture that spirit in a few of our tracks for the chorus sections, fill them with dense synth sounds to attack the senses.

Book – I’d find it hard to choose just one so I’d go with all of Kurt Vonnegut’s entire catalogue. If I have to choose one I’d go with Timequake.

Movie: ‘Infamous’ Directed by Joshua Caldwell, starring Bella Thorne and featuring 6 of our tracks. It’s been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember to have my music featured in a film, so to have them soundtrack a Hollywood movie was one of my favourite things to have happened.

If you’re reading this on Friday, March 5th, be sure to tune in to the band’s Reddit AMA session at 5pm GMT.  

Drive Pt.1 is now up and running on Bandcamp and major streaming services.

Way back in 2015 I had just left college, moved to Cleveland, and started writing about synth music… it was kind of like that Hannibal Buress sketch from the Eric Andre show. Equally as surreal, right around that time the microgenre simpsonwave was blowing up and became a whole thing.

Of all the many simpsonwave videos, one of them stood out to me. The music it contained wasn’t your average synthwave or vaporwave track, and it was amazing. It was labelled #chillwave – but that seemed off to me. I had listened to a LOT of chillwave, having experienced the dreamy “Summer of Chillwave” firsthand – and this didn’t really sound like chillwave I knew.

I shrugged it off. People throw labels around all the time, and, in truth – this fantastic track didn’t really sound like synthwave either. Looking back, I now believe this track – Resonance from HOME – was the very beginning of a new microgenre of synth music altogether.

HOME’s music was truly one of a kind. It’s a dreamy sound, still retro but without being on-the-nose like a lot of synthwave. Always chill. People more versed in music theory than I have even created video essays on why Resonance sounds so damn good.

The Evolution

Then, after dropping just a couple albums and EP’s between 2014 and 2017, HOME remained relatively silent in the coming years. Fast forward to 2018. As I’m scouring the internet for new music to write about, I keep hearing that sound. I even write about it a little bit. The HOME sound. But now, other artists are whittling it down, carving out their own unique niche within the framework of chilled out synth music —
— and they’re all calling it chillsynth.

Now there’s even a chillsynth Spotify playlist, Discord server, and Website. There’s also a YouTube channel filled with chillsynth over at Electronic Gems. Somebody went and made a (very short) essentials image over on Reddit. At this point, I figured this is much larger than a passing trend – it’s become a full-fledged micro genre standing all on its own – and the article you’re reading now began to take shape.

Chillsynth delineates itself from synthwave in that it is almost always much more down-tempo, lo-fi, and features lush synth pads with a lot of sustain, reverb, or resonance – hence the title of the HOME track above. The effect is to create a dreamy, relaxed, almost floating sound. While elements of nostalgia still come into play, it tends to be much less on-the-nose than synthwave or outrun which continually pays homage to the 80s. With chillsynth, we see (and hear) many references to the 90s as well. It’s still nostalgia-based music, although not really fully in the 80s box.

It’s not quite chillwave either. Chillwave also features a lot of reverb too, however as a genre it is centered around a lo-fi pop sound, whereas chillsynth is centered more around a dreamy lo-fi synthwave sound. Though both chillwave and chillsynth contain similar elements, a quick listen to a few tracks side-by-side quickly reveal vastly different compositional elements, and results in a vastly different end-product. I believe many originally called this style chillwave because of those similarities and the fact that at the time, we simply lacked a different genre name to describe it – that seems to be no longer the case.

Below is a short, non-inclusive list of some of the major players. This is not an all-inclusive list, so don’t get mad at me.

HOME
ADMO
A.L.I.S.O.N
Hotel Pools
oDDling
Unfound
Memorex Memories
Voyage
BVSMV
Florida Skyline (RIP)

Now, I’ve seen other music bloggers try to “coin a genre” or “announce a genre” before, and it’s always gone very poorly, most often resulting in the author getting hilariously dragged on social media. Understandably, I didn’t want to do that for this article. In fact, the genre has already seemingly been named by the artists themselves. So, instead I reached out to three of the larger labelheads releasing chillsynth music – Andrew W. of Stratford Ct., Nat S. of Midwest Collective, and Alex F/Tyler V of Eyewitness Records – to let them do the talking for me.

Note: Each of these labels deserve their own entire article. They spoke to me for over two hours each on the phone, and answered many of my personal questions about running a label to boot. Sadly, to keep this article somewhat short and readable, we can’t separately promo each one. Suffice to say they all deserve a good listen, and you can do so here: Stratford Court / Midwest Collective / Eyewitness Records (Formerly Known as Dream Girl Records)

But Don’t Take it From Me…

One of the things they all agreed upon in my interviews is that the sound started with HOME. Before exploding into internet popularity via simpsonwave videos, HOME was relatively underground, appearing on a few compilations before releasing full albums – and he was the only one with that sound.

“It all started as a Soundcloud thing…It’s pretty silly…[Home] was someone I found on Soundcloud initially with only a few hundred followers, and really fantastic music. So I reached out to him and said, “Do you want to put a song on this Compilation I’m pulling together?” and he did.” – Nat S.

