Structure and Stupidity: Talking Music w/ Sunik Kim

A conversation about fascist happy hardcore, player pianos, 90s jungle, computer music, utility techno, and the inherent beauty of musical stupidity

When I was first getting into underground dance music at the start of the 2010s, one of my favorite things to read was Resident Advisor’s Playing Favorites series where DJs would talk about some of their favorite records. This was not only incredibly informative in terms of helping to contextualize the lineage of classic records, but I also really just liked the idea of being able to eavesdrop into a casual record-nerd chat, getting a feel for the great passion and dedication that people have for their favorite records.

While recently reflecting on how formative reading some of those features was for me, I was struck by the fact that this format has essentially been dead for years — RA dropped the series a long time ago, and no one else has really picked up the mantle in the meantime. So, after playing around with the idea for a while, I eventually just thought, why not just give it a try and do it yourself?

For this first edition of Talking Music, I reached out to my friend Sunik Kim, a musician, writer, filmmaker and fellow Tone Glower currently based in Los Angeles. lf you’ve been following my quarterly round-up posts, you might remember that I already wrote about Sunik’s last two albums (here and here) for Infinite Speeds. I still think they’re genuinely some of the most interesting experimental music of the last few years, especially in the way they deal with the relationship between compositional structure and sound material, which is something that has also been a big interest of mine for a long time.

After each picking a selection of tracks and records that we thought would be interesting to talk about, we had a long conversation over the phone one Saturday in late November 2024 that I edited over the holidays. Looking at it again now, I think if there is a thread running through the conversation, it is a shared interest in the notion of musical structure at the intersection of dance music and experimental music, an intersection that we both arrived at despite originally coming from the complete opposite ends of the dance-experimental axis.

Frankly, calling a conversation like this nerdy would be an understatement, but if there is an upside to writing in the Substack age, it surely has to be the fact that you can just publish something like this without any respect for word count limits or attempts at mass appeal. So if that all sounds interesting to you and you’re intrigued by what on earth happy hardcore, Conlon Nancarrow and Dillinja could have in common, grab a coffee or tea and dive in! — Vincent

Richard Turner ‎- Utility Plastics 01 B2 [1999]

Vincent: I picked this because I think it’s really interesting how it’s just this one loop, and most of the arrangement happens through EQing, turning off all the highs, then turning off all the lows, and so on. It’s this very low-tech way of arranging things.

Sunik: Yeah!

Vincent: Another thing — and this is something I’ve thought about a lot over the last year or so — is that I feel like good dance music, and especially good techno, really always has this element of stupidity to it. And this is such a stupid track, it really just is so damn stupid (laughs). But then that somehow turns around to being weirdly avant-garde because it’s so stripped down and ascetic, like you’re just repeatedly banging on something with a stick in a way that is almost performance art.

Sunik: I love that. I think you’re getting at something important with that, which is that, to me, all of my favorite music really sits on that tightrope between total stupidity — almost to the point of self-parody — and being something genuinely ecstatic and singular. All great music has to tow that line for me, and every time something is super self-serious and consciously ambitious, I’m just turned off immediately because it’s like, you’re being too confident, you’re not subjecting yourself to the possibility of being like maybe this thing I’m doing is actually just really fucking stupid (laughs).

Vincent: I adore even just the name, “Utility Plastics”, it’s so perfect for a tool techno project like this, it’s so on the nose. There was another UK techno guy around the same time whose artist name just was “User” and he had this compilation called One Break – One Loop – One True Religion. It’s so self-consciously stupid (laughs).

Sunik: That’s amazing. Like you say, it’s so transparent about what it’s trying to do, but then it can also reach over into this very intense, almost transcendent experience. You know, for me, going and seeing more dance music live recently has really made me appreciate that quality of being functional within a club setting, where before I was very tied to the home listening experience.

Vincent: Right.

Sunik: I think a big part of the reason why I’ve been interested in going to more dance music events is that it’s really the only popular — “popular” in the sense that there are hundreds, or even thousands, of people at these parties — genre of music that has an engagement with extreme duration. It’s probably the only widely socially acceptable situation in which you’re signing up to engage with music or art pretty intensely for at least three hours, whereas if you’re like “come see this three-hour opera or play with me”, people will just be like “what the fuck are talking about” (laughs).

Vincent: I’ve never thought about it in that way before, but that’s a great point of comparison. It’s definitely interesting how three hours in the club feel like nothing but three hours in the opera is usually excruciating (laughs).

