So Phil, for those that haven't seen any footage of you playing live or being at a gig tell us about your set up. It's centred around your 12U modular system but what else are you using live?
As you say my 12U eurorack modular is the centre of my studio & live set that’s organised into 3 monophonic voices, 1 polyphonic voice and a drum section
section. These are all going to my Mackie Onxy mixer where I’ve got an Eventide Space reverb & TimeFactor delay pedals on the sends when playing live. The main musical ideas and rhythms are all being sequenced from the Sequential Cirklon sequencer but within the modular there’s a ton of internal sequencing and modulation to add interest to the various parts. Basically means that each gig I play is never the same which for me is important both as a live experience for the audience but also for my own interest too.
What's your process in the studio? Recording jams, multi-tracking, running stems and then FX mixes etc. How involved is your DAW both in terms or arrangement of tracks and parts and also in terms of sound generation and/or processing?
Last year I caught Moritz von Oswald trio playing at BLOC weekend that pushed me in the direction of early dub techno. I became really interested in the production ideas of dub in general and how the process of mixing itself was a performance when it came to playing the sends & returns. So for my new EP I wanted to experiment with some of these dub production ideas and decided to do the core composition and sound design on the modular and then once I was happy I'd multi-track several jams of the song, as if I were playing a live set, into Ableton. Then I’d edit these down into more coherent structured arrangements before running each stem back out to the mixer for further dub takes were I’d jam the sends and returns dub style. Every track on the EP was made using a variation on this technique even the remix track, at the end of the EP, went through this process.