M-Corp interviewed by WTC
One of the more "normal" sounding artists we've released music from sits on the WTC hot seat.
First of all, would you be able to introduce yourself? How did you start making music?
Name: Max.
It all started, As I remember, On a Tuesday. Might have been a Wednesday.
Anyway, I was a schoolkid, about 2017 or so.
I already knew Garageband a bit from having dicked around with my cousins making stupid sound art with the various standard loops, and through that I got to know about ASDR, as randomly twiddling knobs became a revelation - "Ah so THAT'S how you get that whooshing sound from that record I like!" I didn't know words like 'lowpass' and 'filter sweep' at that time, but had already heard things like Kraftwerk and D*Note's 'Fuchsia Dog', and I felt a kindred spirit with the otherness of electronic music. I was starting to get bored with pop music, and found electronic music to be a quirkier scene where I could escape from it all. There's something about the combination of shifting frequencies with interesting melodic and harmonic ideas that felt more comfortable for me. 'Upstream' by D*Note was one of the earliest epiphanies.
Thanks to a good music education that taught me about music theory and DAW production, I was able to get going. Particular credit must go to one of my teachers, folk artist Richard Navarro, who introduced me to Logic Pro. Orbital's 'Blue Album' was a second epiphany, it's got a simplicity to it that, once I heard the similar sounding Logic presets, encouraged me that electronic music could be made freely and easily with few limits. So I got myself a laptop, and nearly 7 years later I'm still using it.
Considering you've mentioned using DAWs such as Logic for making music, what is your process? What other things inspire you?
I'll sit down with either a laptop and keyboard and muck around with chords or preset sounds. Occasionally you go in with an idea based on a pre-existing sound or time signature. Sometimes external influences - topical politics, personal happenings - play a part. At the moment I'm starting work on an album inspired by the jazz aesthetics of Marc Moulin's albums for Blue Note, and trying to work that into a concept album based on my original fascination with trying to find a sort of 'Kentish electronic music', influenced by my surroundings growing up... but at times it's important not to overthink and to let creativity take its course.
How did your 'Alecto Nerva Muzak '24' album come about? I thought it was really interesting to see an album that was added to consistently rather than being complete as per usual.
That album, or rather a collection of chapters if you like, kind of came together by accident. I knew I wanted to try writing an 'M-Corp does ambient' album, inspired by Tom Ellard, Patricia Taxxon and all those odd TV closedowns from last century (and also my then new night shift job)... but originally I was thinking, spend a few months writing, then put out the best bits. As it happened the music ended up flowing out quite easily, I think because I simplified the process by subtracting elements, and crucially I allowed myself to write imperfect formless sketches, as opposed to the attempts at very tight pop songs with vocals I'd tried out the year before. With the air cleared I wrote an hour of music in January alone, all of which I thought was worth putting out there... so at that point, again inspired by the aforementioned artists, perhaps it would be interesting for people on the outside to see an album growing in slow motion, in real time. It was certainly interesting for me to follow the rabbit hole over the course of an exact year and see what places I ended up in. As to be expected from a ten hour album, there are peaks and troughs (there may be an edited down version on Neotantra in the future!), but I think some lovely moments are scattered throughout the whole thing, and hopefully the thing doesn't peak in the middle of the year and then fall too sharply downhill! You can listen to it on shuffle, but hopefully there is the diaristic feeling of a beginning, middle and end to the 12 chapters as sequenced.
I guess I just like trying different styles out - electronica, ambient, jazz - for my own amusement, and having just graduated and only working part time at that point, I knew it would be my last chance to do a project of that magnitude, writing music in seemingly every spare moment of mine.
You also have your own radio show, 'Sine Waves on Sunday' - how did that come about and what are your goals for it? Is it to promote music you like alongside more underground artists and genres?
It was mostly for selfish professional reasons of wanting to get into the radio/music industry, but electronic music is great uncharted territory for that kind of show. On BBC Radio for example, there are specialist shows on all kinds of music genres - jazz, rock, blues, folk, country and world - yet there isn't a show specifically for electronic music, which seems increasingly weird. Even internet shows like 'Homebrew Electronica' and 'Modulisme' focus on very specific elements of electronic music, whereas 'Sine Waves On Sunday' is a look at the bigger picture, which hopefully welcomes both diehard fans and novices who are looking to find out more.
My show started out as a platform to play the music I've enjoyed for years, and then as the show's been going on I've been playing more and more new music, but the main priority is to showcase the depth of electronic music in a way that appeals to all kinds of tastes. So underground stuff fits with Charli XCX and old Radiophonic noodling from the 60s. When putting together a show I try to make sure every decade since the 60s gets some representation. The aim has always been not to be too elitist - electronic music is defined by the show as any music made by electronic means, which gives potential for things you might not expect. A show very recently featured a pop song by Enya and the BBC News theme, which showcases how electronic music is everywhere, all around us. Hopefully it makes you look at the artform in a different way and appreciate it anew. And for all that to be combined with stuff from, say, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Stockhausen, Boulez and today's Bandcamp/EMOM artists, feels unique and exciting to me.
Everyone is welcome to come in with an open mind and have their curiosity in electronic music rewarded!
I've noticed you've done a few live shows in local places, and I wondered how you cope in that environment. How do your live sets work? Do you stick with the tracks you've made beforehand or do you improvise?