“I think a lot of it does have to do with HOME. He definitely paved the way for many of these guys, I think because of how big he blew up. I don’t really know what all these artists were doing before that. HOME has done tracks for our compilations since the beginning and back then there wasn’t really many other artists that sounded like him.” – Andrew W.

“Some synthwave tracks had chill elements at that time, but it wasn’t really until I heard HOME’s Odyssey that there was a whole album of this new sound. It didn’t have any of the standard characteristic synthwave gated reverb 80’s drums, or other synth sounds people associate with synthwave stuff.” – Tyler V.

After Simpsonwave blew up HOME, it took other artists a few years before many started reverse engineering the HOME sound. Some of my interviewees even speculated it was the lack of new HOME releases coupled with the fact that people were craving that sound (Myself included) that lead new artists to start making it. But, not too long after they did, the sound began to evolve into something new.

“It kind of had a lag effect. People didn’t start making similar music until a year or two afterwards. When they did me and my friend, like, jokingly called them “Home Clones” because it’s like, “oh, this is this is like literally that sound.” Nat said. “But I want to be clear, what people are doing now is not a simple clone. It’s sort of folded in on itself, and created a new genre continuing that particular nostalgia – and it’s awesome.” – Nat S.

“Some synthwave tracks had chill elements at that time, but it wasn’t really until I heard HOME’s Oddessey that there was a whole album of this new sound. It didn’t have any of the standard characteristic synthwave gated reverb 80’s drums, or other synth sounds people associate with synthwave stuff. ” – Tyler V

That specific evolution is something we’ve seen before – in vaporwave and synthwave. The main genre starts, and then begins breaking off into small subsections like vaportrap or darksynth – some of which even become AS popular or more so than the original genre. Right now, it seems, we’re beginning to drive into that inflection point with chillsynth. It’s amazing how similar my separate interviewees opinions were on this.

“I think chillsynth is having a very similar progression to how vaporwave evolved.

You know, vaporwave started around 2010-12, with classic albums like Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe and Chuck Person’s Eccojams, and pretty quickly there was a vaporwave “Sound.” On the surface, it was an easy sound to make – take a deep cut from a Diana Ross album and slow it down, chop it up a little bit. It was easy to emulate. Then, in the next coming years newer artists expanded on that sound. Artists like 2814 made vaporwave that was all synth and no samples – and Saint Pepsi added drums to samples that were only slowed  down a bit. Those were still “vaporwave,” sure – but the newer artists were starting to really explore and do their own thing.

The same is true for chillsynth right now.  Artists like Home built an initial platform of relaxed nostalgic retrosynth that was pretty easy to replicate. There are tons of soundcloud artists recreating those sounds right now.” – Alex F

But we’re quickly moving into the time period where there are a large amount of chillsynth artists who are replicating that sound with their own spin. You have artists like Admo and A.L.I.S.O.N, and Emil Rottmeyer who are adding their own things to make it unique.  There developing their own “sound” within the framework of chillsynth.” – Alex F

“I think more recently we’ve seen a large increase in the amount of people making this style, starting around 2017. It’s hard to say how big it’ll grow. Just seeing what vaporwave has done …Chillsynth is definitely a huge and booming micro genre now. It’s interesting to see, because I feel like when it was first developing, (and I’m sure it’s still in it’s beginning stages) everyone sounded pretty similar, but, you know, in the past few years many of the artists are starting to kind of carve out their own place inside of that. The sound has a base – but it’s already diverging.” – Andrew W

Regardless of whether or not you consider chillsynth a full-fledged micro genre, a subgenre of synthwave or chillwave, or just a passing trend, it seems as though the chillsynth community is growing fast — and it’s certainly a niche to watch. It might experience a boom and bust just like vaporwave or chillwave, but whatever it way it goes you should really listen to and explore it because, well – it’s just truly great music.

“It’s a genre that wear’s its heart on its sleeve, it’s personal. That’s why people are becoming attached to the genre – it hits really hard emotionally in a cathartic or nostalgic way. I think that’s what’s driven people to want to make this sound.”
– Tyler V

 

Earlier this month you released the video for Makeup and Vanity Set’s ‘Algorithm’. Can you give us a bit of a backstory behind the video’s story and themes?

Saman: Matt (MAVS) basically sent us the album around July 2019 and asked us to pick our favorite track to make a video. There were so many false starts and We had so many ideas for this such as live-action concepts with real people, but we couldn’t get it to work for the budget. Then came COVID around March and things stopped. We were like “What do we do now?”. At the time Justin and I were annoyed by the fact that evil Amazon was profiting off of the pandemic, so we thought of doing this spot with an evil chatbot from Amazon. We were really pissed at the time and we were getting very upset about the whole Black Lives Matter stuff. We felt pain for the marginalized and underrepresented, with both of us being POC and having dealt with racism ourselves. We just went further down the spiral with the Dark Web and things like that. It kind of escalated from there.