Sunik: And there is a reason why people are willing to engage with it for these extreme durations, there’s something to it where the duration is a crucial part of the experience, it’s not something that’s just added on top. Obviously dance music has become extremely popular, but I think at its core it’s still this extremely nerdy and weird thing. Just the fact that you might be pummeled by something called Utility Plastics for hours on end is not quote-unquote “normal” (laughs). It’s kind of wild to me that this has become a popular activity, because it’s very intense, it’s not at all accessible.

And I think it’s very interesting what happens to you in that kind of situation perceptually, after like three or four hours. I find myself paying attention to the sound in a way that I definitely do not at your average experimental music show. So it’s not just about duration as such, but about this very heightened sense of perception aided by that duration. If you think about something like a poorly mixed train-wreck transition, people react immediately to that, they stop moving, there’s this instant breakdown of the perceptual “training” they’ve undergone over the last few hours. All of this is really missing in a lot of contemporary experimental music to me, it feels like there’s this potential to duration that even just your very average techno party explores more than your super vaunted, chin-scratching experimental show.

Vincent: Maybe my techno background is why I rarely go to experimental shows (laughs).

Sunik: I’ve stopped going to a lot of these experimental shows, also because there’s often this kind of prepackaged quality to the whole thing. Sometimes, I almost want to do this performance art thing where I would just go around at one of these shows and ask people “do you like music? do you really like music? (laughs).

The other thing about the perceptual aspect of dance music that I find super interesting is that you’re not only engaging with the sound, but you’re also engaging with the history of it — and not in this removed, discursive way, but in a way that’s directly related to the sound itself and the perceptual experience of listening to it.

Dillinja – Sky [1995]

Vincent: I was thinking about what you just said with the Dillinja track you picked. Like, with the way he uses the think break on that track, there’s really this referential aspect to it where he’s using that specific break and he knows that you know that it’s that break, but then he does interesting things with the break and kind of plays with that connection established through that mutual knowledge.

Sunik: Exactly, and Dillinja and Source Direct are probably the greatest junglists to me precisely because of what you are getting at — they know that the history of the breakbeat and they explore the same breaks over and over, but they are somehow still able to modulate them in a way that always sounds alien.

I also see them both as being hyper-fixated with the engineering of their tracks. Like, with the very early, pre-1995, jungle stuff there’s often that tape-rip sounding quality to it. Which is also its own aesthetic of course, but to me the prime — and I’m obviously not alone in that — era is really that 1994 to 1996 period precisely because it brought with it this super intense fixation on engineering. Especially Dillinja really has this insane attunement to the lowest frequencies, they’re always so finely sculpted.

Vincent: Regarding the engineering thing, I’ve been told by people that would know that a lot of this golden era jungle stuff was actually mixed down in proper recording studios by real old-school engineers. And that obviously plays a big part in the overall sound of those records. You see a lot of people these days that are like “why can’t I sound like that?” and I’m always thinking, because you’re just doing it on your own in your bedroom (laughs)! Especially today, there’s often this fantasy of the lone-wolf bedroom producer that, at least with this stuff, was never really the case historically.

Sunik: Right! Another big thing I find fascinating about classic jungle is that, for all its rhythmic fireworks and the almost free-jazz-like influences, it’s actually incredibly formulaic in its structure. Like, you’ve got the breakdown, you’ve got the break, you’ve got that half-way point to the break, you’ve got the intro and outro — it’s all these rigid blocks, and these blocks never really meld together.

I don’t think that’s something that people talk about very often when it comes to classic jungle, that it’s really this hyper-formulaic music — probably even more so than a lot of 4/4 dance music, because at least with the 4/4 stuff you usually have this idea of modulating something like a filter over a period of time that cuts across the track’s different sections. Whereas in classic jungle you really just have these blocks where the bass comes in for 20 seconds, and then it drops out, and that’s that.

Vincent: I think a lot of that very rigid structure also comes down to the technical constraints they were working with. Like, once you get into the 2000s era where they started working with DAWs you often get this thing that I really hate about modern drum & bass, where you have these tracks that just randomly cycle through two thousand variations of differently notched reese basses … and it’s like, what’s supposed to be the composition here, what’s the central musical idea? I think there’s really something to that simplicity of the old stuff, which is something they were kind of forced into by the technological limitations, but they also really made the most of it.

