Dark Ambient Interview: Jan Robbe

Jan Robbe is a composer, programmer, artist and sound designer, one with a love of broken rhythms, experimental electronic soundscapes, and the possibilities afforded by using technology in the creative process. Along with co-founding the netlabel Entity, Jan has various music projects to his name including UndaCova, Atomhead, Duncan Avoid and Diagnostic, the last of which is how we began chatting.

In this interview, Jan reveals how he got started with the tracker scene back in the 90s, the perils of getting stuck in one type of creative style, and who his inspirations are. He also tells us which software and hardware he likes to utilise, how he uses neural networks as an aid to his creations, and why he thinks that humans using A.I for creativity is a dance that benefits us greatly.

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Casey: The description of the latest album under your Diagnostic name, Morphology, tells the listener that you utilised things such as non-linear feedback loops and neural networks, among other approaches, when you created this album. Before we get to that though, in the 90’s, you experimented with tracker software on hardware that was far less powerful than that which is available today. What brought the young Jan Robbe to music creation, and what sort of software and hardware were you using back then?

Jan: Back then my interest in music creation coincided with the discovery of the tracker scene. Simply searching for free music on the internet, that was also small in download size (actually a factor at that time) led me to the Fasttracker / Impulse Tracker software that many artists were using. I remember being shocked by how good the music actually was, even though netlabels were putting it online for free, it was a true explosion of creativity.

So I used Fasttracker at first, but my music wasn't very good. It wasn't until Fruityloops came along, with the support of VST plugins, that things really got interesting. I understood that I didn't actually need to buy any sophisticated hardware to make pleasing sounds, in fact it was all pretty much free of charge.

Around 1999 was when I really caught the producing bug and decided I would make a track every day, with the sole mission of making something that I could be proud of, and perhaps also something that others would enjoy.

Casey: Committing to creating a track every day and doing it for the intrinsic feeling of satisfaction are both great ways to go about any sort of creative endeavour. Have there been periods where you fell out of love with the music or the process, for whatever reason, and are there any other mental approaches or techniques that you use to help to get yourself back on track?

Jan: Especially in the very beginning there were several moments where I simply gave up. It takes a lot of time to grasp all the concepts (synthesis, mixing, compression, fx, ...), but my love for music has always brought me back. By now it's my preferred creative outlet, I almost need it to feel sane, to catch emotional unease by the throat. Or simply for my own enjoyment.

There have been periods where I just lacked the time or inspiration, but I keep in mind that these are only temporary. Life gets in the way since it's never been a sustainable thing for me. Getting stuck in a singular style has also proven to be a problem, but changing up, learning new styles is just endless fun. There's always some artist that will inspire me to make something new.

Casey: Who were some of your biggest influences and inspirations when it came to the music that you wanted to create, and how might this have led to you co-founding the Entity website?

Jan: I remember feeling bothered with commercial electronic music being very repetitive and similar. There was a clear opportunity to just break things, you know, like broken rhythms, breakbeats, but not as a looping structure... I wanted it to just keep on breaking itself with endless variation. Aphex Twin seemed like one of the first to really execute this idea properly, with Squarepusher and Autechre working in parallel and really pushing the boundary of sound. Along came Venetian Snares, which really spoke to me as I always preferred the harder side of music.

But you know, life isn't all metal and violence, so in that regard, say around 2002, I found my counterpart in ambient and more specifically, dark ambient / drone music, just to cover a wider emotional spectrum, using music as therapy.

In 2003, with my friend Nico, we started a website to promote the experimental approach in electronic music. Something that wasn't genre-bound, but simply sounding good to our ears with the artists' authenticity shining through: Entity. This way we got to really know and discover artists, work with them and help them reach some listeners, however small the audience, it didn't matter much as we felt connected in our cause. We all know we are an odd bunch anyway.

Fast forward to today, the list of artists I appreciate just keeps on growing. In my current playlist there's KK Null, SØS Gunver Ryberg, Fernanda Martins, Alphaxone, ProtoU, Marco Monfardini, Oophoi and Ionosphere to name a few.

