M. Geddes Gengras laughs a lot, and not just any laugh. He has nearly the exact mannerisms of my (and maybe your) friend Azeem. Honestly, I barely remember this interview - it took place at Moogfest over two years ago, and despite the nearly 3000 words only lasted about 20 minutes (M. Geddes Gengras talks a lot too, and very quickly). I was pretty out of my depth, but Ged was kind enough to indulge me even more than usual in navel-gazing, philosophy-of-creativity stuff. This was inevitable: he's a modular synth wizard, a big stoner, and a resident of Los Angeles, and any one of those conditions would usually have been more than sufficient for a loose, meandering talk. It worked out, though - before re-visiting this I'd recalled it as vaguely disappointing, but I appreciate it more now with a little space or age or exhaustion or whatever than I likely would've at any point prior. Serendipitously, M. Geddes Gengras has a new tape coming out very soon.

I'm not joking about the Azeem thing, here's a clip.

You seem like you’ve got your fingers in… everything, more-or-less. How do you keep various project, commissions, etc., straight?

[laughs] That’s a good question. Keeping it straight is interesting, and not always possible. Pretty much everything I do - well, a lot of it - is a pretty small time commitment. I always need to be working on a lot of stuff to be able to get anything done, because it’s important for me to be able to switch it up when I get bored. I also have a lot of different interests in music. For a long time I tried to combine them all into one thing, and then I realized that that was a bad idea [laughs]. So then I decided that I would do more things, but make them more specific. That’s sort of the story of what I’ve been doing with music - over the past few years, all the different identities have been getting more specific and more tuned-in to what I want them to be.

It seems like LA’s a fairly ideal environment if you’re hoping to constantly be working on something.

LA’s nice because you have the advantages of being in a major city, but it’s also cheaper than most major cities, there’s more space. It’s definitely not for everybody. There’s a great music community, but it’s also not overwhelming like New York, or even places like Austin, can be, where there’s music everywhere. I like that in LA you can kind of disappear for awhile if you need to do that. I like not seeing everyone I know every time I walk down the street [laughs].

It’s a great scene - it’s not a great place to make money doing experimental electronic music compared to other cities.

[For some reason lost to time, I interrupt and say Lounge Jazz! We both laugh, though, so it was probably apt].

It’s a big rock town still, and most of the venues cater to that. In the States in general, I think, that’s how it goes. But there’s a really great community of artists who are in it for the same reasons - nobody’s really trying to do anything but make good music. The community’s a big part of why I’m still there for sure. The weather doesn’t hurt either, you know [laughs]?

With regards to needing to be constantly at work, is that closer to a personal compulsion or a financial obligation?

I don’t really feel too much obligation [laughs] - it’s mostly compulsion. Part of having to work on stuff all the time also means that sometimes I just don’t work on anything for a long time. Or I’ll be working on things, but not my own creative output. I don’t wanna feel like I’m just sitting around and being lazy, so I’ve always got another project to work on. I get a lot of mixing and mastering jobs, or do stuff for the label I run. But it’s really all compulsion; I’m certainly not making any money doing this [laughs]. The obligation thing hasn’t really come in yet. There’s definitely some stuff that you do because it’ll be a good idea for your career, but there hasn’t really been anything that I haven’t enjoyed doing. The few times that’s happened, I’ve just been like ok, I just won’t do that anymore.

I’m thankful that I don’t feel those pressures. If I was like a new, hot artist or something, then there would be a lot of things to do to capitalize on that success. But I don’t wanna tour a lot, because (a) I don’t think it really makes sense for the music I make, or the way I make music, and (b) when I’m on tour, I don’t get anything done. When I’m home I make music, you know? There’s a lot of stuff people would want me to do, maybe, if I was working with a bigger label, but as it is now I’m really comfortable and happy with the way everything is. It’s enough.

Is there a sort of artistic freedom that comes with accepting that you’re not on the path to or otherwise pursuing superstardom?