Sunik: That’s absolutely true. The technological side of it is really fascinating to me for sure — like, if you see videos of Dillinja working, he’s triggering the samples on a keyboard and the keyboard pitches the sample, so it’s almost like he’s “playing” the sample with the keys. He was really attuned to that technical limitation and he would even play the breaks on the keyboard, although I don’t know if he was just demoing that for the video …

Vincent: That’s how they all worked at the time, playing the breaks up and down the keyboard at all these different pitches and speeds.

Sunik: What I love about “Sky” specifically is that there’s this one moment where the bassline just descends in whole tones. It’s a simple and really kind of artificial progression, but he just knew that if you would hear that in a club environment it would be this extremely intense perceptual experience, just hearing this thing descend from the midrange to the bottom, step-by-step in whole tones. It’s almost “anti-musical” in that it really has no musical precedent, it’s just this very pure, simple structure. I think that’s an example of how they were really interested in this meeting point between the club environment as a perceptual space and the basic structural aspects of the music itself.

Vincent: I think a lot of those “anti-musical” structures were a direct result of working with these primitive early hardware samplers. Where the workflow is like, you have this sampler, you get a sample and then really the main thing you can do with it is transpose it. So naturally, you just try out what it sounds like up a semitone, up two semitones, down a semitone and so on. And then that’s how you build a melody, just going up and down in these transposing steps.

Sunik: Absolutely. And with something like that DJ Bizz track, I find it interesting how some of these tracks are very comfortable with the artifacts that come from that transposition process, really almost integrating them into the track.

DJ Bizz - Untitled B2 [1994]

Sunik: This one goes craaaaaazy. Obviously, this record is like 300 dollars on Discogs (laughs). Have you heard this one before?

Vincent: No, I haven’t! But yeah, it goes really hard — especially on those really bizarre time-stretching artifacts.

Sunik: This track to me is almost like the platonic ideal of breakbeat science, like these are the best breaks I’ve ever heard. They’re so, so precise, but they’re also still in counterpoint with the bass, which is interesting. What I also love about it is that it’s like, every time you think they’ve hit a limit with how deep this thing can go, the next section then goes even deeper. For example, there’s these two different bass layers that switch in and out, but then there’s a point in the track where it has both of them playing at the same time, together with these insane breaks, and it’s just beautiful (laughs).

Photek - Aleph 1 [1997]

Vincent: How do you feel about Photek compared to the other “golden era” producers?

Sunik: I think he’s just slightly below that Source Direct and Dillinja tier for me, in that I think it somehow doesn’t go quite deep enough … maybe it’s because of the over-use of effects in his tracks. “Effects” not in the sense of audio effects processing, but stuff like all the sword clashing effects — whereas with Source Direct, it’s really more inward-looking and self-referential. But still, I love Photek, especially the early System X stuff.

Vincent: Do you know the story of the Science label that those Photek and Source Direct albums came out on?

Sunik: I don’t!

Vincent: It was this special sub-label of Virgin Records that was made specifically for them. At that time in the mid-late 90s, there was a moment where jungle and drum & bass really went super mainstream for a minute, like every cereal commercial had to have some kind of breakbeat. And so the majors were like “this stuff is super-hot right now, here’s some large bags of money, go make us an album” (laughs). And so through those Virgin contracts they basically got — by underground standards — infinite money to make those albums.

That’s why they could afford to basically not DJ or play live at all. I think Photek worked on Modus Operandi full-time, no touring, for over a year straight …. you really can’t imagine anyone doing that with an album today. You can also hear that in the music, this sense of them having these fairly limited tools, but then really this unlimited time and focus to explore those tools. And to me, there’s this kind of sadness to that, because you just know that nobody will ever be able to write a record like that again, the historical conditions just don’t exist anymore.

Sunik: It’s impossible.

Vincent: You know, I think it’s kind of like Hegel writing the Phenomenology Of Spirit … he was able to do that because there weren’t any phones, there was no TV, there was nothing, and so he had all time in the world to think about spirit and the absolute or whatever nonsense — it’s not like there was anything else to do (laughs)!

Blümchen - Herz an Herz [1995]

Vincent: Oh my god, why did you pick that (laughs). But I think it is hard for someone that isn’t German to understand just how fascist this thing is.

Sunik: Really?

Vincent: Extremely fascist (laughs)!

Sunik: Say more.

Vincent: Are you familiar with the term Volksmusik?

Sunik: No.

Vincent: On paper, it’s just traditional German folk music, but it really always has had this fascist military march vibe to it. Like, I remember being at some Volksmusik events with my grandmother as a child and at these shows, everyone always starts clapping in lockstep like an idiot, ecstatically losing their mind with these deranged, empty smiles — I found that creepy even as a kid because it really feels like you’re at some kind of fascist rally!

