As Lynch Kingsley drops the Eden ep we go behind the scenes with the enigmatic producer and three things become apparent: 1/ the thoughtfulness which it necessarily takes to make cool music, 2/ Inperspective has always been a stone cold killer label and 3/ MBV doesn’t ever date.
Hi, can you tell me how the linkup between you and Inperspective came up? Are you birds of a feather, with your outlook?
Hi there, my friend James (bass:is) checked my soundcloud one day and he thought that one of my tracks there ‘Perversion’ was great and that Chris would love it.
Later on, Chris sent me an email asking me out for an EP and I accepted immediately of course. And yeah, we can definitely say that, a forward-thinking attitude towards drum & bass coupled with a profound respect for its roots is definitely an important characteristic of my music, such as Inperspective’s.
You have to understand the past to act in the preset to shape the future.
When did Eden come to light/take shape?
The moment that Chris asked me for it. I was already making an EP of mostly half-tempo experimental tunes though, the stuff I usually do, but those didn’t fit the vibe of the label. So I started trying to make my vision fit within a more traditional drum & bass aesthetic. It worked very well in my opinion and I’m super proud of it, play it wherever I go since I finished it.
I also started loving making tracks this way, in fact I have a new track on the run which is sonically similar to this EP
What inspired ‘Vision of Suffering’?
It’s almost a jam, which is a really strange thing for me. I never come up with good tracks doing them fast, I always have to work on it for weeks until it gets at least acceptable.
However, I wanted to make something very dark and twisted and, even though I wasn’t watching many horror movies, Possession by Zulawskij (RIP) sparkled in my mind. Maybe this one went so fast and precise because I know that movie almost by heart and trying to recreate it visually with sounds was very natural to me.
Title-related, do you feel that humanity is in a difficult way right now? What things occur to you on the day to day, what are small obsessions you think about?
I think we as human beings have the duty to be empathetic with others. Yeah it’s pretty obvious but easier said than done, living in a society that wants you to be ruthless and treat people like opponents instead of friends to get to your goals, to be the best of them all.
These things lead to alienation and if you don’t take care of yourself you end up being a cold-hearted machine that knows no kindness and compassion, the two most beautiful things a human being has.
This is all put to test now in my opinion.
Take us into the title tune?
‘Eden’ is my heart opened up in front of the listener. It’s a track filled with everything I love, that makes me feel good, that puts a smile on my face everyday. It’s simply made of little things, tiny details about my daily life that makes me want to live life.
I think that those details you find in whatever you want in life: a good talk with a friend, a landscape, a situation in a movie, a personal experience is what shows you the real beauty of things.
However, I mainly built this one in a particular period of my life in which I discovered the filmography of an amazing French movie director from the 60s: Alain Robbe-Grillet.
I delved deep into his movies, I watched all of them and it was one of the most intense and gripping cinematographic experiences I ever had. ‘Eden’ is my state of mind, because that’s how I feel when i feel the beauty of life.
When does the inspiration for the various textures/tones/instruments you use come from? As in: do they come while the tune is being created, or before?
As you can see from my thoughts about ‘Eden’ and ‘Vision Of Suffering’, my inspiration comes mainly from movies and things I see, giving more importance to the eye over the ear. Same goes for sounds: I see something, I watch a movie, I see a great long take for example which I enjoy and sounds flow through my mind.
If there’s an interesting soundtrack with it I may be inspired by it and use something similar, or even sample it and twist it my own way.
Sometimes instead I got inspired while listening to some tunes from my friends, new releases or some good old jungle of course, like every other producer, but I don’t listen to a lot of music anymore though so I do that less frequently.
It really depends when they come out though: sometimes I’m just in the middle of the night watching an obscure Japanese movie and a sound to start building a track with comes to my mind, at other times I just open up Ableton Live and, while messing around with some drums, things I’ve seen come to mind and they may inspire a sound that works fine with them.
What sort of stuff did you like of the label from the past, as a fan yourself? People may now forget that this/Technicality was the breeding ground of so much amazing music and that it was also in an era when D&B in general didn’t have the same crazy inventiveness of the older days, some felt.
Inperspective Records is the label that introduced me to drum & bass, unconsciously. I remember I was just sharing various tracks of different genres with an old friend of mine and he sent me a link to Equinox ‘Antarctica’.
I instantly loved it and I immediately started looking out for more music from this “new” genre that fascinated me.
I started digging through the label’s catalogue recently, like a year and a half ago because of DJing and my renewed interest for drum & bass.
I have to be honest and what I like the most from the back catalogue are Equinox tunes: ‘Acid Rain’, ‘Filteration’, the already-cited ‘Antarctica’ and ‘Troubled Mind’ are classic tunes by now.
I also really love Senses ‘Darker Self’ and Macc & Dgohn EP though.
What tune is in your head right now?
Dillinja ‘Baby Your.’ I was listening to it a few days ago. Mesmerizing.
How did you start to produce: what gear?
I started making music after I bought a Novation Launchpad, so I basically spent the first few months figuring out how to make it work with Ableton Live, slowly learning its features and producing techniques by myself and through tutorials.
I also had a glitchy and slow Vaio laptop, a crappy external audio interface and some very cheap monitors that, after four long years, I finally changed them for a new decent pair a few days ago. Still making music in my extremely small bedroom though, like I always did, even when I tried to become a guitarist.
Oh my teenage post-rocker days!
If you could be a fly on the wall for any studio session in history – funk, soul, rock, jazz, hardcore – which one and why? Think: tantrums, drugs, overdubs…
My Bloody Valentine Loveless studio sessions definitely. It’d be tremendously interesting to see Kevin Shields works almost all by itself to those incredible sounds, while people goes mad at him because of the enormous costs of the recording sessions, huge delays (… got the joke?) and his unpredictability.
And overdubs, yeah, they were probably an obsession of his also, since those songs are made of huge numbers of recordings and layers: guitars, feedback noises, different vocal takes… and more guitars.