Casey: As with so much in the music world, the technological world has advanced a great deal in a few short decades. What have been some of the most exciting tools for you to use during that time, and what does your current composing/creation environment include?

Jan: Along came things like Native Instruments Reaktor, Absynth and granular synths (most notably the native Granulizer in FLStudio and Robert Henke's Granulator) which really took sampling to the next level. In later Atomhead works I got a bit obsessed with Rob Papen's Subboombass which served as the basis for a lot of my drums / bass sequences. UHE Bazille became my go-to modular emulator, and eventually got me into the analog modular domain.

For a couple of years now I've collected Eurorack modules and experimented with them, and while there is certainly a uniqueness to this approach, and improvisation is very gratifying, I find myself returning to the digital domain since I see myself more as a composer / programmer / sound designer than a performer.

Casey: For Morphology, you made use of machine learning to create the sounds it contains. What need does machine learning fulfil in your creative process, and how do you train the neural network to give you output that is in the ballpark of what you are looking for... Or do you use it more as an element of chaos and let it throw up things for you to spring off from?

Jan: I've always had an interest in how the brain works, how we perceive music and sound, so when the opportunity arises to experiment I gladly jump on the train. A.I is an important evolution, of which we are only scratching the surface. It is evolving at an enormous pace, it's actually hard to keep up, but using Google Colab's cloud computing service it became more convenient as some of the notebooks are easier to grasp and don't require an advanced degree in programming to use.

Using the Jukebox AI notebooks, there are a couple ways to go about it. One method is to prompt it with a piece of music, and have it "guess" what the continuation might be, based on a large pre-trained database of music or "model". When you are in a creative rut, it's obvious how this output could be used to your advantage since the results are entirely unpredictable.

For Morphology I found it more apt to train my own neural network, based on the material that I had already created, in order for it to produce variations of itself. Most of the time it tends to output a mess of unintelligible garble. But once in a while, something entirely unique comes out of it, something that also displays actual emotive content, that I wouldn't have created myself, though it still contains the gist of the sources so it would "fit" with the rest.

Casey: The other element mentioned in the description of Morphology is chaos, by way of non-linear feedback loops. I’d imagine that your neural network’s output produced plenty of chaos that also made it into the track. How important was it for you to have some chaos in Morphology, why does it appeal to you, and why are non-linear feedback loops a fine place to find it?

Jan: Chaos is not just a kind of randomness, it's best understood in terms of Chaos Theory, a chapter in System Dynamics, which covers emergent complexity.

Using modular synths, chaotic feedback systems can be quite easily achieved. My favourite method is to patch the output of an oscillator into a filter, then feed it back into the oscillator (SYNC or FM inputs). Many strange noises will ensue and it doesn't take a lot for it to go completely haywire, going off on its own tangents (simply automate the filter cutoff or something).

There's more methods, for example there are modules which can create Lorenz Attractors or similar chaotic functions. They can act like an LFO, without exactly repeating themselves. So it's non-repetitive, much like a non-periodic tiling (e.g. Escher or Penrose), it tends to sound more interesting, alive, unpredictable, than something which simply repeats itself.

Casey: Alongside your music creation projects, you’ve long had an interest in generative design, making use of its concepts when it comes to your fractal computer artwork, and in your 2014 game Hyperspace Invaders. At the moment, a key element seems to be the human involvement in training or assessing what the software outputs, making sure that it achieves a certain task or function. What advancements in areas such as machine learning, would you most like to see with regards to things that you might currently find restrictive or a struggle, and do you have any concerns about the paths that A.I might take us down when it comes to the creation of art in whichever form?

Hyperspace Invaders Screenshot

Jan: I can't wait for these systems to become faster and more convenient. I don't see a problem for creativity, quite the contrary. Humans will adapt to this technology, like a dance. I've heard someone say that "the code is the art", and while I agree, I also still think that selecting and applying the output are creative choices. For example, text to image, where you prompt the neural network with keywords (like "a cat in a bag travelling into another dimension")... it generates a picture based on your description. It could be the final form. Or it could inspire you to make a game or movie concept or anything you can imagine. Imagination is limitless. A.I is simply an extra tool for us to employ. An extremely powerful one at that.