Justin: This is the second music video that Saman and I have directed together. The first one was the Meg & Dia video, which kind of explored a similar world. We naturally gravitated together towards this strange, amorphous fear of AI and its capabilities. We workshopped four or five different concepts and then we landed on this idea that we could do a whole video with just text. I was honestly a little unsure that we could pull it off but Saman was so gung-ho about it that I was down to try it out. It felt like an insane challenge where we could unload all of this stuff that has been causing us a tremendous amount of frustration, angst and sadness. We explored the whole QAnon phenomenon, the trolling on 4chan and 8kun, stuff that I had been researching anyway, simply because I wanted to understand what was going on. The video was a good way to explore and vent about all of this racism, misogyny and all these people who wander through our lives anonymously from the dark corners of the web.

I feel like you both have very distinct and somewhat diametrically opposing styles. The work I’ve seen from Justin seems to be more contemplative/organic, picturesque, whereas Saman veers more towards a more-action-based digital world. Do you agree with this? How would you qualify the creative process between the two of you?

Justin: I agree with that 100%. I think there’s something special about that dynamic. Saman and I aren’t just collaborators; we’re very close friends and we share a lot of personal time together outside of work. I respect his talent and abilities and I hold him at such high regard that there are certain things that I would be uncomfortable pursuing if it were just me doing it. Together, we have this combined force thing that gives us the freedom to play in each other’s world a little bit. It felt really natural while we were doing it. I’m always surprised at the results because obviously it’s a mix of our two brains and sensibilities, which makes things inherently different.

Saman: I agree with that. To me, Justin is very much an artist, an experimenter and explorer. He loves all forms of art and disciplines. He’s able to use his craft in so many different ways. I think that I’m very much a campfire storyteller. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the storytelling is the most important part of my DNA. It’s nice to work with Justin because when you have another brain, you can try and stay objective with the story. Unlike with our previous video, we kind of played whatever role we needed to. A lot of that came from trust, I believe. It’s very hard for people to give up what they usually do. So there were times where Justin was taking the lead on the story whilst I was focusing on the technical aspect. I think Justin brought a lot to the table regarding the topic and the issues and he educated me on certain elements. It was a learning experience. I like that our projects are always about trying something new. They’re stories that we know we want to tell through experiments. That’s a very Justin thing. I’m experimental, but Justin just is an experimenter, so I feel a lot more confident with him because he does his homework. I just want to make shit up. I don’t like doing the homework.

Justin: That’s a funny way to look at it. I feel the exact same way that you feel about me. I thought that you were incredibly experimental. It was invigorating and fun. You also have this insane knowledge about the UI stuff. It is mindboggling. I guess we just leaned into each other’s traits and interests.

Saman: Yes! And the UI was unique for both of us because we’re so far away from motion graphics. I guess, if anything, I go into it a little bit more because I’ve done it a few times and I’ve used text in music videos before. I like doing unconventional music videos, but this was something new for both of us. We had to figure out how to make text interesting in a music video, which is a medium that is supposed to be very visual. It was a paradox of sorts, but we liked the challenge.

What have you learned from working during Covid?

Saman: It’s interesting because we technically finished the video in July. The label thought it should come out a little later and wanted to do some homework on how to implement the strategy of promoting it. During that time, Justin and I were doing other “pandemic jobs”. I shot two commercials remotely while I was sitting in my bedroom on a computer. I think this job had the same kind of feeling where I just miss people. I miss human interaction, and I think a lot of it bled into the work. I think the reason that there’s something really scary and sinister and sad about the video is that it feels lonely because that’s how we felt. It felt isolated. Even though Justin and I don’t like people like Jeff, the main character, we felt like him in the sense that we’re alone making this thing in a dark room. I think that the learning experience for me was that I know that I like people, as much as I say that I don’t, because I feel sad because I’m not able to interact with other humans. The other thing that came up is communicating ideas. You have to be very specific from note to note, which honed that skill down. You don’t have access to people as often and the way you normally would, so you have to turn on your brain to creative mode all the time. Justin and I would have to get on a call at all hours, dead tired, to get these assets handled on time. So there’s a lot of time management, creative management and expectations. We had to go with the flow, too, because we weren’t the ones doing the effects. It sounds like it’s all compromise but they’re actually reality checks and good lessons.

Justin: I feel like I learned a lot from this video because we’re living in a time that feels like planning seems obsolete or strange to do. I’ve done four music videos during the quarantine, and every time I’d start one I feel like it might not get finished, they might pull the plug on it. There are so many things happening that every time I released a video, some horrible tragedy happened. When we released this one, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died that same day. When I released another one during the pandemic, George Floyd had died that same day. There’s always these things where you’re wondering whether things are going to fly, whether it’s going to get cancelled or whether it’s even going to be received in the right way when it comes out. There’s this big void of what to expect. While we were doing this, I was always on the verge of wondering if they were going to can the project at any time. I don’t know if I even told you that, Saman.

Saman: No, you never did. That’s interesting! [Laughs] I love how you didn’t want to bring it up so as not to jinx it.

Justin: I didn’t want to “Incept” your mind with any doubt, because I love the project. But I was filled with uncertainty the whole time. It was a test of patience the whole time.

