Excerpt

Ben Nobuto: Earlier you mentioned ‘reverse engineering’ when you were talking about Nerve and Jojo Mayer-

Adam Yasmin: And like Squarepusher, yeah.

BN: Yeah, I’m really into that concept. I think I first discovered it through Steve Reich, you know, Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians. He’d done all this stuff with tape machines and he realised that that on its own isn’t enough to sustain your interest, but if you can get humans to sort of try and imitate machines you get this strange mixture of precision, machine-like precision, but also really beautiful human imperfection that always creeps in. And that’s what makes music so expressive: that gap between the perfect, almost Platonic ideal of what the music should sound like and then the scrappy, imperfect, flawed human realisation of that sound.

AY: We are humans who’ve listened to electronic music for decades now and are so deeply moved by it that we then play as though we are machines, right? We’re playing machine-created beats. It’s just so . . . I dunno . . . It’s both so beautiful and strange.

. . .

AY: I wonder what you draw inspiration from that may not be music itself. You kind of touched on it when you described being based in Kent and being able to train into London, and so when you get back home you get grounded and you have that sort of nourishing ‘groundedness’' about you, but I wonder what else you may be drawing inspiration from?

BN: I think a lot of this stuff works subconsciously, but usually I feel there’s a binary or a dichotomy between something that’s really saturated and intense and overwhelming and then the opposite of that, which is total stillness and serenity. And for some reason I’m really fixated on that dichotomy and how these two forces sort of interplay. So I think a lot of my pieces tends to follow a (maybe quite predictable) pattern where the listener is plunged into total chaos and it’s up to them to weave their way through this labyrinth and find a moment of stillness - sort of like an oasis - within this craziness. I don’t know if there’s like a formal concept that summarises that, but you see it in lots of other things as well. Like in horror movies: in the still moment just before you get a jump scare or just after something horrible happens, that silence is so charged, it’s so powerful, you know. It’s almost unbearable.

AY: I feel like, metaphorically, you’re touching on what’s structurally within a storm: the eye. The eye is this sort of calm but charged space. I feel like that’s what I’m hearing about what you’re saying.

BN: Yeah, I kind of see it like that.