Casey: As someone with a finger in so many creative pies, what does the immediate future hold for your creative endeavours?

Jan: I'm focusing on sound design and composition for video games, at least I will try and see if that's a feasible thing to find a job in. I want to check out more A.I. scripts, both in audio & image/video, it's very exciting.

Perhaps at some point I will have another stab at a mini Hyperspace Invaders iteration (hyper casual), if the situation permits it.

I'm finishing a flashcore EP with my friend Eelke of Anti-Narcose Records which will probably be my next release.

I definitely want to make more ambient-style things too, both in collab and solo. I would love to dedicate more time to Entity. But as you can probably tell, that's a lot for one plate, so, don't wait up, just have a check now & then :)

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Thanks so much to Jan for taking the time to chat with me. If you’d like to read more about Morphology, I’ll be writing and posting my impressions in the coming days. (Casey from the future says looky here).

You can find Jan’s creations in a variety of places, such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud and Facebook. You’ll find his digital art (such as the picture below) at FRAMEofMIND, and the netlabel at Entity. You an also find Hyperspace Invaders on Steam.

Catharsis by FRAMEofMIND

Dark Ambient Interview: Scott Lawlor

Anyone who knows Scott Lawlor will be all too aware of how prolific he is with his music releases. It’s a good thing that his music is well worth listening to! Scott kindly agreed to share a few words with me in this interview. We touch on how he can be so prolific, the challenges of composing music as a blind person, the virtue of creative constraint versus total freedom, and the most mundane sound he feels that he has ever recorded. Thanks for joining us and I hope you enjoy the interview.

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Casey: Scott, even though I am familiar with how prolific you are with your music releases, it still surprises me just how frequently I see that you’ve released a new album on Bandcamp. What are the main factors in your life, that you think may contribute to how you can achieve such a release rate, how does this current rate compare with periods earlier in your musical life, where you felt the need to take a break from things, and what was different between the two periods?

Scott: I am a stay-at-home dad and since my kids are in school, I have a lot of time to compose and release music. Some years have been busier than others regarding actual number of releases but through all of that time, my situation has been the same.

I've got many more albums on our network that I've recorded over the last 7 years, so if I quit writing new music right now, I'd still have releases for a long time to come. I'm always working on new music so the odds of catching up to myself are astronomically impossible at this point.

Casey: As a blind composer, I know that you occasionally tweet about accessibility issues with the tools or apps that you want to use. What kinds of accessibility issue do you find the most irritating, which apps or tools do you use that you feel handle things really well, and more broadly, what is your usual process for composing a new track, which tools do you tend to use the most etc.?

Scott: Well, for a long time, I had a Roland fa08, Sound Forge and Audacity as my main way of composing music and though this set of tools allowed me to create many albums over the 6 years that I used them, they weren't as accessible as the current tools I utilize.

The menus on the Roland didn't talk and I was limited in how I could shape sound from within the synth, so this lead me to using things like Audacity for shaping recorded sound from the Roland into something totally different. Even though it was an interesting experience to do things this way and I got quite proficient after developing such a streamlined workflow, the results from one project to another weren't as different sonically as I thought they'd be.

As an example, Paul Stretch is a tool that I used to use quite a lot in my early work and though it can create some interesting results, if you change the default values, it's something I hardly ever use anymore, or, if I do use it, it's part of something with a good many more layers and elements mixed in.

I think part of the reason PS has such a bad rap in the ambient community is probably because people didn't change the values, and just released things that were run through it with no further processing after the fact. Just look at all the videos of popular songs that were run through this plugin and uploaded to YouTube as an example.

The same can be said for other effects inside the box and so the point of all this is to say that, though for me, this method worked for a while, it's actually pretty easy to tell which effects I used, particularly on the noise projects that I've done over the years.

Now that I've said all that, the tools that I use now are totally different and they're accessible with speech so it's much easier to manipulate sound and add interesting effects where this wasn't possible before. I use Komplete Kontrol from Native Instruments, and various third party instruments by companies like Soundiron, Soniccouture, Luftrum, Sudden Audio and, of course other things from Native Instruments themselves.

