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.