Objekt / Kaleidoscopic wormhole

Kaleidoscopic wormhole

Interview with TJ Hertz aka Objekt, producer and DJ living in Berlin.

Euphoria and release, algorithmic machines and creative sensibility. The world of Objekt cohesively blends dichotomies of being through the language of music. The DJ and producer has been a pioneer in the development of the music industry and in this special feature for Nasty Magazine, Objekt opens up about his perception of the clubbing scene, his creative process, and his background at Native Instruments. A fine mind in the music scene, Objekt acts as a spatiotemporal tunnel connecting audiences through his highly polished DJ sets, resembling what he calls a ‘Kaleidoscopic wormhole’.

You just came back from a world tour. How are you feeling now that you are back in Berlin?

Well I had the best time I can remember having on tour so I can’t say I’m that excited to be back, haha. But I had a really inspiring time in Australia, New Zealand and Asia for three months and now I’m just trying to hold on to that and stay in this curious and motivated mindset that I got myself into in that period, and carry that forward through til the end of the Berlin winter. It felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air to spend an extended chunk of time in new places and step outside of my usual routine for a bit.

Interestingly, you mentioned the comfort zone because, to me, the life of a DJ does not have much of a routine.

Maybe not routine, no, but I’ve definitely felt I’ve been getting into a comfort zone in Berlin – I’ve lived here for 15 years and spent much of that in the same 1 kilometre radius. It felt great to be living in Taipei for two weeks and just have a completely different environment to explore and to recalibrate that sense of what day-to-day life can actually feel like, what I actually enjoy or what’s exciting.

Do you incorporate clubbing into your day-to-day beyond work?

I’m very selective about where I go out. I used to go out a lot in my 20s but that tailed off as I started touring more. I was away most weekends and when I did have time off I’d be more inclined to spend it seeing friends or relaxing than staying up all night in clubs, particularly as I eventually realised that clubs are terrible places to actually have meaningful conversations with people you care about. But these days I’m trying to make more of a point of going out a bit more, to events that look like they might be inspiring or interesting or fun. I’m just much more picky about it, especially when it comes to the general vibe of a venue or party, how comfortable the space is and so on. I’m getting too old for gratuitous, shitty parties, haha.

From post-dubstep/UK bass in Objekt #1 and Objekt #2 in 2011 your music has evolved into a more complex, electro/IDM-inspired sound. So, your sound has different genres that mix together. Your DJing style is described as both wild and laser-focused, transcending genre boundaries. Is it relevant to talk about noises that transcend musical structures, still maintaining cohesiveness? What role does genre play in your music?

I guess I’m wondering what you mean by noises in this context.

I feel today the traditional notion of rhythmically beautiful music might not be relevant anymore. Your sound is much more disrupted. What I mean by noise is the transcending of traditional melodies.

You mean traditional genre classifiers don’t really feel that relevant anymore and we’re moving towards a system in which music is described by its sonic quality rather than by genre? I think it’s definitely true to some extent, but I don’t think genres have lost their relevance entirely. I think genre will always have some degree of use because classification can be an informative way of talking about music. If you can’t classify or group similar pieces of music together or artists even loosely, I think you compromise your ability to fully articulate the musical significance or meaning of the attributes that distinguish one song or artist from another. But I don’t generally DJ by genre, as in, I don’t purposefully set out to play music of a particular genre but rather try to play DJ sets which feel musically cohesive to me. And most often that cohesion tends to come from other factors than the genre of the constituent tracks. That doesn’t mean that I don’t ever purposefully play sections of a set of a consistent genre; of course I do that sometimes, like maybe I’ll play half an hour of techno or half an hour of drum and bass. But more often, what’s more significant to me is thinking about the narrative arc of a set in terms of quantities like energy level, rhythmic propulsion, euphoria, anticipation, tension, release, aggression, softness.

So it’s very feeling-based actually.