Sunik: That sounds terrifying.

Vincent: And the thing is that for everyone in the early German techno scene … for them, that was really the ultimate enemy, that was what their reactionary parents were listening to. Techno, as a musical and social form, was explicitly meant to be antagonistic to that. And so when stuff like Blümchen and Marusha — that is basically just Volksmusik with techno beats — came out in the mid-90s, to them that was extremely traumatic, an absolute catastrophe, because it was like the empire had just won and everything the early techno movement had stood for was all for nothing.

Sunik: Wow, I had no idea! Although I had already figured there was some kind of important historical context to this that was just completely invisible to me as someone in the US (laughs).

Vincent: To be fair, it is kind of fascinating on a musical level though (laughs). What do you like about it in that sense?

Sunik: Musically, there’s two things that I like about it. The first is really just the simplicity of the chord progressions — and you know it’s funny, because it really does bring out this reactionary quality in me, like “oh, nice chords!” (laughs). The other part is these insane, gabba-like drums. I actually find it quite badly produced, but it has this harsh quality to it that I find kind of interesting. The kicks are very mid-heavy and there’s this jagged and garish quality to them that I really like.

Vincent: That’s the sound of those old Mackie mixers that everyone had in the early 90s. I actually have one of them, the small original 1202 Micro Series mixer. I got it because everyone told me the clipping is really good for techno, but I actually rarely clip with it and mostly use it for effect loops. Because once you overdrive it, you really only get that one sound out of it and everything starts sounding like gabba (laughs).

Conlon Nancarrow - Study for Player Piano No. 37 [1979]

Vincent: I’m very interested in why you chose this particular Nancarrow piece, because I know you’ve spent a lot of time studying his work, but I think to most people that know about him, Nancarrow is just this crazy wacky player piano guy and it all just kind of blends together.

Sunik: I think that Nancarrow generally is quite misunderstood. Because like you say, it’s easy to turn him into this novelty where it’s like yeah, it’s the crazy robot piano ragtime guy (laughs). I chose this piece in particular because it’s so long and it encompasses so many of his different structural ideas in one piece. And a lot of it is also quite slow and sparse, which I think again goes against many people’s conceptions of what his music is supposed to be.

There’s so much I could say just about this piece in particular, so I don’t even know where to start! But you know, zooming out to my interest in Nancarrow in general — people … I think most people don’t know that his favorite musician was Bach.

Vincent: I didn’t know that, that’s wild (laughs)!

Sunik: Like, he would only appreciate reviews of his concerts where it was compared to The Art of the Fugue or something (laughs). That was the pinnacle of music to him and he studied counterpoint super intensely — he was very attuned to that and all of the structural notions it entails, and it was really the canon structure that fascinated him the most about Bach.

The canon is obviously a highly complex idea, and there are many aspects to it that Nancarrow unfolds in his work that I could talk about. But I think the main thing is really the time or the tempo canon. In its basic form it is about having a certain run of notes and then putting that on top of a version of itself that is slightly sped or slowed down, so it is almost like this kind of Steve Reich phasing effect — but here it is created through the structure of the actual notes themselves, rather than by layering up different copies of the same recording.

Vincent: That’s amazing.

Sunik: So you can have a “static” time canon where a note is copied and the second copy of it is stretched slightly faster or slower. But where it gets really interesting is when the second copy then starts speeding up or slowing down over time and it starts clashing with the original version of itself. That’s such a simple idea but it’s just so beautiful and elegant to me, and it is really the kernel of all of his music. And Study No. 37 is so good because within it he explores so many different valences of the time canon.

Vincent: I’m interested in why he felt like he had to turn to the player piano at some point in order to realize his music.

Sunik: Already pretty early on in his career he was interested in these complex relationships between notes. And he wrote some pieces for actual players, but he quickly felt like the performances just went horribly wrong because there was this imprecision in the timing. It was just about distilling down those ideas about time in a way that humans can’t really play, and for him the player piano was the best way to accomplish that. He also worked really slowly, because with the player piano there’s this painstaking process where everything has to be punched in that’s almost like manual labor.

Vincent: Do you think there’s something essential to the specific timbre of the piano to his music? Or is it just a placeholder that could have been replaced by the timbres of other instruments?