The most time consuming part of composing now is deciding on which sound to use. Sometimes it takes me longer to find the sound I want than it does to create the actual work in question.

Casey: In an interview with the From Corners Unknown podcast, you touched on the topic of how constraints can often aid creativity, talking about how contests like the ambientonline.org forum’s One Sample Dare Challenge can give creating a different focus and challenge you in different ways. How much constraint do you enjoy before you feel it becomes a true hindrance, how often might you sit and compose with no purpose in mind, and the theme later suggests itself, and do you prefer one approach over the other?

Scott: Most of the time, I compose without constraint, just letting the improvisation go where it will as I play on the keyboard and upon playback over time, a theme or concept will come to me for the music. I do prefer this approach but am thinking of revisiting the ambientonline.org One Sample Dare challenges since I have new effects, software and hardware that are much more accessible.

Casey: In the aforementioned From Corners Unknown interview, you talked about some of the sounds that you recorded, including workmen breaking your house windows, at the time that it was your turn to submit the sample for the One Sample Dare Challenge. I was wondering, what is the strangest or most obscure sound that you can ever remember sampling, and which mundane thing have you recorded, that gave you the most surprising and satisfying sound, once you started experimenting with it?

Scott: The most mundane thing I've ever recorded was the spin cycle of my old washing machine and I took that recording and created an album called Spin Drone, which, looking back, isn't really that interesting but some people really seem to love that album.

I think the most interesting thing I recorded was different objects in our old clothes dryer which I then used for an album called the Ambient Series 1, Symphony for Prepared Dryer. I put many different things in the dryer including silverware, wooden alphabet blocks, shoes, coins, and even sweet potatoes, recorded from 19 seconds to 3 minutes, depending on the item and then processed those sounds to create the album.

My wife wouldn't allow me to put her pipe wrench or glass in the appliance and you can hear her promptly rejecting both ideas in the last track of the album which is the documentary for the project.

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Thanks very much to Scott for answering my questions. If you’d like to find Scott’s music, you can find him on Bandcamp at this link.

 Dark Ambient Interview: Mindspawn

At the beginning of the year, I posted my review of Daemon, a dark ambient album from Mindspawn, a musician also known as Gene Williams. After reading the album description and some of Gene’s postings on his own website, I had more than a few questions that I was curious to get the answers to. Gene was kind enough to agree to an interview, the result of which you can see below. We talk about the role a persona plays in his creativity, the perils of working with tools that can be different each time you turn them on, and we get a glimpse of Gene’s general philosophy towards life. I hope that you find the interview as fascinating as I did.

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Casey: You originally created the Mindspawn persona to aid in the creation of your solo musical projects. In a blog post in early 2020, you say that, over time, the Mindspawn persona has tended to gravitate more towards what might be termed dark ambient creations. With these things in mind, in which ways does using a persona help you in your musical endeavours, and why do you think that Mindspawn, over time, has tended towards the dark ambient side of things?

Gene: Personas create a loose framework on which to explore certain aspects of my creativity. Think about David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Hank Williams,' Luke The Drifter, or Nicki Minaj’s, Roman Zolanski. All were used in some fashion by the artists that created them to delve into musical idioms that reflected the persona in some fashion, but much of the time the music made under these persona’s were usually outside the typical style, sound, or societal expectation of the artist’s main audience. I make music across many genres from blues to hip-hop, and while I do a lot of productions under the Mindspawn name that aren’t dark ambient, the majority of my Mindspawn releases are firmly in the dark ambient, drone, etc., vein. It’s simply a sound or style I gravitate toward.

That said, having a persona that I can play with creates a framework for sound exploration, timbre choices, and arrangements that contributes to a smoother workflow when creating new work. I don’t think of them as inviolate, but more akin to wearing a performance costume, if you will.

Casey: In the same blog post, you also talk about how Mindspawn helps you in the process of self-discovery, letting you explore questions about who you are and the role that perception, both your own and others, might play in who anyone “is”. Is there an example that you might be able to give that illustrates something that you’ve learned about yourself by way of your music creation?