Yeah, and it’s very much reflected in how I sort my music. On a monthly basis as I’m importing music into my library, I’m sorting pretty roughly and quickly, so I categorise my monthly additions based more on energy level than mood; I have like 4 energy playlists for varying levels of intensity. But for my broader collection, which is more thoroughly organised and which I update whenever I have time, for the last few years I’ve been doing most of my playlisting by mood. So I have 10 to 15 mood playlists that have slightly cryptic names that mean more to me than anyone else, like ‘Curious George’, ‘Coming Up For Air’, ‘Kaleidoscope Wormhole’, ‘Skeleton Dance’, or ‘Powerful Starry Abyss’. On top of that I’ll also have a handful of genre playlists, but genre sorting for me is more useful for some genres than others, like dubstep and garage. Usually in a set, genre does come into it but it’s not the driving force. I’m much more likely to dive into either a mood playlist or one of my most recent “monthly additions” playlists.

“But more often, what’s more significant to me is thinking about the narrative arc of a set in terms of quantities like energy level, rhythmic propulsion, euphoria, anticipation, tension, release, aggression, softness.”

Talking about your creative process, the interconnection of the human with the machine can be traced in how ravers and clubbers interact with your music. Your Essential Mix in 2020, the mix CD for Tresor in 2016, and the 8-hour set at Nowadays in 2021 take listeners on a curated journey which involves storytelling and intertextuality. Is the narrative integrated influenced by the audience you play for?

Profoundly. I think the ideal for me is an audience that is just very dedicated to experiencing whatever it is that the music brings up in them, one that’s attentive and responsive and feels like dancing. Ideally, there’s a sound system that can convey what that I want to convey with the fidelity and the power needed to get the message across. And in those situations, it’s like you described: the right conditions enable me to improvise a cohesive narrative that can be dynamic and evolving over the course of two or three hours, or sometimes I’ll play all night and it’ll be eight or nine hours. That will be largely a process of following my nose and following my heart, I think. A lot of it is about tension and release. Maybe it can be a little psychedelic. It’s not that I’m necessarily thinking about it in explicit psychedelic terms, but just in the sense of a curious sonic rollercoaster. I really like exploring that kind of zone. Liminality is an overused word, but what I mean is the tension between euphoria and dread, between tension and release, between defined and confusing. I enjoy guiding the ship through those waters in a way that makes the ride feel compelling and rewarding.
That’s all on a good night, of course. On a different night, in a different setting, people are drunk, and they just want to chat with their friends and maybe dance a bit, and in that kind of situation all nuance goes out the window and you just play party tunes to keep people moving. That’s also not always necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you just want to go out and have a good time and not get too deep into things. I also enjoy playing sets where it’s more about keeping the energy up in an interesting way and having fun with the selection and mixing. Both of these approaches can be fun and I think any given gig can fall anywhere between these two extremes on this spectrum. But if as a DJ you’re gunning for the former while the crowd is more the latter, then everyone’s going to be disappointed. And vice versa; if you’ve got a super curious and openminded crowd but you go in all guns blazing and play a typical short-attention-span-festival-set-of-bangers then I’d consider it a missed opportunity and a bummer.

“I really like exploring that kind of zone. Liminality is an overused word, but what I mean is the tension between euphoria and dread, between tension and release, between defined and confusing. I enjoy guiding the ship through those waters in a way that makes the ride feel compelling and rewarding.”

Do you think the direction of a set can also change culturally?

Like geographically? Sure – for one, different audiences have different musical reference points or genres that they grew up listening to. For example, much of continental Europe grew up with 4/4 dance music like house or techno or trance, which was the dominant pulse of mainstream dance music through the 90s and 2000s. The UK had the hardcore continuum and for a while I was finding audiences there to often be more rhythmically open-minded, though I’m not sure that’s as consistently the case anymore. In Asia, it really depends, but I’ve generally felt pretty free to go off on weird rhythmic tangents there, and people will be down.
But ultimately I think it depends more on other factors, like the space, the type of venue, the kind of crowd that the promoter attracts. There’s a big difference between playing in big venues for more mainstream audiences, and playing in small spaces, which often attract headsier crowds. In my experience that difference is much more significant than any difference between countries or cultures, and plays a much bigger role in informing what direction I’d want to steer a set in.