Saman: There’s such uncertainty in things dying so fast and so often that you really have to be zen about these things. I have meetings with big celebrities about a project that later dies within two days. I get depressed about it, then two days later this other project moves and goes forward. With this video, I had this carefree attitude throughout. I think the label loved it originally, but they were being respectful and concerned whether Matt was going to like it. After Matt came back to us and told us that he loved it, they were constantly there to make sure the video had the best “life” after its release. That’s been hard too. We’ve had a lot of publications that were very frightened by it, some people offended by it. As a society, because people don’t like feeling uncomfortable, they choose to not watch something. I think that a lot of people are just uncomfortable and we realized that it’s a shit-starter video. We know that we’re going to be provoking people, and we know the people who like being provoked will like it and spread it. We’ve been shadowbanned several times when we’d post it. It would get banned, taken down or flagged. It’s been a hell of a process releasing this video. It’s ironic because the song is called ‘Algorithm’ and yet the algorithm of the web is blocking our video and preventing us from spreading the word. I definitely learned that, sadly, as a society, we don’t want to face the hard truths. And it bums me out.

I assumed that you somewhat expected this reaction though, given that the video touches upon this very subject. It’s somewhat … fitting.

Saman: Yeah! What’s very interesting is that women tend to like the video, which we were initially worried about. Women seem to like it more. We thought that men would like it as well, but they seem a lot more frightened by it. I think it’s a lot of men probably see a little bit of Jeff in them, and it’s super sad that, rather than engaging with it and acknowledging it, they run away from it. My favorite responses are from people who just give compliments about how good the video looks. I always know the subtext of those comments is that they’re uncomfortable and didn’t have the words to express what they feel. We weren’t surprised, you’re right. We kind of knew what was coming. We just didn’t realize how delusional people are, how they’d rather have junk food at a time like this. Justin and I are big proponents of self-healing. We love meditating and spirituality and I was disturbed by how blocked people are.

Justin: I guess that if I can amend my answer, I’d say that is the most important thing I’ve learned. Men and women are very different in the way they perceive these things. When we were coming up with this Jeff character and figuring all of his flaws and kinks, I was basing my input on two of my good friends, one of which is one of my best friends growing up. He has this fetishization of Asian culture and Asian women, and that always disturbed me as someone who is mixed race. My mom is Japanese and my dad is white, and I’ve had white people and Japanese people being racist towards me. That’s something that’s overlooked and I wanted to make sure we incorporate those perspectives into this video. People can just anonymously fetishize, dehumanize and emasculate on the Internet. Jeff was very much that guy who feels like he can do whatever he wants and get away with it. Men, because they saw themselves in Jeff, were really disturbed. Women almost immediately saw a predator in Jeff. They’ve seen this guy before. They’re viewing it from two very different lenses. That was the most interesting thing to me. One of my good friends is, in my mind, a model for Vanessa Yi, this second-generation Asian person. She said that she longs for the day for an AI bot to take down these racist, misogynist trolls because she’s been terrorized by them. She knows Jeff and she can’t stand it. She’s a symbol for that. The guys see AI as a symbol of a force digging up stuff that they don’t want people to see. They are very much more protective of their perceived privacy. They want to keep what they do in the shadows. And that was disturbing. Instinctively, men were scared of the AI and women were scared of Jeff. That’s very telling and very sad. 

Social media and online means of communication seem to be quite a hot topic of debate as of late, namely with the release of Netflix’s The Social Dilemma.

Saman: We were just watching it as the video was coming out. The parallels were kind of interesting.

The documentary draws a link between social media business models and algorithms and the spread of racist ideologies and conspiracy theories, namely QAnon. How would you like our relationship to social media and tech to evolve?

Saman: Personal accountability is huge. One thing I feel is that the tech community is so invisible to lawmakers, politicians and people who’re in power. It’s hard to ask for accountability when the people at the top of the tech world don’t fully understand what they’re doing. It’s almost like empathetic autism, the inability to react to the damage that’s being caused. The word “regulation” sounds like censorship, but what I think of when I hear that word is just being accountable. I think it’s hard, because “empathy” and “accountability” don’t mean anything to data. It’s a little bit of a nihilistic view that I have right now, because I’m upset at it all and I’m still absorbing things, but I think that what’s going to happen is an implosion. I don’t think that we are going to be able to sustain this. I believe that madness will come. The thing that’s supposed to be connecting us is the thing disconnecting us the most as humans. I don’t know if there’s a way to stop it. I just think that people are going to have to rebel and stop using things or tax the shit out of tech people to take away power.