Gene: My Mindspawn persona is one that actively encourages my experimentation, and as it is a persona I can look from the persona back to myself… it’s really hard to learn about yourself without the input of others, my Mindspawn persona is a little like someone else looking back at me, informed by the musical explorations. Over many years of this back and forth conversation between Mindspawn and myself I’ve had revelations, big and small, that have caused me to question “default settings” in my life, revisit old ideas with new eyes (or ears), and shape how I interact with the world in a more balanced (for me) manner. I’ve learned greater patience and discipline via Mindspawn, and a willingness to try anything no matter where it takes me. In that way, the Mindspawn persona is an amplifier of all my creative endeavors. Would that be possible without the persona? Of course, but the persona creates a ready made laboratory replete with recipes, ingredients and best practices baked in… It is kind of strange on some level that creating restrictions can be immensely liberating, and at the same time no restriction is inviolate. I think for me a lot of that stems from an interest Taoism that really got stared with exposure to Bruce Lee’s philosophy and teachings, in particular, “have no way as way."

Casey: For Daemon, your most recent Mindspawn release, the album description mentions the role that experimentation and exploration played in its creation, and the possibility of losing those discoveries if you were to risk turning off your modular synth. How important is it for you to start a project with some kind of purpose in mind, and do you have any particular techniques for branching out into areas that, while related, might not be imagined until you happen to stumble across them?

Gene: Sometimes when I start a new work the purpose is clear and fully formed, at least loosely so. At other times the only purpose is to sit down and explore sound. Quite often I will start with a purpose but that might alter marginally or significantly, even to the point of being utterly unrecognizable in some cases… So the short answer is, purpose can be valuable, but if the art asks you to violate that purpose, be willing to try it on for size. You may find that new place is where you were going all along….

My way of working with my eurorack modular equipment is a perfect example of something that swings both ways. On the surface, the power to create almost any sound I can think of is right there, I have over 120 modules that shape, twist, chop apart, granulate, and otherwise create interesting sounds…. But the myriad ways I can realize a particular kind of sound often will lead to unexpected tangents that can take you far far from the original intent. Many of these tangents are far more powerful and intriguing than the original concept. So, when I’m creating a new soundscape, bass sound, drum hit, weird noise, or any form of explorative sound design, there’s always this side of me listening for the unexpected.

I most often start with no pre-patching at all, preferring to literally create a new sound design from scratch every time. By starting a sound design session clean, it lets me think about new ways to arrive at the same place, different modules that might shape the sound differently or emphasize a particular aspect of timbre, etc. Most often this happens pretty quick and I record my work and then clear all the cabling for the next session. On occasion though, I’ll be onto something, and the chase to find/realize that something can take days. Modular synths, like any analog device, are subject to the whims of the world around them and there is no ‘freeze state” where you can turn everything off and come back to it later and hear the exact same thing.

Digital tools, soft synths, etc., are phenomenal for that ability to have perfect recall, modular synths, not so much. For example, you might be connecting several modules to create a sound... a slight variance in temperature on the last module in the chain might be barely noticeable, while that same variance at the beginning of a chain can make the end result widely different. Thus, when you’ve got a great sound on your modular, but it still needs more tweaking to get it where it needs to be, if you turn it off things cool down/the electrical flow alters and the sound can get altered in really significant ways. “Losing a sound" doesn’t always happen when you turn a modular off, but it can. When I don’t want to risk losing a particular patch/sound I’m working on, it stays live for the entire time, and sometimes that can take days.

So while it can be limiting and even frustrating not having “total recall” on a modular synth, it’s also a way of working that I enjoy. The sound is in the moment, volatile the entire time, and when you turn it off, that sound is gone. Again, a kind of restrictive liberation.

Casey: While Daemon made considerable use of your modular synth, do you enjoy using any particular equipment or software above others, and have you encountered any that you really thought would be fun or powerful, but that you sadly didn’t “click” with?