I’d be lying if I said that when I started making music I didn't want to be famous or something. I think that’s a lot of peoples’ natural instinct when getting into performing. But as you get older [laughs], you start to think more about that and what that means. The people I really respect in music or in art in general are people who have always made the things that they feel compelled to make. Sometimes they have success with them, and sometimes they don’t. A lot of people don’t have any success, ever. But to me, that’s way more interesting and important than something who’s trying to fill a hole or capture a piece of the marketplace or whatever. That’s all business talk, and art’s about expression. Taste sort of feels meaningless to me these days, because you can’t quantify someone’s personal expression.

It seems inevitable that a band will come along and insist that we refer to them as a startup.

That’s what this is! I guess it makes sense, because it is a business. I had a really big conversation with my friend about this the other day, just talking about how clubs work. He’s really idealistic, and I was explaining that, you know, I know we want to think that people run these clubs to put on music shows, but they don’t - they run them to sell alcohol. That’s how this business works. That is what it is, but there’s different sides of it. You can make some money engaging with the positive, creative, interesting side because there are companies and institutions that can afford to put these things on, but the minute you start thinking about that stuff too much you’re just screwing yourself. It’ll cloud you from making good, or true, creative decisions.

I’ve seen it happen to a lot of friends of mine who have early success with their music - you stall out, there’s just nowhere to go. If you’re in your early twenties and on the cover of all these magazines, what happens next? Artists have to find a voice, and that’s really the only measure of success to me. Have you found it, what have you turned it into? But that’s something you can’t quantify at all, you can’t sell that.

I think I’m at that age right now, mid-thirties, and all of the artists I know who are around the same age are in the same zone right now: everybody’s work is getting very distinct, the people who have been working hard for a long time are still only now discovering that. It’s really cool to see! Even if you’ve been admiring someone’s work for a long time, seeing them get to a place where you lose the references and it’s entirely theirs. In the end, you should only sound like yourself, right? Look at someone like Neil Young, he’s had more flops than you can count [laughs]. Even big fans of his don’t really like that many of his records all the way through, save for the classic ones. But he’s just been there for years, hackin’ away and doing exactly his thing.

The record I just finished that’s about to come out (Interior Architecture), I’m firmly convinced that nobody gonna like it. But I’m also not sure that I ever could have possibly cared less about how people react to it. It’s the record that I absolutely had to make, I’ve been working on it for six years. It’s a big artistic statement for me; even if it doesn’t have a lot of the stuff that drew people into my other records, it’s for me, not for them. I think any artist who tells you differently is lying. You make this stuff to satisfy yourself.

I was doing an interview with William Basinski, asking about listening to music before you release it. I might listen to a record a hundred times before I decide that it’s done, and, you know, he was saying that he’ll sit on things for 30 years [laughs]. When you’ve spent that much time with something and it doesn’t get boring for you, then you can believe that someone else might pick it up and listen to it three or five times. And with experimental music, I feel like that’s a lot [laughs]. I do it too; there are some records that you listen to over and over again, but some that you might really enjoy but only listen to a handful of times.

How do you approach, or wrap your head around, the idea of composition for generative music?

It always starts with an idea of a sound that you want to hear. I play around a lot, starting with a really loose idea and playing until that becomes a sound I like or something that excites me. And then I start to build around that. The way the synthesizer works, you have the option to connect everything to everything, or have any part of it affecting other parts in whatever way you like. That’s what’s interesting about it to me; it has this sort of reactivity that bring about all sorts of unexpected or even unpredictable results. It feels like playing with another musician, a lot of the time. Or maybe conducting another musician. Massaging another musician [laughs]. There’s an interactivity, and a big part of it for me is listening. Learning to listen to it is learning to play it. You have ideas that you can try to make happen, but the gear itself has strict limitations: I have x amount of voices in my system, I have x amount of envelopes. It’s simpler when you’re designing just one piece of music, but for an entire live set you’ve got to figure out how to play several pieces from the one device.

It’s an organization thing, I think, which is funny because I have terrible organizational skills normally[laughs]. But there’s something about the modular that just feels like a mirror of the inside of my brain. People always ask how you learn it, but it’s like any instrument - the same way you’d learn chords and scales.

