An Interview With Electronic Musician Mode7
Ben Wills gets electronic musician Mode7 to admit that his music sounds like “Outer space travelers having a curse placed upon them by gypsy astronauts who look like NWA,” in this Smalldoggies interview.
Ben Wills conducted this interview with Portland-based electronic musician Mode7 via e-mail in the weeks leading up to his performance at the Smalldoggies Reading Series #6 on February 10, 2011.
I met Mode7 (real name: Sean Bailey) after an amazing performance at Rotture in September 2010. My feet were rendered completely helpless by his barrage of noisy beats and hypnotic melodies; they proceeded to tear up the dance floor of their own accord during what was easily the best electronic set I’ve experienced in the past year (which, conveniently, you can listen to here).
In our interview, we discuss the Century Project, live electronic performance and the rise of “post-Dilla” and “bass-music”.
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Ben Wills: How would you describe your aesthetic?
Sean Bailey: Outer space travelers having a curse placed upon them by gypsy astronauts who look like NWA. Psychic gangsters, man. Wait, did I answer that right?
Ben: What initially inspired your foray into electronic music?
Sean: I would say the first electronic music that really got my attention was Alec Empire, all of those old DHR releases. “The Destroyer” is what did it for me; I was just hooked after that. That and Squarepusher’s “Big Loada” and the Richard D. James Album, those are the obvious ones.
My friend got this compilation tape that had two Atari Teenage Riot songs on it, and they just blew my mind. It didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before. It was the first stuff that made me go, “I want to know exactly how they made that.” I was totally clueless.
Around 1998 or so I discovered the early Warp and Rephlex stuff, and a lot of the harsh synth noise stuff on Vinyl Communications and started buying gear on ebay. I got a modded Roland TR-606 drum machine, and just started experimenting from there. My first full setup consisted of an Akai rackmount sampler and a Roland MIDI sequencer, and I had to save everything to 3.5” floppy disks. For a MIDI controller I used this shitty keyboard that came with the Miracle Piano Teaching System for PC. It had these built in speakers that I had to rip out because the volume didn’t go down all the way.
Ben: Besides your work as Mode7, you play drums with Invisible Orchestra; how has that influenced your music?
Sean: I’ve been playing for the last several years with Invisible Orchestra, which I started with some friends of mine back in Arizona, but I’ve been doing the Mode7 thing for a bit longer, so I would say it’s the other way around. I wanted to replicate some of the chopped-up breakbeats I was hearing in a lot of hiphop and drum and bass/IDM stuff. My playing style has always been rooted in dance music.
Ben: You recently completed a project to do 100 songs in 100 days. What inspired that?
Sean: The original idea for Century was to do a song a day for an entire year, which was influenced by the Project365 photography website. I had a friend who was doing that, and I thought it would be great to do something like that with music. Sort of audio snapshots, just laying tracks down and going with whatever came out. Once I finished a day, I wouldn’t go back and alter the overall sound. No changing synth voices or adding parts or anything like that.
I decided to cut the number of tracks down to 100, maybe like 70 or 80 days into the project, due to my slowly going insane due to lack of sleep. The way my life is structured outside of making music just wasn’t conducive to something that huge. I’m not disappointed at all, though. 100 is still an awesome number.
Ben: Was the process frustrating? Rewarding?
Sean: It was hugely rewarding, in that it was a just a great work exercise. One of my major downfalls with making music has been motivation, so it was good for me personally to have this goal that I needed to reach every day. It has turned me into a faster producer, for sure.
Ben: How do you feel about the results?
Sean: In some cases, honestly, I’m surprised with the shit I managed to crank out in a day. Not that I’m saying that every day was a total gem. Tons of them are just little loops or snippets that I did when maybe I didn’t have the energy to make a full song that day, or my computer kept crashing or I ran out of time, or something like that.
That’s one thing about this project that is really cool to me; it’s kind of an audio journal. There are certain days or groups of days that sound cohesive for one reason or another. There are plenty of bits that I go back and listen to and feel like they have the potential to be turned into great songs, but obviously if I added anything to them, I wouldn’t count the final results as a part of Century; it would be its own thing. So in the future, you might hear one of those tracks as a part of a new song. I also like the idea of using the less fleshed-out tracks as little interludes in the live sets.
As a whole, I’m really quite happy with all of it for what it is, and I feel like the majority of it is pretty listenable.
Ben: You’ve said that all the pieces you created during this project are intended to be performed live—a context which often seems like an afterthought to most electronic producers. Why focus on performance?
Sean: I have always liked the idea of the dynamic between a performer and their audience. Performance has always been an important component of making music to me, which is a little ironic, being that I have played a total of five (5) Mode7 shows in eight (8) years. And I didn’t even play my first show until last year. But playing this type of stuff live humanizes the music in a way that doesn’t translate in recorded media. Plus, in the case of electronic music, so much of it is just really enjoyable when played very loud, and not everyone has, for example, a 1000-watt subwoofer as part of their home stereo system.
I also find the act of physically going to shows to be a mysterious phenomenon. It’s this almost unquestioned ritual of human culture; it’s just something that people do. We can rationalize it all we want, but it comes down to a bunch of people gathering in a space to have someone throw sound at them. It’s so weird when you think about it, and I love that. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love hearing their favorite music live, out of the context of their living rooms or computers or iPods or whatever. It’s a listening environment that’s harder to take for granted. It garners more attention for the music, since that’s what everyone is there for.
Ben: What have you been listening to lately?
Sean: Some of my favorites the last couple of months have been EPROM’s Bay Area EP and that new Trent Reznor thing, How to Destroy Angels. Also Tobacco’s Maniac Meat is great.
Ben: How’d you end up in Portland?
Sean: I moved here in 2007 with my wife and our son to have a change of scenery and climate, in a number of ways. We were just tired of where we were and needed something new. So the schools here were a huge draw, as well as the rain and the people. I have met as many awesome people here in the last three years as I met in Arizona in 24 years. I had been to Portland before, around 2002, and just fell in love with the place. I always had plans to move up here, but it just took a few years to get the ball rolling.
Ben: How do you feel about the music scene/culture/community here?
Sean: The music scene here is really interesting. There are so many bands and artists here that are gaining huge followings nationally, but here it’s like, they’re just people you see at Fred Meyer or regulars at your neighborhood coffee shop. Everyone here is just so low-key about it. I will say it seems pretty hard to get established here without knowing people, but once you do it’s not so bad.
Ben: How do you feel about the unprecedented accessibility of music in contemporary culture and the relentless cross-pollination of genres and styles?
Sean: I like how easy it is to find music nowadays, and to share it with other people. I’m super stoked about how many websites exist now that are geared toward helping musicians reach larger audiences. The Soundcloud platform impressed me from day one. It’s just so well designed and useful for so many things. There is now space for so much collaboration and expanding of peoples’ musical tastes and ideas, which is really exciting to think about. And I think that has a lot to do with all of the cross genre and new/no genre music being made right now.
Two tags that stand out to me right now are “bass music” and “post-Dilla.” On one hand they really crack me up, but they also signify a change in the way people interpret and listen to music. Naming a whole genre after a frequency range? Awesome, that leaves tons of room for experimentation with only one single expectation. And the second one, post-Dilla, is just incredibly profound. It’s become a style of music all its own, and totally based on the influence of one guy, which is crazy to think about. All in all, it’s an exciting time to be making music, and I feel fortunate to be doing what I’m doing.
Check out Mode7’s website here or at Soundcloud, Myspace or Last.fm.
He will be joining the line-up at Smalldoggies Reading Series PDX006 on February 10, 2011. Details here.