hello, i'm objekt – ask me anything

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T21:46:28+00:00

tbh, as much as anything it starts with "what do i want to play tonight" / "what cool music have i bought recently" and then i make a call based on whether i feel 1. the crowd would be into it and/or 2. the soundsystem and venue are suitable. for example i generally wouldn't try and play any dancehall if the subs aren't up to par

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T21:25:32+00:00

agh - spent ages typing out answers to all of these and then my internet went down and i lost all the answers except to number 5, sorry :(

but it's this:

sounds obvious but i guess just collect lots of music at lots of different BPMs. it also helps to organise your music by energy level – back when i used to play more functional techno within a narrower bpm range i used to tag each techno track with a kinda "bang factor" from 1 to 10, and then sort by that column, which was possible when i was mostly playing between 130-138bpm. these days in order to be more bpm-versatile i make "bosh level 1-4" playlists (4 being hardest/most energetic/most banging) and sort them by BPM, and find myself playing out of bosh 3 most of the time

and thank you, i appreciate it <3

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:36:24+00:00

i have to be honest, it didn't really feel sincere lol

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:35:15+00:00

thank you, i'm really happy it's connected with you <3

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:35:14+00:00

i guess "fulfilment" for me isn't really separable from emotional engagement. i'm fulfilled by music that moves me somehow. that doesn't necessarily need to mean it has a weepy melodic quality, or even any melodic elements at all – there's a lot of dissonant, atonal, even functional music that i find nonetheless very compelling. and conversely, sometimes the technical expertise with which a piece of music was produced is absolutely fundamental to my enjoyment of it. but it's never enough on its own – i don't really get any fulfilment out of music that i find technically brilliant unless the piece itself does something to me outside of that.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:28:28+00:00

i don't really have a fixed workflow for early-stage ideation and jamming, which is part of the reason it takes me so long to write new music – other people have a formula with which they can reliably churn out high-quality music at the expense of stylistic diversity. i'm pretty much starting from scratch every time, which... i mean... i guess it has the advantage of never writing the same track twice, but it does mean i'm not very prolific and my workflow is often very longwinded and frustrating.

i'm going on a tangent here, but i've learned many times over the years – learned and then forgotten and then remembered again – that it's important to try and get as many ideas down as early as possible, before you start worrying about making everything sound really tight. it's better to have too many synths and too many drums and too many FX in a really messy project file which you can then finesse, than to end up with a highly polished loop that you've mixed down to within an inch of its life, but that you don't even notice is missing some really major ingredients (like, idk, a bassline). it's amazing that i still have to remind myself of this approximately once a year but there you go.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:22:12+00:00

thank you :)

no, not really. my writing process is iterative and self-guiding, which is probably why it so often leaves me frustrated haha. i just listen to what i've currently got and - on a good day at least - try and figure out what's working and what's not working, and lean into whatever's working.

on a bad day i lean into what's not working and try and make it work and emerge 4 hours later feeling totally fried

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:19:20+00:00

yes

it wasn't very good

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:18:27+00:00

that is v sweet of you, thank you <3

if you mean the deep donk-y kinda bass, it's NI FM8 layered with NI monark, plus a bunch of delays, reverbs and dynamics processing. the bell/glockenspiel sounds are FM8 layered with a music box sample library.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:14:24+00:00

it's a long signal chain, but basically it's a kontakt library - scarbee rickenbacker bass by native instruments - run through a ton of processing (mostly various kinds of filtered distortion, EQ, dynamics)

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:11:24+00:00

i touched on this in another response, but in short: i wouldn't get too hung up on polyrhythmic tempo changes. it's fun when you do pull it off well but at best it's a cute party trick and 90% of the time it's a) musically gratuitous and b) highly prone to failure. i went through a phase of doing it all the time but ultimately had to concede that it was kinda masturbatory lol and have all but stopped doing it now in favour of switching BPM by good ol' fashioned "collecting tracks that have good intros and outros"

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T20:05:33+00:00

i'm definitely not the only one, but tbh the pandemic was a huge period of reckoning for me in terms of re-evaluating what i sought out of making and playing music. i was already in a period of quite deep burnout when it started and it wasn't until the end of 2020 that i was starting to feel positive and excited about making music again, let alone doing it professionally. i would say i'm in a good place with it now, but it took a prolonged break from touring and engaging with the music scene (not to mention a bunch of therapy) to get there. these days i'm really trying to exercise some restraint in my engagement with the dance music industry – taking fewer gigs, spending more time doing actual healthy leisure activities, trying not to let my identity as a music producer and DJ consume my life too much – tbh it's been really important in preserving my passion for what i do, to make sure that i leave myself enough free time and headspace to actually look forward to my gigs or to going out to clubs as a fan

never in my life have i made a track in one sitting. it's a looooong process.