Which one do you prefer, DIY or big venues?

In terms of vibe, very much the small venues, DIY or otherwise. For the most part it’s the small shows that I come away from feeling most fulfilled. But I like having some variety – bigger shows are important too as I think they’re often also a gateway drug for a lot of people to discover more adventurous forms of music, especially younger audiences. Plus I dunno, sometimes there is something to be said for experiencing certain kinds of music in a larger space on a really huge soundsystem. Or just going to a big-ass rave, you know.
And to be fair there’s always tradeoffs – high-quality sound is hugely important to me and that’s an area where you can’t always be too picky when it comes to DIY spaces, which I love for other reasons and try to play at whenever I can. There’s a lot of factors at play.

Yes, the sound defines the quality of the experience. It makes me think about your background, which can be one of the defining factors for the quality of your music. Your work at Native Instruments involves developing audio and machine-learning algorithms. How does your technical background influence your creative process, both as a producer and as a DJ?

I definitely have an extremely technical mindset when it comes to producing, often to my detriment. It can be quite frustrating in the sense of getting really bogged down in details and not feeling like I can be as spontaneous as I’d like in my creative process, which is actually something that I’ve been trying to work on more consciously recently: developing a workflow that allows me to be more creatively messy, as well as getting the main ideas down first before getting lost in a wormhole of endless micro-editing. As for DJing, it’s a mixed bag, because although my approach to DJing is also very technical – I always know from a sonic perspective what’s going on at every point in my sets; I have a very detailed control over what’s happening EQ-wise or transition-wise and I use a lot of effects – I feel like that level of technical control frees up a part of my brain that allows me to be more expressive musically. I feel in my DJing I’m able to be more dynamic than I am with my production. It often feels very off-the-cuff, like flying by the seat of my pants in a way that I don’t get at all when I’m making music. But in my DJing all of that is enabled by a technical approach, rather than hindered by it, if that makes sense.
At Native Instruments, I was working in DSP, which stands for Digital Signal Processing. It’s the development of audio algorithms basically. It gave me an in-depth working knowledge of what was happening to audio signals at each stage along the way, as you generate them with a synthesiser and process them with effects, and this has been fundamental to me in terms of understanding how music production worked from a technical perspective. What does that mean for the actual music I make? I don’t know – I know other people who have a DSP background who make much less polished and much more raw and improvised music than I do, so you could argue both sides really. I don’t know if it is my background or just my personality that guided me towards a style in which every detail is highly thought out, sculpted and polished. But for sure the DSP work informed my understanding of how each part of the signal chain was working and how that contributed to a piece of music sounding the way that it sounds.

As a producer and DJ, your music incorporates technological innovations. It can be interpreted as a mix of human creativity and algorithms – a blend of ‘organic’ and ‘synthetic.’ Additionally, the pulsating rhythm in your tracks can be linked to the heartbeat, yet you intentionally disrupt and break it. How do you balance the human touch, full of creativity and emotion, with the use of algorithms or technology in your creative process?

In terms of my relationship with algorithms and music-making, and to what extent I relate to the computer generative side of it, I think my process, when it’s going well – because I often feel I’m fighting it – tends to start out with very broad strokes of the brush. That might be where you’re hearing this heartbeat being interrupted and punctuated with cacophony, I don’t know. Features like that might start taking shape in the early stages of the track. Often, in those stages, it is a case of letting the tools guide me, using, if not randomisation or sequencers or plugins, then at least some chaotic elements of my tools where you don’t really know what the outcome is going to be. Trying things out, randomising some samples or just trying to make some really weird sounds; then recording them back to audio and stretching them or pitching them or quantising them, seeing if there’s something in there that could be reinforced with another musical part or texture or melody that emerges that could serve as an inspiration for adding more layers.