I started gigging last year, and one gig was a 20-minute set in my local village church, so I decided to write something unique that would fit the acoustics of the church, in which I weaved various synth pads and field recordings in and out on the fly, while also adding a bit of JD-Xi synth drone… generally though I try to show off my previously recorded tracks, with a bit of extra 'live' goodness. Most shows are done purely with my laptop, and I take a few tracks from my repertoire and separate the parts out into loops I can trigger on and off. Some tracks might be more complex so I'll just let the original structure play back, but in either case, I'll be tweaking filters and effects and playing additional instruments such as synth and melodica on top. So it's halfway between a DJ set and an improvised live performance really.
I'm actually starting to prepare for a gig I'm doing in Salisbury, England in mid-May, and there's been a fair bit of agonising over what tracks to play in the 30-minute set to a casual festival audience. A guy with a laptop isn't the most interesting thing to look at, but I try my best to let the pretty sounds speak for themselves :)
Would you be able to discuss your other projects such as Samuel Dross? There seems to be an interesting alter-ego type situation at play unless I'm misreading something!
Yes... basically about 3 years ago I was getting a bit bored with writing instrumental pieces. You get to a certain point and you end up repeating yourself, which I didn't want to do, and at that point I was listening to stuff like Severed Heads and Scott Walker, and I was interested on the idea of cutting my work into strands, and writing and presenting music as a person rather than as a mythical corporation. The name 'Max Williams' sounded common and bland in an artistic context, but the name 'Samuel Dross', which I'd had in my mind for a while, has some obscure fantastical element to it, like the main character in a comic book. Over time a strange backstory came to mind, which strengthened the idea of both M-Corp and Samuel Dross - involving a feud between the two co-founders of M-Corp that leads to one killing the other, and hooking his brain up to some abstract music-making machine. It really was an experiment to see how my voice sounded on top of my music, how good I was at lyric writing and how lyrics and vocal melodies affect music. As it turns out, writing and recording lyrical stuff is a whole different board game to getting mere loops and melodies together.
As a way of resurrecting and finishing off old demos that had hit a brick wall (some of which were up to 5 years old), the experiment worked well, but recording yourself singing into a home mic without any formal vocal training makes the production and mixing process so much more intense than if you're just working with MIDI synths! I recorded two Samuel Dross albums while I was a music student, with the latter one (Whatever Happened To...?) being my final-year project, and therefore involving lots more Neumann mics and plenty more time spent in studios that didn't work properly, re-recording my strained vocals when perhaps I should have used my home demos. At a certain point, I did. The harshness of my voice, and my desire to make sure it cut through, meant the instrumental side of things was a bit neglected. In retrospect, the voice should have been treated more and lower in the mix - it sounds better on tracks with pitch correction and pitch shifting (like What Else?).
I'm not sure which album is the better of the two - 'Life And Times' sounds better and has higher standouts, 'Whatever Happened?' sounds a bit thin but has more refined verse-chorus songwriting stuff, plus a lovely cover and a '70s wine cellar' feel. Given it all came together in about 6 months, and was the first and only situation where I've written a whole album to a strict academic deadline, it probably went well as could be expected. Listening back to the albums recently, they sound a bit rough and patchy, with my lyrics being perhaps too preachy or dark, but it was a fun project I have fond memories of. Worth it for, say, the joke of 'Dross Diss Track'.
As for 'Dross 3' - well, that would be nice some day...
You previously mentioned wanting to make an album of "Kentish electronic music" - it feels very strange to say this but I do feel your music is very British, specifically English, especially with your 'BULIMIA24' album - in my opinion you can sense this through the weird, abstract humour and of course the consistent usage of old TV/radio ad samples throughout. What is your take on this?
I think there has always been a deliberate Englishness or theme of patriotism running throughout my work. The term 'Englishness' has a lot of dirty connotations, in much the same way that patriotism and nationalism gets poisoned whenever they cross with toxic extremism in any country. So I suppose unconsciously I'm trying to claim that back? I think in a world generally dominated by American imports you should protect and preserve your home culture and be proud about it. That goes for everyone. I do think that can be a separate thing from the vision of England promoted by the likes of the EDL, which is more to do with flags and racial prejudice and immigration and so on. I hold no truck with that. What does it actually mean to be English once you take all that stuff away? There must be something deeper and more optimistic...
Coincidentally I've recently been listening again to a kind of music which fascinates me - so-called English folk songs (other countries might call them 'lieder'), often written for piano and voice by the likes of Michael Head ('Limehouse Reach') and Vaughan Williams ('Bredon Hill'). They can often be impenetrable, but when they work they're really beautiful, solitary and intimate - you can close your eyes and see the English countryside in front of you, and you realise both of these things could not exist anywhere else. The dry absurdist sense of humour from old British samples is another thing as well which isn't easily replicated elsewhere, along with the introvertedness.
Though at the end of the day, having been born in England and living there for 23 years helps.
'BULIMIA24' was less an exercise in Englishness than an exercise in a sonic style of plunderphonics that's quite separate and more global, though again, subconsciously I made no effort to cover up any English traits to cater for a global audience. Old TV/radio samples can be as hypnotic and musical as pop hooks written within a tonal key, whether it's The Orb from Battersea, or Negativland from San Francisco. I just wanted to make people nod their head or feet a bit, and maybe smile or chuckle while they're at it. A bit of humour's a good thing, you can't take everything too seriously. Laughter might be the best secret weapon we have right now - good for the brain, spreads a bit of joy round, which is all we can hope to do. It's too rare these days.
Although I love writers and musicians who can translate their individual traits and relations with their surroundings into a composition, I don't believe in stereotypically English sounds, any more than I believe in Kanye West going on about his latest album apparently containing 'anti-Semitic sounds'. It isn't the sound, mate, it's you.
Thanks for all the great responses. To cap it off, do you have any announcements you'd like to share about you and your projects? Any last words?
Thank you for your support, stay tuned and listen to the radio :)