The inability to fully understand the system seems like it would keep you creative, too.

Absolutely, it gives you that pushback. A lot of times, the ideas that I have are not nearly as interesting as the results that I get from trying to implement those ideas and failing in various ways [laughs]. The gap in between what you actually want to accomplish and what you are capable of accomplishing - that’s a really interesting zone. And as you get better, maybe it’s a little less unpredictable. I always work with random sources within the synthesizer, because that means there’s always something happening that can surprise me. Especially in a live performance setting, it’s easy to rush through things, but if I really sit and focus on the instrument and what it’s doing I don’t feel the need to do much. I’m experiencing the music the same way the audience is.

How, then, do specific pieces end up on specific albums? Are you just documenting specific sessions or periods?

It works in different ways - all of my records have come together really differently. I’ve made records in three days, and then this one took six years. I made five other records while I was working on this one[laughs]. And a lot of the time that I was working on this record, I didn’t know that I was working on it. It was just an amorphous idea or something.

Making records is my job. I love doing live performance and all the other stuff around music, but being records feels like the ultimate to me. That’s my favorite part of the whole thing. There’s nothing that feels better in this whole thing than getting your record for the first time and being able to listen to it. It feels like you’re making something permanent, something that’s gonna last longer than you. And then even if everybody forgets about you, the record’s still there. It’s a record of where I was at at that time, both musically and personally. What was going on in my life, how I was feeling. I can listen to the old records and it just brings me back there. It’s like free therapy.

I always think about this with the design of records - I always want to make something that, if I found it twenty years later in a thrift store, I would lose my mind and be like I have to have this! It needs to look amazing and mysterious and whatever, those are all important things. Luckily I know a lot of really good artists, because I’m incapable of doing any of that myself.

So you’d say that making records has more of a documentary function than it does active expression?

Well, it’s both. For me, it’s maybe more documentary. But I think on the outside, people don’t really look at it like that. I don’t want to be too explicit talking about what was going on or what the records are about. It’s expression, that’s the main goal. When I have something that feels unique and powerful and can still surprise me, that’s how you know it’s right. But I also want it to be useful to people in some way or another, whether they use it to relax or dance or whatever. There’s a lot of non-functional art [laughs]. Especially with regards to synthesizer music, people always talk about cosmic. Oh, your music’s so cosmic. Man, forget that. My music’s domestic. My music’s the sound of like a kitchen or something. It’s so connected to the world, in my mind, and not a heady, abstract thing. It probably comes across that way, which is fine. I don’t want to tell people how to listen to my music, that’s my worst nightmare.

Have you considered making music from non-synthesized, or even non-musical sources? In a bathroom somewhere in town there’s apparently an installation where the sound of someone’s toenails being painted is being amplified a thousand times or something (this was actually much more insane than I’d remembered).

I’d be down. For a long time, everything was coming out of the synthesizer. It’s only this new record that has non-synthesizer sounds on it. I’m getting more interested in integrating other parts of the world back into the music, playing with air more. With synthesizers, everything’s direct - a synthesizer, hooked up to a pre-amp, hooked up to a computer. There’s no air, air doesn’t exist in there. The air that you get is the air between you and the speakers. So I’m interested in playing with air and space a little more in the future, seeing how that changes the feeling of the music.

How do collaborations work, particularly with people unfamiliar with modular synthesis?

It really depends on the nature of the collaboration - I’m working on a collaboration right now that’s been done entirely through dropbox. She’ll put music in there and I’ll play around with it and send it back, and so on. I love playing with people, I love sitting down and jamming. The modular isn’t always the best tool for that, but there are ways that I can do it that are really fun and interesting.

Collaboration’s hugely important to me, and not just musically. Working with and just being inspired by artists is where I get so much of my fuel for this whole thing. Meeting new artists, seeing and hearing what they’re doing. Vampiring them a little bit, trying to suck up some of their young energy. And collaboration really keeps the whole thing going - the minute you’re stuck in your own head it’s really amazing to go out and work with someone where you really don’t know what they’re gonna do.