Justin: I agree with all of that. In a weird way, this is what it feels like to have already lost the battle. What happens when you open a portal to what feels like infinite amounts of human knowledge? There’s darkness and light that comes with that. I think I’m a more educated and more empathetic person because of the internet. I’ve learned so much about things I would have no access to. But there is also that dehumanization factor because you’re looking at something through this apparatus plugged into all of this other stuff. At a certain point, because of that disconnect between something  tangible like reading a book or talking to a person face-to-face and the online world, there’s an obfuscation of the truth, where people don’t even trust what’s coming out of them. They’re algorithmically fed information because that algorithm wants to keep a status quo. Then people start reinforcing these bad ideas that they stumble into, being incentivized to distance themselves from each other. They start not trusting people who are authorities in their field, and that translates to terrible, dangerous ideas that people can make money off of. That’s a real problem. People are making money off of this division. The wrong people are being incentivized to do the wrong things, and the right people don’t even know what’s true anymore. I can’t see us as a society coming back from that.

The video also deals with our relationship between humans and tech, in this instance AI. Do you find yourself buying into the humanization of tech?

Saman: What I want and what I think will happen are probably two different things. What I want is usage of technology as a tool and to be able to rely on it in some ways and to be able to control it in other ways. People don’t care about the truth as long as they get what they want, or rather what they think they want. I think that technology will not rule us but will be used as a way to manipulate people. As people get lonelier and stop talking to each other, I think that technology will become people’s friends to talk to. We don’t care if it’s real, because as long as it feels real to us, who gives a shit? And that’s how fake news works. When you turn on Fox News, they’re not news anchors anymore. They’re basically reverends for corruption. It’s the same thing. Where this video is a bit of a wish fulfilment for Justin and I is that we explore whether AI will see humans as sacks of waste and try to take us out, or rather take out the people that are hurting us. The idea of an AI vigilante is wish fulfilment is something I hope happens. Maybe AI will save us from ourselves. Who knows? We will accidentally create this technology that knows how to put us out of our misery and stop the disease.

Justin: In my current state, I see tech as useful tools. AI is in this weird early stage where it still can’t quite understand the features of the human face. It doesn’t quite get it yet, but I do think that AI technology as a whole has an actual evolution very much like organic lifeforms. It just happens to be that this evolution very much integrated with humanity. It’s in its best interest to continuously integrate with us and eventually become indistinguishable from us as lifeforms. I think we’ll just keep on moving towards that place where, at some point, people will stop wondering whether it’s a good or bad thing. It’ll just be a thing. It will be integrated with us in such a way that it’s indistinguishable. Right now it feels like a tool, at some point it will feel like a lifeform, and after that it will even feel like a superior lifeform. It won’t have the hang-ups of the body that kills them. I know it sounds very Sci-Fi, but I do feel that’s what it looks like. And I’m neither upset nor fearful or happy about it. It’s just a thing that’s happening and people will adjust and adapt to it as they adapt to any new circumstance.

Closing off, name one of your favorite albums, movies and books.

Justin: Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane is one of my favorite albums of all time. Maybe my favorite book is Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Film-wise, I’ll go with Alien.

Saman: My favorite album is Daft Punk’s Homework. My favorite movie is Terminator II.  I’m not much of a reader, but I’ll go with the Steve Jobs bio [by Walter Isaacson].

What’s next for the two of you?

Saman : Our collaborations now are nothing to announce as of yet. I’m working on a few films that I’m either writing or developing and getting cast. I’ve got a science-fiction film. The movie I’m the most excited about is a Kung-Fu Romantic Comedy called Kung-Fu Love.

Justin: I’ve got a short film in the works and I’m also illustrating a book with my wife right now. It’ll come out next year.

Makeup and Vanity Set’s Endless Destiny is out now via Data Airlines

Saman Kesh is represented by Golden LA for commercial work.
Thank you to Justin, Saman and their team for making this interview possible.

Over the course of two hours, we discussed everything from his unique production style to an intense period of burnout – and even the destruction of an entire unreleased Dan Terminus album!  We hope you enjoy this deep-dive into the mind of a true sovereign of synth.

Got a question yourself? Check out the upcoming Dan Terminus Reddit AMA October 1st in /r/Outrun at 12pm ET.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and length)

Artist: Luca Carey

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us! 

“It’s cool, man. And thank you for having me! Ask me anything. I won’t dodge any question.”

In 2015, you had an interview with Decibel magazine. You mentioned that you began making electronic music to pass the time – as an outlet for your creativity. Now, five years later, after touring with Perturbator and gaining more fans – is creating music still the outlet it used to be?

“It’s a difficult question – almost a loaded question! But, my answer is yes and no.

I must say I never thought that I would be touring with James (Perturbator). I never thought that one day I would play in Paris – in a big, big concert hall called Le Trianon – in front of fifteen hundred people! I never thought I would end up doing this.

So, I try to keep the same state of mind – which is to say I’m still the same loudmouth asshole, turning knobs, twisting buttons, punishing keys, and beating up synthesizers. Because I think that if I stay true to myself, then maybe the music will be fresh – or at least, it will still truly be me.”

In an old Reddit AMA when asked about producing music, you mentioned that you create a track in your head and work on it in your head – and you place it on a “mental shelf I built for myself, like a mini-library.” Then you patiently reproduce the track on your DAW. Can you tell me a bit more about your mind library? Is that still a method you use to produce?