Sunik: I think that half of it was just necessity — like, that’s just what he was working with — but he also did experiment with modifying the piano, he refined his piano’s timbre to where he thought that it allowed for the temporal structures to emerge with the utmost clarity. I find that interesting because it is a timbral question, but not really in the sense of foregrounding timbre, but rather in the sense of how that timbral character can allow for the structural ideas to emerge.

Vincent: I think it’d be an interesting thought experiment to think about what would have happened to the trajectory of his work if he’d been born a few decades later and he would have had a computer at his disposal to realize those compositions.

Sunik: Totally! I think there is actually a later interview with Nancarrow where someone brought up that same point and he was like, you know, if I had been born in a time where computers were readily available, of course I would have just used a computer (laughs) — he was not all fetishistic about his particular choice of instrument.

Pascale Criton ‎– Infra [2017]

Vincent: Were you already familiar with the music of Pascale Criton?

Sunik: No! But I thought this piece you chose was very interesting and cool.

Vincent: Unfortunately, this is really her only piece that is available as an actual recording. She is this very traditional, institutional kind of composer that doesn’t interact with the recorded side of music very much. She also has a really interesting background in that she was a student of Gilles Deleuze, and if you look at the transcripts of some of Deleuze’s later seminars from the 80s, he will often refer to her whenever the topic of music comes up, like “ah, music — Pascale, you will know all about this, come tell us something” (laughs).

A lot of her compositions explicitly reference concepts from Deleuze, which I find very interesting. She’s also edited this great volume on Deleuze and music, it’s called Gilles Deleuze: la pensée-musique — I don’t think that’s been translated, but I think some of her other papers are also available in English?

Sunik: Ah, yeah, I just found one, I’ll have a look at that later! … I think this piece also reminds me quite a bit of spectral music, there’s this hyper-microtonal aspect to it that I find very interesting. Have you listened to a lot of spectral music?

Vincent: Yeah, and I tend to usually like the ideas behind it, but I find a lot of it kind of boring to listen to in practice, because it’s very score-based music and it’s often hard to tell what the core of the composition is supposed to be just from listening. Maybe that’s why I like Criton’s music, because I can really hear the compositional ideas behind the music. There’s a clear beginning and end point, and you can really tell she thought about every second of how it develops between those points — you know, it almost reminds me of that famous Brian Eno Win95 startup sound, where it has this very detailed structure of how the timbre develops over a very small time-frame.

Sunik: Right, I see that.

Vincent: So, with that Paul Dolden piece …

Sunik: Before I go on my little Paul Dolden rant (laughs) — is there anything else you like about Criton?

Vincent: I think I really just like listening to her stuff. It has these very haptic and tactile timbral movements that I find very pleasing, it almost gives me an ASMR-like sensation, which is certainly pretty rare with this kind of ultra-contemporary classical.

Paul Dolden - Below the Walls of Jericho 1988-1989 [1990]

Vincent: I didn’t know about Paul Dolden until I saw you mention him somewhere. Is he well known in experimental music circles these days? I’ve never heard anyone else talk about him.

Sunik: Maybe in the early 2000s a reader of The Wire might have been clued in, but yeah, these days, nobody ever talks about him.

Vincent: What did you want to say about him?

Sunik: What Dolden is really interested in is scale, specifically the scale that the digital realm affords you — you know, these impossibly stacked orchestras with 500 tracks, whatever technology allows for, and then seeing how that unfolds. But to me, that kind of renders the music less interesting, because it opens itself up to just being novelty, like “look how many things I can stack on top of each other”.

There are definitely interesting structural ideas in his music, but I think they ultimately remain trapped in that exploration of timbre through scale. I don’t necessarily hear very convincing meta-structuring ideas in his compositions, it’s more like, here’s this cool sound and here’s that cool sound. Also, to me that chasing of scale through technology maybe lends itself to a kind of fetish of the digital. I know I sound very critical …

Vincent: Didn’t he start out making these pieces on tape?

Sunik: I think so, yeah, sometime in the late 80s. So it does make sense that there was this holy shit moment of what suddenly became possible with digital recording technology. But for me, I think what I’m really interested in is the opposite of scale, tracing one or two lines in their unfolding, rather than just throwing a million things at you.

Vincent: I think what I like about his music is really just that it’s very sonically impressive. Like, with this piece, when I first heard that, I had this “holy shit, that sounds fucking insane” moment. And that’s something I very, very rarely get anymore just based on how something sounds.

Sunik: Totally, I get that.

