Interview: David Kanaga

David Kanaga is an electronic artist from San Francisco (via Eugene, Ore.). His biography is “unfortunately pretty dull,” but his two recently released EPs are anything but. The collection of psych, folk and electronics which comprises small musics 1 contrasts Cybernetics’ organic fusion of improvised percussion, field recordings and dreamscape samples, but both are decidedly Kanaga’s.

His offerings move briskly, often with beats which are understated and sometimes hard to immediately discern. Cybernetics falls somewhere between the environmentals of Nicolas Jaar’s latest and the glacial and evaporating moments of Burial. Listeners won’t hit the dancefloor, but after multiple headphone listens, Kanaga’s seemingly minimal compositions continue to reveal new details.

Kanaga also created a loop specifically for this Fracture Compound post. Check it in the interview below.

Fracture Compound: How did you get into producing electronic and sample-based music?

David Kanaga: When I was 12, some good friends of mine (Josh Bothun and Jonas Pologe — I still work/play on different music things with them) introduced me to a piece of software called FruityLoops. I had been playing music before then, but had never really been able to experience the kind of compositional control that powerful software like FL provides. I started out playing with synths mostly, then eventually got demos of some other programs, Sound Forge and Acid, which I used to cut samples for the first time.

FC: What’s your creative process?

DK: Big question! It changes a lot, depending on what I’m doing… Still, there are some constants. I make a lot of stuff, including a lot of crap. I heard a quote from a friend, Iris Alden, that “work doesn’t come from inspiration, inspiration comes from work,” and it’s true! If I’m lucky, I’ll be inspired no problem, but if I’m not, I’ll just work anyway, and usually be inspired like 30 minutes in. I just make stuff, and don’t really have plans going into it, and when things are going well, I’m really open to external influence, responding to sounds and forms, and I’m allowing rather than willing the music to happen. This is at my best, and good stuff usually comes from it — other times, I’m inside my head, and I make crap/hollow genre music.

FC: Do you impose rules on yourself from project to project?

DK: Yea, though it’s not always conscious. I’ll usually work and work on a lot of different ideas/sketches, then at some point, something will strike me as being worth exploring for longer than one track. What I’ve started doing recently, which has helped me produce things quickly, is to take a song that I like texturally, and then strip it of all its content and use that as a template for the other music on an EP. I first did this consciously with The Portable Dragon, though most of the EPs before that used a similar process, only with less precision. Recently, a kind of “rule” that I guess I’ve been following is to use a really limited sample palette (like only one or two samples for a whole EP), and let the form of the piece emerge as a kind of my response to that. The Portable Dragon, Flower Walk and Cybernetics all do this.

FC: How did Cybernetics come together? What were you trying to accomplish with that particular release?

DK: I’ve always been interested in cutting samples loosely, to create complex rhythms and allow other exciting things to happen by chance. I’m really into improvised music, especially music that is rhythmically free (rather than metered), and I’d been trying to be as improvisational/carefree in my sample cuttings as I could, but there was a problem: the quantization grid (in Ableton, which is what I now use) which cuts bars into equal rhythmic units. I usually have it on, since that’s the default (and probably why I make a lot of dance music), but it doesn’t allow me to create the constantly shifting kinds of rhythms I enjoy while I improvise, so I turned the grid off, recorded live drum improvisations, and then “attached” samples/sample manipulations to notable “events” in the drum part. It’s like follow the leader, where the drum track is the leader. “Cybernetics 5″ was the first one I did, and I felt really good about it. Around the same time, I heard Sun Araw & Matthewdavid’s “LIVEPHREAXXX,” which has some really loose drum machine kicks in it; that excited me and made me want to put the 808 kit in as part of the instrumentation, since I loved the tension between the rigidity of that sound and the free “decisions” that it was making. Then I found the Harold Budd sample, and that sort of led to the rest of what I did. In short: I wanted to create free/could-have-been-improvised music with an electronic pop producer’s textural palette.

FC: You’ve featured both natural-sounding and heavily processed vocals in your music. How do you decide which approach to take? What do you hope the voices in your music will accomplish?