“Absolutely it is. I started doing this when I was a child because I read a book in which the character said that since libraries were burning, Monks had to build their own mental libraries, and would have to memorize dozens of books. So if a library burns, at least there will still be somebody out there who’ll be able to rewrite the whole book.

In fact, it’s just a visualization of a shelf, like a metal or wooden shelf in my mind. When I have an idea, I put it there. It’s something that helps me remember a lot of things – and yet I still don’t remember everything I would like – especially you know, from childhood and everything.

Lets say, well, to be honest with you, to describe my mental shelves… it’s not a palace. It’s not gothic, it’s not dark… it’s not a cyberpunk Los Angeles city. It’s just a warehouse filled with shelves. I connect it to rooms or bedrooms from my childhood, like lets say the village I used to go to when I was a child in the south of France, or my grandparents cabin in the countryside. For some reason those elements are very precise in my mind.

There is no map. If I want to go there I’m there. I don’t have to walk five miles down memory lane if I need it – it’s just there.”

Photo Credit: Laura Lyson

Your first album, “The Darkest Benthic Division,” is very atmospheric. You mentioned some of your influences were Noir Deco and the original Vangelis Blade Runner soundtrack. Then, as your albums progressed, they get much darker and heavier.

What inspired you to take your music from that atmospheric, dreamy sound into the darksynth territory?

“Two things, the first thing was gaining technical knowledge in terms of music production and getting to know my DAW better. The second thing was that I really wanted to push my music harder because I wanted to try new things – new sounds. I wanted to go dark and heavy because I’m also metal head.

It was difficult. I could have gone on writing “The Darkest Benthic Division” forever – writing the same album five times, really. But I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself and write the same album twice.

Sometimes when I strike a few chords on my keyboard I go back to those very simple, yet efficient atmospheric tracks. Something that I’ve also noticed, is that when I play such songs like ‘Abandoned Ship Graveyard’ or ‘Underwater Cities’ people go crazy.

It’s when I get the most attention. People look at me, and I look at boyfriends hugging their girlfriends – and it’s a fantastic experience. But in retrospect, it’s the most simple album I’ve made. So that’s the beauty of it. Maybe one day I will write another whole atmospheric album. I have no idea – I’m not against it. But now is not the time.”

The Production Style of Dan Terminus

Speaking of new music, I understand you used  FL Studio to produce “The Wrath of Code” and other albums. Has that changed? Did you use any new hardware, VSTs or DAWs or for the new album, “Last Call For All Passengers?”

“I’m an in-the-box producer. I love working with VST’s, and even the cheap stuff. I don’t care. As long as it sounds good it’s okay with me. As long as I can distort the shit out of it then I’m fine!

The new album was created on FL studio 10. As far as hardware goes, I didn’t use any hardware for the album. I only use VSTs like Synth1, Korg M1, Korg Wavestation EX, FM8 – and a few plugins like Multiband Distortion – stuff like that. Nothing too fancy, I’m sorry.

Basically, my setup is just me, my 2012 computer, a midi keyboard, two Fostex monitors and the screen – and that’s it. I’m a pretty simply guy you know? I don’t feel like having multiple synthesizers or clicky, shiny gear will help me become a better musician or a better producer – it’s all in my head first anyway. It’s all about being yourself.”

“So, was your creation process the same for previous albums and “Last Call For All Passengers?”

“I still create in my head and then reproduced the tracks in my DAW. I would like to tell you something though – it’s not necessarily about gear, but knowledge.

I feel like when you buy equipment, you don’t necessarily learn new things. But, if you can create the bass sound in your head by snapping your fingers, you don’t need to spend three or four hours designing a sound.

I think everyone should keep on learning every day, to get a wider playground. I try to learn new things every day in terms of production by reading books or reading articles. Every time I discover new things. So, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a good idea to buy a synthesizer. It IS a very good idea to read books and articles and to make sure you’re learning new things – even if it’s just a small, little piece of knowledge. I certainly don’t want to sound arrogant either – there is still much for me to learn!

This also lets you make things sound bad, in a good way. You know what I mean? If you listen to “Last Call For All Passengers,” you will realize the mix is kind of like a roller coaster.

Many times I voluntarily left the EQ alone – because if I EQ’d them properly, then they would sound too clean – and it would not be interesting!

If I were to work with another person or other people, things would be different. But when you are a one man project, I have to surprise myself. I have to outdo myself. I have to challenge myself. Otherwise, it’s too boring. And I would not wake up. I would just go to the countryside, take care of my horses and say, “Fuck music, fuck all of you, I’m just going to stay here forever!”

Art From Luca Carey

That’s interesting – so you own horses? Is that why the cover of your album is this sort of nightmarish horse? Did Luca Carey do this album cover as well?

“Absolutely, in fact, it was kind of a challenge because I wanted Luca to use black and green only. And I mean, if you’ve seen look at Carey’s work before, you know he usually paints with a thousand colors. He asked me if he could use grey, and I said, “Okay, but no more!”

I asked him for a mix of a Mérens – which is a black French mountain horse, and a Trait Comtois, which is a draft horse. He threw me three ideas, and I picked the one I liked the most.