What do you mean by weird sounds?

I mean by re-recording sounds that come out of your favourite synth and then manipulating those with some other effects or pitching them down, pitching them up, stretching them. This process is guided by tools, which I guess could be algorithmic, as you put it, but more likely might just have chaotic or unexpected outcomes that feed back into your own inspiration to understand where to go next on a particular track.
All of this happens very quickly, and then after that I spend months sculpting, polishing and chipping away at what comes out of these sessions, into something that sounds extremely detailed. At this stage the process is no longer chaotic and is much more guided by technical and musical convention and experience and technique. But that’s not the stage at which I’m writing anymore, rather I’m pushing it in different directions, trying to understand how this idea could be executed in the most compelling way. I guess for me the sound design, songwriting, arranging, polishing, mixdown stages are usually all a big convoluted iterative mess, haha.

It is fascinating how DJs and producers work in solitary in the studio and then are exposed to crowded live sets. One specifically that comes to my mind is the one with the visual artist Ezra Miller which connected people to the music in an unconventional way, creating a more comprehensive multi-sensorial experience. How did the collaboration start?

Ezra was introduced to me by Bill Kouligas from PAN. He’s incredible – I feel like the visuals he developed had almost a synesthetic connection with the music. Ezra was able to identify and hone in on a visual story for each song that made total sense not just for the songs and the set as a whole but also to individual sonic and visual elements within each track. It felt super cool to be able to closely tie those elements together and I really enjoyed the technical challenges of figuring out how best to connect the live audio and the live visual experience. There was a significant amount of interconnection between our respective laptops – a lot of the musical parts were triggering elements of the visuals. There was one song from the album, kind of a weird ballad almost, where we had this visual of a giant animated 3D model of a woodlouse, magnified to festival screen size. It was terrifying but actually kind of cute. Anyway, it was inspired by these photos that he had found of various insects magnified by an electron microscope. And so he commissioned another artist to model one of these things in 3D, and we used an iPhone camera to track the motion of my face and map it onto the motion of this insect’s face. I was singing into a vocoder, and the head of the insect was moving with my head and its mouth was moving with my mouth. And it was really exciting to be able to map out these details in a whole new medium that I’d never explored before. The lights and the lasers were also synced to my Ableton set – a lot of the more punctuating musical elements would trigger the lasers for example.

That’s super cool! This makes me think of how the DJ possesses the aura of creative genius, and we forget about the team that works behind the scenes to create an event.

Yeah, for sure, this was very much a team effort. The lights for the AV show were designed by Dave Ross, who also does Aphex Twin’s lighting design. The lasers were inspired in part by an incredible Chris Cunningham live show in I saw back around 2010 or so. And without Dom Morris, our production manager and TM, the whole show would never have got off the ground, let alone survived a single festival excursion.

Talking about collaborations, you have engaged in b2b sets with Call Super. What do you find most rewarding about sharing the decks with another artist?

In all honesty, speaking in general terms, I think b2bs can be cool occasionally, in certain settings and with certain pairings, but I feel the majority of the time they end up being less than the sum of their parts. I’d usually mostly rather play solo. (Though to be fair, I’ve been selective enough with my own b2bs over the years that I’ve really enjoyed most of them.) As for Joe, we’ve been best friends for close to 15 years now, and we’ve been DJing together since the beginning, so DJing with him feels pretty close to playing a solo set in a lot of ways and definitely feels special as b2bs opportunities go. We don’t really need to talk about it much anymore; we have a very similar sense of direction when it comes to DJ sets. Of course, our DJing styles are a little different, and we have different areas of specialisation, but I would say that he’s one of the few people that I can play back-to-back with and feel confident about being able to structure the set in the same way as I would structure one of my own sets and still preserve that same sense of narrative and trajectory. We do often end up playing some sillier stuff, bringing out a more playful side of each other, but whereas a lot of, back-to-backs can end up in a bit of a banger parade – or at least a string of quite functional party tunes – I never felt that way with him.