We’re back with our monthly mixes! And how better to get us hyped than with a mix that in its own nicely strange way encapsulates everything that we’re here for at Neoterika?
This mix is eclectic and free, a fun listen powering through a bunch of different moods, genres and tempos with nary a care. According to A-M-F it’s “A mess of stuff I’m into”, leave preconceptions at the door – just roll with it and enjoy.
A-M-F’s Crossing EP is a great listen (links at the bottom of this article), it’s inventive and by turns richly dramatic and spare.
We caught up with A-M-F to find out more. Check out our interview below the mix!
Tell us a bit about your musical background and influences.
I haven’t been a music fan for long. Or at least; I can’t go so far as to label myself as a “music is my life” person. Maybe 6 years I’ve been into music. The interest was born of finding a stranded iPod at my Nan’s house. She didn’t know who’s it was (it actually belonged to my older cousin) and just said I could have it. I ended up being more drawn to the electronic music on there, even heard my first Daft Punk album from there, “Human After All”, which I’ll stress right now is not my favourite of theirs. It also lead me to hear “†” by Jusice, which I’m VERY glad I heard. I love it still to this day.
But sadly, most of the music I was drawn to on that iPod doesn’t occupy my listening time anymore (Digitalism, Boys Noize), but I held onto a lot of it and still consider it my routes in becoming a music fan. As for what influences my OWN music; I’d say Swans, Flying Lotus, Death Grips and clipping. are some names that heavily influenced the “Crossing” EP.
How did you make the move into producing your own tracks?
In the later years of secondary school I had a close friend who started making a lot of Dubstep and Complextro in Garageband in the media suite at school (he went under the name “Subosco” at the time). It piqued my interest and I got some help from him and gave it a shot myself. I made one crummy Electro House song in Garageband, of course it sucks looking back now, but melodically it was decent. It just wasn’t mixed at all, in pretty much any sense of the word.
How do you put together your tracks, what is your process?
I’m not sure if I have one single method, nor do I know many creative types that do, but nowadays I guess it’s been a lot vaguer of a process. For example, I’ll just say to myself “I’m going to make something that’s around 15 minutes but ends up sounding very little like it started and have the content of the track in it’s duration act as one big transition between those two parallel sounding ideas” and I’ll just try to churn that out. I did that on a smaller scale with the song “Toms”, but now I think I’d want to branch out and make something along those lines but bigger. I don’t really have ideas drafted or stored and think “I’ll add this into something later”, instead I just start with one thing and continually build from it with multiple sonic passages and try to turn it into something coherent. Sounds formulaic, but it’s never met with a “samey” result.
Tell us about your Crossing EP – I really like the mix of almost gregorian chant vocals with very digital futuristic sounds on surpass, and the spare bouncy rhythms of Toms.
I’m honestly quite disappointed with myself on that EP, as it’s not finished. I just resulted in giving up on it, there was supposed to be MORE vocals with more lyrics to further flesh out a concept I had in mind with the first track. But college came around and took up the time I was initially using to work on the EP and I also lost a lot of motivation to work on it. Creative drought’s a bitch. On a less bummer note, it turned out to be at least half of the ambitious project I’d aimed for and I’m still somewhat proud of it, because for while I really WAS pushing myself ambitiously and artistically in the process.
To get specific, those vocals are (like most of the timbres in the EP) were heavily processed. It’s just me poorly singing “two dimensional, two dimensional” which were then drowned in delay, reverb, distortion and LPF effects and then double tracked and pitched into octaves. Then there’s the vocals that spout out “oh monitor”. Those are similarly processed, but rely more on the use of a vocoder for their melodic output. As for “Toms”, it started just from those distorted synthetic tom drums heard in the first sections of the song. I would say it’s actually a pretty conventional drumbeat, only it’s channelled through a less conventional sonic lens (Low, Mid and High tom drums in place of a Kick, Snare and High-Hat). The aim was to have it evolve from an initially more percussive piece; into one more melodic and ethereal in sound.
What do you do to get your music out there?
I rely more on soundcloud group sharing for exposure than anything else, which is pretty impractical and met with few results of recognition. I didn’t start reaching out to blogs until I put “Crossing” out, but I ended up giving up on [that] not long after starting.
[…]For now, I’m mostly inactive on pushing my music around. The internet is so vast with opportunities, but right now I don’t even know where or how to start looking.
What’re you working right now?
The most I have is a piece of a song that’s around 3 minutes so far, but I would like to turn it into that 15 or so minute long piece I mentioned earlier, but I’ve also thought of trying to get things rolling with a smaller project (like a beat tape or something). I also opened up the project file of a remix I did for sleepytanuki and ended up adding some sections, maybe I’d introduce that to a live show if ever I started them. It’s sounding pretty intense so far.
Who else is floating your boat right now?
I’m somewhat involved with a small group of long distance friends who’re also producers (namely “sleepytanuki”, “imari”, “sakuraburst”, “yitaku”, “nuage, nuage”, “hyleo” and “Ollygon”).
Thanks A-M-F for taking the time to chat. Check out his Crossing EP on Soundcloud or Bandcamp now.
a-m-f.bandcamp.com/album/crossing-ep
https://soundcloud.com/a-m-f-6/sets/crossing-ep
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