As a relief, I told him for the back cover – you do whatever you want to do, because forcing him to only use two or three colors was an ordeal for him. So, he painted a big Cthulhu, and he painted it his way, and it’s fantastic. And let me tell you, it’s going to be nightmarish, really.

Technically, the horses are not mine yet. It’s just a matter of, you know, papers – but I love them with all my heart.

But with Luca. I believe that this guy is clearly not human, or at least he must have some alien DNA in him because his vision. No, I mean, really, his vision is so singular that it’s hard to compare it to anybody else. I love what he does. I would like him to get more recognition because it’s just not fair that he’s such a genius does not get more recognition!”

Check out Luca’s work Here!
Follow Luca on Facebook Here!

Artist: Luca Carey

I read in another interview when you were creating “Automated Refrains” you were listening to a lot of Bathory, Type 0-Negative, things like that. What were you listening to for inspiration when you were creating “Last Call For All Passengers?”

“My heavy rotation records was music from the 90s. Bomb the Bass, Nation 12, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy. Because, I started hearing such music in my head. I said to myself, ‘Hey, Bomb the Bass was so fucking good!”

Burnout and Album Destruction

From the little bit I’ve heard, it sounds like it’s going to be more danceable than you previous work – is that a fair assumption?

“It depends on what you define as dance music! You will hear a lot of breakbeats and lots of bigbeats, just like, you know, the Chemical Brothers and everything.

I think it’s almost on purpose. when I started doing this I made it spontaneously because this album – “Last Call For All Passengers” was born from thrashing, dumping another album that I made as I burnt out. So. So, yeah.”

That’s interesting – you dumped a whole album? Surely it couldn’t have been THAT bad?

“I worked nine years for a big company. I had to resign, and at the time I was suffering from extreme burn out – I even fell asleep at the wheel and I crashed my car into a wall, as I was burning out. The doctors ended up ordering me to stay home and rest.”

What? That’s crazy!

“Yeah, but to be honest, the burnout is one of the best things that ever happened in my life because it helped me refocus. You know, it’s cool. I was burning out and I started writing songs and in fact, I wrote a whole album that was super fast paced and very primal. It was primitive… and also it sucked big time!

It was a shitty crappy album with distortion over everything and it sounded like crap. But I wrote it as I was burning out because… I don’t know, I was angry or something. Well, I’m still angry – but angry in a good way, if I dare say so!”

Is there any chance we’ll get to hear this terrible burn-out album? I know you say it’s bad, but it sounds fascinating.

“No! When you write an album and when you release it, it is a very serious matter. You don’t make an album for fun. You don’t release an album for the purpose of releasing an album. You release an album because you want to fulfill yourself as a producer or as a musician. It’s like getting a tattoo. I don’t want to look back 20 years later and think – “Oh fuck, I should never have done this!”

When it was time to go back to music again, I listened to this album it sounds definitely like shit, so I got to get rid of it. I dumped the whole album. Quite recently, in fact, as I was saving projects on my external disk drive, I found a copy of this destroyed album. So I really listened to it again. And let me tell you, it was so fucking bad, like really – it’s horse shit, really.

And then I wrote “Last Call For All Passengers,” which is all about being back to life again. Not in an artsy-fartsy phoenix rising from the ashes kind of thing. I think that’s fucking ridiculous. But, that is how the album was born.”

With a title like “Last Call For All Passengers” – and with the current state of the world, I thought the album might be about this looming science fiction dystopia or climate change?

“The true explanation is that I was watching a movie by Mel Brooks – Young Frankenstein. There’s a scene where Frankenstein is hopping on a train, and the ticket collector says, “Last call for all passengers!” I think. Maybe I misheard it, but I said, “That’s it!”

After I picked the album title, now we have COVID-19, the fires in California, two thirds of Australia have burned. The pentagon releases papers saying, “Hey, maybe UFO’s are a reality.” Then we dodged a bullet with war between the US and Iran – and so much more. So, now I look at the title, and it really fits the world we’re living in.

The world we live in today feels like the X-Files from 1995. It was supposed to be a television show, not reality! Really, if I saw the heavens splitting open and a fleet of motherships landed, I feel like that would be just a normal day in 2020. Great! Now we have Big Mac’s on Mars!”

Cyberpunk or Darksynth?

Life really does imitate art! Speaking of which – you mentioned before you don’t really care about being labelled as a “darksynth’ producer – but do you think the genre is moving away from it’s synthwave roots?

I don’t really listen to much darksynth – I only hear what people send me from time to time, for guidance or feedback. There is one guy I listen to because I think he’s brilliant – SurgeryHead. He’s one of the very few guys I saw live that really, really scared me – and I admired him at the same time. His music is perfect, and his on-stage persona is, well, let me tell you it’s fucking scary!”

As far as synthwave – I would like to see it keep on evolving instead of becoming a sterile representation of the music. Any form of music needs to evolve.

I definitely agree with with that! But, it’s odd to hear you don’t listen to much darksynth, I think many fans might consider you a darksynth producer? What do you consider yourself?

