Hi Varsity Star, thanks for joining us at Minimal Mag – how are you doing?

Good, thanks. I’m just finishing up home brewing some beer – haven’t tried doing it in a long time but finally got my girlfriend on board so I’m hoping we can stick with it for a while. Fermentation is so cool to me – the idea that time is an ingredient in food. I definitely got into the bread thing during the pandemic along with everyone else, and I’m still at it. I just can’t get enough of that yeast I guess.

When you show up at a nightclub or event, what elements make it particularly enjoyable and fun for you to play at?

This is something I’ve been trying to figure out with this music for a while. Obviously, a good sound system helps but so much of it is really about the people listening and the vibe of the night. I’ve played a couple of nights where it’s mostly DJs, and it doesn’t really translate well, because I don’t fade between tracks and stay in that 110-130bpm range the whole night. I think my favourite gig I played was a few years ago at this more bandy venue in Brooklyn called Friends and Lovers. It was kind of more of the vibe of going to see a band play a full show, and I felt like I could actually talk between some of the songs and have more of a range to it. I don’t have any issue with four-on-the-floor nights, and that stuff can be super fun to get into, but it’s definitely not really where I’m coming from with all of my music. I think in general electronic music live tends to get pretty uncanny – you never know if you’re showing up for a DJ set with some videos projected behind the person or if it’s going to be something actually “live” in the old fashioned sense. I think James Blake really has this kind of thing figured out though.

You are a Jazz musician as well as an electronic producer, how much does your classical jazz background inform your productions?

Hopefully not too much. It’s interesting you say “classical jazz” – it makes a lot of sense in a way. For me there’s so much I love about that music itself, and the stuff I grew up listening to and emulating on bass. But there’s so much about the modern community around it that I just don’t relate to at all, especially the drift toward the classical music approach to it, and there being so much worship of the old ways. I grew up playing bass and hanging with drummers a lot, and so to me, so much of what jazz is about is really the time and the feel, and that’s something I hope shows up in my tracks. It’s funny because the horn players kind of come and go, but at the end of the song, the bass player and the drummer are the ones still there. Maybe the piano player feels like he’s part of it, but it’s not quite the same. The sound of the bass and the way you choose to play it, plus all the same kinds of choices for the drummer, really define so much of what a band sounds like in that kind of music. And I think it’s similar for this stuff, even if you’re doing synth drums that are exactly on the grid. There are perfectly quantized things that feel so good to dance to and also sloppy live stuff that’s supposed to have “swing” that just feels awful. To me, the whole precision vs. slop thing isn’t as much about picking an ideology as just picking an ingredient for a track. Every set of sounds kind of has a way it wants to be played.

You are based in New York and across the pond in the UK you have an album coming out with Small Pond Records, tell us about that.

Yeah, it’s funny – for this kind of music there’s definitely more of a scene in Europe, and also historically in the UK. I don’t know exactly why that is – I think it has something to do with there being lower drinking ages over there and more of a youth culture around dance music. But yeah, I was a big fan of Inwards’ stuff when I came across it a few years ago – it sort of felt like a kindred soul to me in that it was making this really song-y music using just synths and samples. Anyway, I hit up Inwards asking if he was looking for any remixes, and then the timing worked out and I did one for his track ’19TET’. His label liked it so we talked about doing a record together after that and here we are. The funny thing was I had never done any remixes before, so I sort of lucked out that it turned out well. So I’m happy that the whole enterprise is over there in the UK – I think it allows me to flesh out a bit of my fantasy of being European.