Gene: Yes and yes…. My guitars, eurorack modular equipment, my small collection of Moogs, my monitors (both my main monitors, Kii Threes, and my headphones, Audeze), and my DACs and Amps (Schiit, Chord, and Apogee) are my favorite hardware pieces. On the soft side, I create a lot of custom patches and sound libraries in Kontakt, and a Kontakt engine I use frequently is the Dark Matter and Dark Matter 2 instruments made by String Audio. The Dark Matter stuff is great for creating specific ideas as you have immense control over the sound shaping parameters…. Aaaaaand the Dark Matter engine has a “randomize” function which is like playing a sound design slot machine. Huge fun and surprisingly capable of creating usable and nearly usable patches out of the blue.

On the other side of things, I’ve purchased many sound tools that sadly didn’t live up to my expectations… And that’s fine. You experiment, maybe something works for awhile but you hate the workflow, or the plugin might be a little too unstable, or you simply don’t jive with a sound. I liken this to the hardware DX7 synth. When those came out (like a thousand years ago), they were the hot ticket and everyone into synths had one. I purchased one in the mid 1980s and as much as I tried to like it, and I did use it a lot, I never cared for the sound, how it interfaced, editing, etc. BUT that’s my experience, obviously lots of people loved that synth…. Still a valuable lesson, as I learned about things I didn’t like and that informed future time investments and purchases.

Casey: When creating Daemon, you embraced the various meanings of the word, from the Greek mythological version, to a background process running on a computer. More broadly, do you have a particular philosophical, spiritual or general view of life, a view that you feel best describes what is going on around us, or that guides you in your interactions with the world? I know that you mentioned Taoism and Bruce Lee in a previous answer...

Gene: I’m not religious, nor particularly spiritual, although the latter would depend on the definition one chooses to employ. Viewed from some perspectives, all life might be called spiritual.

I have a fascination with the occult and the supernatural, but I wouldn’t call myself a practical believer. The world around us is full of so many marvels, it usually seems the supernatural is superfluous, and the occult is usually revealed with little more than patience and an open mind.

Taoist and Stoic philosophies contribute immensely to my perspective of the world, and by world I mean everything, the universe seen and unseen, and myself.... My interest in Taoism originally came through the filter of Bruce Lee’s writings and philosophy when I was wee, maybe seven or eight years old. Stoicism was planted into my mind via reading Seneca in my early twenties. I wouldn’t call myself a Taoist nor a Stoic, but as Bruce Lee says, “absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.”

Aside from that, I have a strong belief in science. It usually works, and more importantly, as we get presented with better information, the “rules” of science are mutable and can reflect that new information. Science is fascinating, with myriad disciplines to explore and fuse, and real-life wonders which are as mind boggling as any acid infused tea party collaboration that Dali and Giger might conjure.

 

Casey: What can your fans look forward to hearing from you next?

Gene: I haven’t a clue! Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I’m always working with a few different people on their projects, and I am a full time mastering engineer, so I’m always hearing a variety of new music. All that exposure to other artist's music is such an incredibly cool experience from which I draw a ton of inspiration. I might pick up on sound combinations or maybe a novel mix approach, or any plethora of things you might hear that makes you think, that makes you feel, that excites you…. All these combinations I try to learn from, and then from that mix of ideas, techniques and sounds new interpretations flow… that’s what the next Mindspawn album will sound like.

That all said, I’ve been playing around with thematic ideas from re-reading some of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories and Michael Moorcock’s, Elric/Stormbringer and Corum tales. Trying something that is inspired by those sources might be an exquisite challenge and rewarding no matter where it ends up. The stories are rich with imagery that begs for a soundtrack, a haunting melody, or an otherworldly sound. The worlds of Wagner and Moorcock are very fertile environments that spawn myriad musical and sound suggestions.... I could call the next album, Arellarti by Night, or perhaps, Dreaming City Blues…

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Thanks so much to Gene for taking the time to answer my questions. You can visit Gene on his website to learn more about his music and his mastering services. And be sure to keep an eye out for his music on your music stores of choice too!

GAME REVIEW: Flowscape

Flowscape is a kind of meditative creativity tool, the soothing music and gentle animation helping the player to create scenes and views that they might want to escape to. It also has a map-making feature for any DnD'ers out there. You can read my full review over on Geek Syndicate.