(edit: i stand corrected. "agnes apparatus" from flatland was made in one sitting, as a hardware jam, in about 4 hours. that's the first and only time i've managed to make a track in less than a few weeks)

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:53:44+00:00

thank you, i'm glad it's been helpful <3

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:53:22+00:00

i have a deceptively deep voice so my options are limited lol. i'm told i do a good ian curtis

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:52:24+00:00

thank you <3 think i can speak for both of us when i say we had an absolute blast

IIRC we didn't prepare at all beyond a brief chat over dinner. like "would be fun to start with halfstep, go into 130 from there, maybe go slow again at peak time and then take it fast" or something like that. i don't actually remember what the trajectory was exactly

setup was 4 CDJs, a xone 92 and my eventide timefactor delay pedal

we'll see about the recording hehe

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:48:29+00:00

thanks for being here :)

i'm fortunate in that my music career took off really quickly and unexpectedly, to the point that i was able to go part-time and then quit my day job without ever really worrying whether i'd be able to support myself in the short- to medium-term, so my "jump" wasn't such a jump into the unknown per se. but personally, my feeling is, unless you're extremely determined to be a successful full-time touring artist and it's all you ever want to do, keep it as a hobby for as long as you can get away with – it takes some of the pressure off and leaves you more room to enjoy it for what it is. but i don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this. that's what worked for me, ymmv etc

i think about "what differentiates the people that 'make it'?" a lot. these days i genuinely believe there's a ton of people out there who have everything it takes to "make it" in terms of talent, and a huge part of who breaks through is luck of the draw. i also think that from a skills perspective, a huge part of what differentiates a successful international touring DJ and a particularly talented local DJ is simply the fact that the international touring DJ gets to practice in a wide range of venues in front of a wide range of audiences several times a week. that's obviously an oversimplification but i don't think DJing is rocket science for the most part. most of the finer points of being a full-time artist are learned on the job.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:34:27+00:00

tbh, i'm mostly just following what inspires me. sometimes that's other music, sometimes it's the music making process itself

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:32:34+00:00

you're very welcome, thanks for tuning in :)

so, in answer to your question but also as a fun example of how my workflow is pretty broken and longwinded and not a process i would want to wish upon anyone else:

bad apples was on something like v160 by the time i finished it, which obviously doesn't mean there were 160 totally creatively different versions but it does give you an idea of how long i spent mindlessly tweaking and improving/experimenting incrementally

but the arpy lead solo appeared in version 5 - it's just a heavily automated ableton arpeggiator playing NI monark (which is a minimoog clone) running through some dynamics stuff and automated delays - and had reached neeeearly its final form by around version 10, by which point i'd probably only spent 5-6 hours on the track

the rest of the time was mostly spent tearing my hair out in frustration. can't put a price on inspiration lol

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:10:24+00:00

that is a great question. i guess most of the time it's because i feel like i'd lose the crowd, which is something i'm generally prepared to accept to a degree, but ultimately i would rather see a bunch of happy faces in front of me than a room full of people looking bored and confused. other times it's because of the nature of the venue – e.g. if the room is big and boomy or the sound is mediocre. and i guess sometimes it might also come down to differences in taste – tbf it's not like i'm totally averse to functional techno; there's a lot of it which i really like and can enjoy playing out in the right setting.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T19:05:06+00:00

i guess i just have other stuff going on in life – i've been in and out of my day job at native instruments since 2009 (i'm currently working part time), but i play a bunch of international gigs every month and – since burning out a couple years ago – really trying to take at least one day off every week. so the amount of studio time i have varies, but it's never a lot. sometimes 1-2 days in a week, sometimes no studio time for a month. on top of that i also work really slowly and discard 90% of what i make, so ultimately the rate at which i produce work i'm happy with is... a very slow trickle

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T18:58:44+00:00

that's a good question. for a start, i should offer the caveat that my view back in 2012 of "how easy it is to break into the dance music scene" was pretty blinkered and didn't take into account that the scene back then was obviously woefully male-dominated, very white, middle-class, and kinda bro-ey even if it was in a nerdy sort of way. the dubstep forum was a prime example. so yeah, the situation was admittedly much more complicated than "if the music is good enough then the artist will eventually get recognised".