“There are three layers, OK? The first layer is that I am an electronic music producer. The second layer is that I am a cyberpunk music producer. The third layer is, as long as it sound good to me, I will make that kind of electronic music.

I don’t mind if people label me darksynth, and if people label Dan Terminus as synthwave too, I don’t mind. I wont get fussy about what it is. As long as it sounds good and as long as people enjoy what they are listening to, it’s fine with me really. I do understand that from some people’s perspectives, some of my tracks may be considered darksynth, and a label is always necessary I guess.

Like, when I say, I listen to death metal, I mean old-school deathmetal. Bands like Carcass, Obituary, Pestilence, Deicide. Some people who say, “I listen to deathmetal too” and they bring up artists like Meshuggah or those totally insufferable bands who play on a 12 strings guitars that sound like a horde of guys banging on telephone cables with hammers.

People have different definitions of what deathmetal is – what any genre is. So, no – I don’t consider myself a darksynth musician. But, if people label me as such, I really don’t mind.

So you consider yourself a cyberpunk musician?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I had never heard cyberpunk music – the closest I got was when I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, and there is a colony in space where guys from Jamaica listen to “Zion Dub” which he described as bass-heavy music.

So, it’s very selfish of me, but I wanted to write music that to me, would be a kind of cyberpunk music. It’s selfish to want to define a new genre – but it was just me thinking, “Okay, what can the soundtrack to a cyberpunk setting?”

I was totally flattered when I first heard people actually calling my music cyberpunk! It was a huge compliment; I was humbled and honored.

Well, we’ve been talking for quite some time now – thank you deep-dive interview! What’s next for Dan Terminus?

“I’m not sure yet, more music for sure – we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Hi Dana! What’ve you got to recommend to us today?

I would love to talk about the film Labyrinth from 1986, starring David Bowie and directed by Jim Henson. I was born after the movie came out, but it’s one that was really important to me throughout my childhood. Even watching it now gives me that sense of ‘instant nostalgia’. I have some really cool older cousins who played it for me one Christmas when I was young. We were all big David Bowie fans and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever. The music was amazing, the visuals were incredible, the puppet-work was really inspiring…

What do you remember about the music you grew up with?

My parents always played a lot of eighties music like Madonna and David Bowie. Later on, I got into Prince’s eighties catalogue. I remember the first album that I ever owned was Björk’s Post. That album really inspired me. Alternative rock was probably my first foray into music though. Electronic came in later on.

Do you remember what got you interested in diving into electronic music?

I think it was the sound of the synthesizers. They sound so warm. To me it’s this perfect amalgamation of humanity and technology coming together: Synthesizers are technical machines that we operate, but they ultimately need that human touch, that human connection to allow them to come to life. I love that aspect of it. The songs also remind me of the eighties music that I had been listening to as a child.

I remember getting into Boards of Canada and thinking what an incredible sound they had. That was also a big draw for me to jump into the Synthwave scene. I found that a lot of these Synthwave artists were incorporating these nostalgic eighties synthesizer sounds in a way that sounded poppy and dance-y, which is closer to my background as an artist. I like to perform and sing very upbeat music, and I like the fact that Synthwave is a nice fusion of the two worlds.

What I love about Synthwave is that it covers such a broad range of different types of music. You can have some of that orchestral, cinematic approach, or you can have some of the more dance-y, techno approach. You have great artists who are able to write really slick pop hits within that Eighties retro nostalgia framework. There are similarities to modern pop in that you can have great melodies, catchy hooks, and memorable choruses, but there’s a bit of grittiness, a bit of an unpolished, nostalgic feel to Synthwave that is more appealing to me than what you hear in some of the ultra-slick modern pop songs out there on mainstream radio.

Do you remember how and when you came across the Synthwave scene?

I believe it was on Soundcloud. I was at Theatre school at the time, which was certainly demanding and a lot of it was producing other people’s written work, whether it be music, monologues or theatrical pieces. I needed this creative outlet to explore my own voice and musical creativity. I believe I stumbled upon Robots with Rayguns and Betamaxx on Soundcloud, and I immediately fell in love with the sound and vibe that they were putting out. I reached out to them and they agreed to collaborate on a track, so I started releasing different collaborations with different artists. It all grew organically and ultimately developed into people contacting me and coming up with more and more material.

Have you got any news to share with our readers, any updates?

I just came out with the album Megawave, which is the collaboration album with Powernerd. I’m really excited to release it with Outland, which is also an event company that produces live shows. I’ve been really lucky to have performed three shows with them, two of them in London (UK) and once in my hometown of Toronto, where they put on a massive show this past summer. I’ve had a great working relationship with Powernerd over the last few years, working on various tracks. We performed two live shows together before. We have really good energy and we wanted to keep the momentum going with this album. People responding so well to it, and I’m thrilled about that. The next step, once everything opens up again, is planning the next European tour. I’d like to go back out there for the third time. I have dates booked for October, so my fingers are crossed. When everything is safe, it will be so nice to see everyone and experience some great music together under one roof again.

Thumbnail photo by Hayley Stewart.

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