Vincent: And even just with the stacking technique, it’s so, so difficult to get this kind of density. Like, sure, you can stack 500 things, that’s easy — but it’s also probably going to sound like shit. He has this very specific and very intricate way of layering things that gets him to the point where there’s this maximum timbral effect. I guess he really does only have one idea, but it’s a really well executed idea (laughs).

Sunik: It’s definitely meticulously executed. You’ve never heard these timbres anywhere elsewhere. It is really interesting in that way. I guess I’m being really picky because in a way, he’s like a musical neighbor for me …

Vincent: The narcissism of small differences (laughs)!

Sunik: Exactly (laughs)! But I think the reason I don’t return to his music very often is that it does cross over into a bit of gimmickry to me. Because it’s almost aware that it’s going to have this strong effect on you. And at that point music just fails to me, you just can’t be that confident (laughs)! You have to have some self-skepticism, like “is this going to carry or not?”.

Oliver Ho - Wonders (Unreleased Mix) [2000]

Vincent: To me, the interesting thing about this track is really that it’s this very intense techno track, but it doesn’t have a kick — and that might sound kind of unremarkable in itself at first, but it is really almost impossible to get the kind of intensity you get from a 4/4 club track without a kick drum. And I think this one almost pulls that off. And it’s not that I dislike kick drums, I just like the idea of thinking about the structure of techno, seeing what else you could rely on to get the same structural effect that the kick provides.

Sunik: Right. I think that is a very interesting question — how do you fill in the gap of that big percussive thing that is telling your body to move in a certain way, what happens when you are expecting to hear a certain thing but it’s not there, and then what can make up or compensate for that?

Vincent: There’s a small, minor tradition of people attempting to make this kind of “kick-less techno”. Maybe every four or five years, someone tries it — there’s an old 90s Carl Craig remix that does it, there’s that Umek track released on Tiesto’s label (laughs), Sam Barker has done it in recent years — but then nobody ever follows up on it, and it disappears again for a few years. So for thirty years now, people have been trying to make techno without a kick drum, but it’s this project that always fails (laughs).

Sunik: That’s funny.

Vincent: Speaking of “perceptual gaps”, let’s talk about the Amacher record!

Maryanne Amacher – Sound Characters [1999]

Vincent: Did you ever listen to this one like it was intended, with the otoacoustic effect [which requires playing the piece on speakers, very loudly, almost at the threshold at pain]? I’ve never really done that.

Sunik: I’ve successfully replicated the effect at home. And obviously that’s what she’s mostly known for. But if you look at the piece, the otoacoustic part actually only makes up a minority of the piece. And yeah, the effect obviously is extremely intense and hard on the ears, but it’s really just a part of a larger perceptual project. A lot of the piece is basically silent because it’s exploring sub sonic frequencies, and then a lot of it is just this mid-range drone — and these are all really just components of this larger piece.

Vincent: Right!

Sunik: What’s really interesting about the otoacoustic effect to me is that it’s almost this way of calibrating the ear for the other elements that follow. It quite literally opens-up your ear, exposing the physical and biological structure of your eardrum. So it’s like, I’m going to throw this really intense thing at you, and your ears will feel super fucked up (laughs), but then that also puts you in this really open state of “what else can happen?” and poses questions of what other perceptions you could also be open to, what areas you perhaps haven’t yet dared to go to.

Sunik Kim – Tears Of Rage [2024]

Vincent: On the Bandcamp page for your new album Tears Of Rage you say that with this record, you challenged yourself to “use pure electronic sounds in a way that avoids generic ‘harsh’ / computer music tropes, and is very ‘clear’ / ‘dry’ and compositionally and structurally complex” — what was the thought process behind that approach and how does it compare to your previous album Potential?

Sunik: I still really love the MIDI-paradigm that I used on Potential, because MIDI is kind of an inherently limited and outdated form and it was enticing to me to work with that and to prove that there are a lot of hidden potentials in it. But by the time I was writing this one, I kind of felt like I had done everything I could do with that. I had a program that was good at spitting out thirty minutes of very cool sounding material, but I just knew that that wasn’t enough for me anymore, I could see it becoming a gimmick.

So out of that came this desire — which I think really came out of listening to a lot of Maryanne Amacher — to see if there are other inherently limited forms that I could apply similar structural ideas to. And then, for whatever reason, my ear was just drawn to the sound of a simple, default-preset saw wave. The challenge with saw waves was really preserving the overall structure of it where it wouldn’t just become a noisy mess. With the General MIDI preset sounds that I used on Potential it was easier in a way, because they were playing off of stable perceptual notions. You understand it’s a trumpet or a violin, and so on, and each instrument has its own organizational logic. So it was this question of “how do I create that same structural effect when every sound is basically the same” (laughs) — you have to listen more closely, in a way, I think.