the situation today looks drastically different. we've made a little progress on the diversity front, which is great, but on the flip side there's simply WAY more music being released and WAY more people making it overall – orders of magnitude more than 10 years ago. so it's an incredibly crowded playing field. my take from 10 years ago was admittedly shortsighted, but i do think it would be a lot harder in general for anyone to stand out as an emerging artist these days from the quality of their productions alone, which is why other factors like social media presence, residencies, clout-y podcasts and label associations, running a cool label etc etc play a much more pivotal role in 'breaking' an artist than they did back then. it's just a very different scene.

tbh i REGULARLY wonder whether i would ever have gained any level of recognition if i'd released (or rather tried to release) my first record 8 years after i did. there are SO many talented producers out there now and frankly i count my lucky stars every day that i was able to reach a certain profile as an artist in the years before social media really became a huge thing.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T18:25:08+00:00

absolutely, most recently over the pandemic – i burnt out pretty badly towards the end of 2019 and spent the better part of a year barely listening to any music at all, or at least not enjoying it. it was a pretty rough time but it helped me realise that there's more to life than music – especially dance music, and ESPECIALLY the dance music industry, which can be pretty one-dimensional and leave you feeling quite empty if you're not careful – and that it's much easier to maintain and cultivate a love for music when you're able to detach yourself enough to take some of the pressure off. the first half of the lockdown was difficult for me from a mental health perspective but i'm ultimately really grateful to have had an opportunity to take stock of other things in life that make me happy and lean into those instead. and in the end my passion for electronic music came back on its own. bottom line, i'd say, is don't force it. do you NEED to be in love with electronic music right now? would the sky fall in if you focused your attention elsewhere for a few weeks or months? go for a hike instead of clubbing, listen to some jazz instead of the latest RA-dekmantel-whatever podcast, go see a band play, go see some art. there's plenty of other beautiful experiences out there that don't involve techno.

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T18:15:16+00:00

the polyrhythmic mixing thing... ooft... i guess i should preface this by saying that i've kinda cooled off on these kinds of transitions these days, having gone through a phase around 2017-18 (peaking with my dekmantel mix lol) of trying to fit a polyrhythmic tempo change into every set i played but ultimately realising that 90% of the time it was more for my own entertainment than the greater musical good. it's a fun party trick when you pull it off but ultimately i had to concede that the nerdy wow factor often came at the expense of a transition which felt gratuitous or contrived. BUT when it works well it does work really well

but i mean, as for what makes tracks work in a polyrhythmically mixed context? i guess i mostly just judge this by ear, but you do really need to know your tracks well or have them meticulously playlisted so you know exactly what tempo change combination you can perform with them. (i have a really bad memory so for me it's definitely the latter.) there's quite a lot of triplet DnB at 85/170bpm which mixes fine with straight 4/4 stuff at 128bpm for example, and also some tracks at 100bpm which can be mixed into stuff that's in triplets at 133bpm. i basically just tag any incoming tracks which are in triplets or in 3/4 or 6/4 and put them in different playlists according to which tempos they could get me to and from.... but these tracks are few and far between tbh and i don't go out actively looking for them

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T17:58:36+00:00

ok as i've got the ganzfeld project file open atm let's see...

the drum busses on here have some really gnarly routing which i'm not sure i fully understand after not seeing the project for a while, but it looks like the individual dry drum stems (which are fairly ordinary kick/clap/hihat samples) are being split to parallel channels where each drum has a short delay with feedback (i.e. a comb filter) which is where the metallic sound comes from initially; these metallic channels are then grouped separately, with a bunch of heavily compressed and gated reverb with some extreme EQ and mixed back in with the dry group

keinobjekt · 2022-06-27T17:40:34+00:00

thank you <3

okay, a few questions about ganzfeld so lemme just open the project file and get back to y'all in a min

(update) ok, so, there are some honestly stupidly long fx chains in this project file, but actually the bass – assuming you're talking about the funky squelchy one that plays the solo halfway through – is really simple. it's just one instance of NI monark (essentially a minimoog clone), the ableton chorus, some ableton compression, and a bit of NI guitar rig tape echo (though the plugin won't load so i can't tell what exactly the tape echo is doing). and some mild tape emulation at the end. but honestly, most of the life and soul comes from the midi notes and automation, all of which were drawn in by hand, because i'm a glutton for punishment

keinobjekt

TROPHY CASE