DK: Most of the time vocals are recorded after I’ve done a lot of the other instrumentation, so deciding how to treat them is an intuitive response to the music that I’ve already made. I use samples all the time, and I like to think of the vocals as just another sample (which they are). So, I’ll process samples whenever if I feel like it, and I’ll do the same with vocals. I don’t know that I have hopes for what the vocals accomplish for others; for me, they provide a physical connection to the music–even just sitting in front of a laptop, feeling music being produced by your lungs/body like that is a really powerful thing.

FC: One of your latest projects – small musics 1 – is diverse in approach, ranging from electronic to psychedelic folk; How do those differences coexist in your music?

DK: (And that was a collection of songs off of my blog that I selected because they were more similar than the rest ). I don’t know how they “coexist” or if they do, but I’m naturally drawn to working with a wide variety of sounds, I think, because there’s such a wide variety to choose from. Working from only, say, funk samples, seems like it would bore me, since it would feel like an artificial restraint. But again, if there’s a sample, or some specific idea that I’m really interested in exploring further, I’ll stay with it as long as feels right, and it might turn into an EP.

FC: Your samples tend to veer more toward academic music (classical, jazz or avant-garde pieces), than the more pop-rooted samples people might be more accustomed to; How do you select a work to sample, and what about you might these aesthetic choices reflect?

DK: Probably the main reason I sample these pieces is that they don’t have drums dominating them throughout: sampling music with drums ends up controlling so much of the rhythm that it can be hard to be creative with other aspects. A lot of my sampling is just done by chance, though. I’ll go into iTunes, close my eyes, scroll and click on something, drag it into Ableton, then cut to a random place in the sample, and sort of fine-tune from there. This feels good to me, a lot like sitting at a piano, hitting a random key and going from there. Chance/chaos seems to be a really important part of the creative process.

FC: With the exception of Lil Wayne, you seem to shy away from incorporating popular music samples. Is there any particular reason for this?

DK: I don’t really like music where a lot of its meaning is generated from its cultural relationships to other things (though you might argue that a lot of everything‘s meaning is generated in this way). I did the Lil’ Wayne remixes because I fell in love with his voice and didn’t think the productions he rapped over accompanied it very well (though some productions, like “A Milli” are absolutely brilliant). I’ve sampled other pop things, too, but usually transform them more. And actually, I sample a lot of older pop, but the drums are usually more subdued in those tracks.

FC: On your blog, you offer to make a custom loop for $5? More than the $5, what do you get out of doing this?

DK: Chance. It’s more chaos to inject into my music, having to work with this rule that someone else comes up with, and that leads to good creative energy. It’s loads of fun, too. I love videogames/software/other kinds of interaction in general, and this project feels like a sort of 1-turn-each/2-player game to me.

We asked Kanaga to sample “one or more of his earlier works, Fracture Compound-style,” and he came up with this loop. Explained by Kanaga: “I sampled some things from about 10 years ago — crazy to revisit them! Cool prompt — got me to go do something I wouldn’t have otherwise… I hope the loop was “fracturecompound-style” enough — that’s a tough one…”

FC: Do you perform your music live? How does that work?

DK: I’ve done it a few times in the last couple years. I’ve usually created a live set with new material specifically for the event that I’m playing at, then I perform it using Ableton’s “Session view”, which is a way of playing with loops nonlinearly. I haven’t really done performances incorporating many of my pieces from other contexts, since I haven’t figured out how to do that in a satisfying way. I’m working on a set for Cybernetics right now that will hopefully be pretty improvisatory (past sets have felt sometimes too rigid to be creatively satisfying beyond the set-design/production) — so, even though I’m thinking of it as a version of Cybernetics, it’ll probably be its own thing, but with a similar instrumentation or whatever…

FC: How do you expect or hope a listener might react to your work?

DK: Well, it’s kind of like you guys write in your site description… I love “listening” to music, but often don’t enjoy “hearing” it all that much (would usually rather hear natural/environmental processes). So I hope people “listen” to mine. Still, a lot of it is pretty straightforward, which probably lends itself well to being “heard”…