Vincent: I thought it sounded quite sonically complex though, was there a lot of processing applied to these saw waves?

Sunik: I think a lot of that timbral complexity comes from layering, specifically the effect that emerges when two lines of the same sound “cross” each other, this kind of X-shape where lines criss-cross, and then at the meeting point there’s a brief flanging effect [cf. the discussion of Nancarrow above]. I like allowing the materials to make that moment for themselves without me strictly dictating that, letting them evolve in the way they want to evolve.

Vincent: Did you also make this one in Supercollider like you did with Potential?

Sunik: Yes. The thing about me and Supercollider is that I do the one thing that all the good coders say you’re not supposed to do (laughs), which is to just create one giant patch that does everything. So, I have this single patch — I’m looking at it right now — with about 2500 lines of code that’s been a scratchpad from day one. I do have a system that links all the pieces, but it’s probably incomprehensible to anyone except me because it’s so poorly coded (laughs).

But there are structural principles throughout. It’s a tiered system and the first level is just note data, which is really just numbers. That’s why I like MIDI as a form, because I don’t have to think between the lines, it’s a discrete system of numbers [usually corresponding to note pitch information] between 0 and 127. It’s really just data generation and manipulation, which I then send to another layer of VSTs. I have this VST wavetable synth that I like to use to a lot right now, but I actually don’t really explore it, I just like the sound of the initial default saw wave preset (laughs) — I think over time, I’ve just realized that I’m more interested in structurally manipulating static sounds than spending a lot of time playing around with timbral modulation.

Vincent: I find that interesting, because at least to my ears, I heard more of a concern with timbre on this record compared to Potential, where it was obviously these clusters of preset sounds. I think I wrote something funny about how I thought it sounded, something about how it “sounds like if Tiesto had spent time studying at IRCAM” (laughs).

Sunik: I loved that description, it’s absolutely true (laughs)! I also liked what you said about it sounding like a “corrupt [video game] save file” because I’m really into this idea of data translation. In a way, I see the piece as a form of data translation. The whole thing just starts with arrays of numbers, it’s something that I can just type in a notepad, it’s not inherently musical. The interesting thing then is the translation of those numbers into musical sound. And obviously, there is a process of data translation in all electronic music in a certain sense, but I think there’s just something very transparent about this particular process of translation, and I guess I’m deliberately trying to make that act of translation very visible.

Going back to the “computer music” thing, one critique I have is that a lot of computer music … I hate most of it, it’s terrible —

Vincent: (laughs)

Sunik: — one problem I have with it is that it’s really just tech demos. You stumble on an interesting algorithm and then you just let it play out. And people know that, but it’s considered to be part of the aesthetic, playing with that meta concept of automation that I just find very uninteresting musically, because I want to hear what someone does with cool sounds and not just those cool sounds playing themselves. The other thing is this interest in “harshness” that does not interest me at all — I’ve really struggled with this “noise” categorization that some people have put onto the stuff I’m doing.

Vincent: It doesn’t sound like noise at all to me. I think some people just immediately associate clusters of sound and structural intensity with “noise”.

Sunik: It’s definitely not noise!

Vincent: What I’m also interested in with this piece is the question of the relation between the patch and the finished piece — I was thinking of someone like Autechre and their heavily reliance on complex Max/MSP patches for their music, for example.

Sunik: I think at least compositionally, I’m basically on the opposite end of Autechre in the sense that I never create a program that is already a piece, the program just generates fragments. When I’m making music, I spend hours every day just collecting all these fragments that range from two seconds to two minutes, and then at the end I do the manual work of actually putting them together.

Vincent: And so then you arrange them on a linear timeline in a more traditional DAW environment?

Sunik: Yes.

Vincent: I find that really interesting, because I feel like doing classic manual linear timeline arrangements has gotten a pretty bad reputation nowadays. Even with more techno stuff, it’s like the least sexy and cool thing you could possibly do these days, just endlessly shuffling blocks of sound around on a screen like LEGO (laughs).

Sunik: Exactly.

Vincent: Everybody wants to be in this “intuitive”, immediately creative mode. I remember reading an old interview of Dave Huismans (2562) with RA where he was talking about just dragging stuff around for hours to slightly shift the timing of a snare or something. And I feel like nobody wants to do that anymore, perhaps also because it’s quite time intensive, right?

Sunik: Yeah. Lately, the way I’ve been working is quite intense — for hours every day, if I find the time — just building and finding fragments, collecting material until the program generates that one fragments where I immediately know, “oh, that’s the thing”, the thing that’s going to be the cornerstone.

Vincent: And that then determines the structure of the rest of the piece?

Sunik: Yes! By that time I might have ten or twenty hours of fragments, but none of them are new to me. And so when that organizational kernel comes out, it structures everything else retroactively and I can hop through the old fragments and see what goes where.

Vincent: Right.

Sunik: You know, I’ve just finished a new piece about one and a half months ago, and it’s two hours long (laughs)! That’s quite different from this record. Duration is something that really interests me right now, because at my performances, people often have said to me that they might be overwhelmed during the beginning, but then they end up seeing the larger organizational structure during the last five minutes or so, but by then the piece would be almost over already. And so I thought it would be interesting to try and make a piece that can exist in that space for longer.

Fictivision vs. Phynn ‎- Escape (Phynn Mix) [2004]

Vincent: I posted this in the Tone Glow Discord a while back and you and Sam Goldner went absolutely crazy (laughs).

Sunik: Oh yeah! For me, I think there’s two things I really like with this track. First, it’s the chords. The melodic contours of the whole thing are really interesting — if you asked me to come up with that, I could never do it, I just don’t think about music in that way. And secondly, I’m also always drawn to things that have this mix of being melancholic and ecstatic, and I hear that very strongly here, like, I could laugh to this or I could cry to this.

But then I think it’s also the structural aspect. Because every time you think they’re done adding another type of breakdown it’s like, oh no, that was just the intro to the real breakdown (laughs). It’s not pure repetition like with something like the Utility Plastics tracks, there’s this almost proggy quality to it.

Vincent: It is “progressive trance” after all …

Sunik: Right!

Vincent: To me, there’s also this kind of referentiality to it that’s similar, but also different to what we were talking about with the jungle stuff — where they’re really referencing the form of the breakdown and the trance arpeggio. I always find that really interesting, because very few of these producers know music theory, but there’s really this very specific melodic and harmonic form that makes something sound “trance” or “techno”, and what makes it sounds like a trance arp is quite specific.

Sunik: It’s really so specific, and like you say, it’s not just a timbral thing, it’s also in the construction of the chords and melodies themselves. And again, I don’t think that way at all, which is why this music is so fascinating to me. This trance track really sounds more advanced to me than whatever GRM shit, like, with the GRM shit you just put a fucking plugin on it —

Vincent: (laughs)

Sunik: — so it is funny to me how all these categories are just reversed in my head, where with the most techno-futuristic shit I’m like, oh, you just put a plugin on it, but with this, I’m like, this is the future (laughs)!

Theo Parrish – Traffic Jams [2024]

Vincent: To close things out, I remember you recently saying something about going to this amazing Theo Parrish all-night gig. What was that like?

Sunik: Where do I even start with that? That was probably my best live music experience ever. I was there for six or seven hours and what really blew my mind was that — in contrast to your typical techno sets where you work by taking percussive elements in and out — he would work by having the whole mix in these very particular frequency bands over ten or twenty-minute stretches. And part of that is literal, because he has this insane mixer where you can fully kill entire frequency bands, so it’s not just a fade, but a hard cut, and he would tweak that really intensely.

But it was also really just the track selection itself, where there would be a stretch of soul and disco edits that don’t really have a lot of bass and mostly exist in the midrange, for example. And that would put you in this very specific perceptual zone, like “this is what I’m listening to”. But then he would just suddenly cut from that to twenty minutes of full-frequency acid tracks — he really played a ton of acid, and as an acid head really made me happy (laughs) — and so suddenly you’re hearing these really intense frequencies after all those midrange-y soul and disco tracks. And that to me was just super interesting, this thinking in pure frequency bands as a form of structure.

Vincent: I think there’s some people doing something somewhat similar with techno. I’m specifically thinking of DVS1, who I remember often doing this quite extremely EQing and layering of tracks, where he’s totally killing the midrange on one track, and another track only exists in the highs and so on, and then he’s bringing them in and out and kind of morphing through these frequency zones quite rapidly — if he’s on form, he’s really the best techno DJ on the planet, if you ask me.

Sunik: Is he — because I know he’s coming to LA with this Wall Of Sound thing where they’re installing this custom PA and everything, I wonder if that’s worth going to …

Vincent: Oh my god, you should go for sure!