There is no such thing as too much saturation. With killer synth riffs, dystopian melodic lines and aggressive sound design, CLOZVREβs music is the perfect soundtrack to listen to while reading Richard Bachmanβs The Running Man. Read our discussion with the enigmatic artist below.
Describe your sound in three words
Broken saturated chaos.
Tell us a few things about your creative process. Your sound is heavy indeed. What comes first? A synth line, the beat or ..?
I’ll start by opening one of my favorite synth plugins, turning some knobs, adding some modulations, etc, and coming up with a cool sound. From there I’ll write a bassline or something to get the ideas flowing then go back to tweaking the sound and processing it. I’ll maybe add layers to whatever it is then do some bus processing. Once I’ve got something nice, I’ll start adding some beats, glitches, fx, etc. I’ll build up an interesting loop and once that’s done I’ll start thinking about other sections I could do, transisions, and other things to further develop the track and take it beyond just a loop. Along the way there is a lot of tweaking, processing/mixing along the way, coming up with ideas then scrapping them, meticulous work, etc. I don’t usually have an idea before I start I kind of just figure it out along the way. It usually takes me anywhere from 3 days to a week or more to finish a track and I usually work on it everyday until the idea is finished. I avoid starting things, then saving them and starting something new and instead commit to the idea if I think it has potential and get it done or before working on anything else.
Written, produced, mixed, mastered, cover art by you. Your work is a one-man show. Is songwriting (and the full production cycle) a lonely process?
Not really. I guess it can be sometimes, but I like being hands on with everything from the very beginning to the very end. I never had the money to pay people to do things like mastering or cover arts of visuals or anything really not even photoshoots. It forced me to learn the tools so I could do it myself and has become part of the fun. It’s also nice that I don’t have to rely on anyone else to get my point across. I’m not a very social person anyway.
Favorite album of the past decade?
It’s hard to pick just one but some favorites are The Haxan Cloak – Excavation, Emptyset – Recur, and Blanck Mass – Dumb Flesh. I also really enjoy SD Laika – That’s Harakiri, Yaporigami – Hertzian, and Clark – Turning Dragon even though it came out in 2008.
Does it scare you that the average listener might listen to your production driven music in very low quality internal laptop speakers?
Not so much. I do about 85% of my work on mix cubes which are mid-range speakers & test my mixes on phone speakers, crappy old iPhone earbuds from 2014, etc. I go out of my way to make sure my tracks sound decent on low quality speakers & really good on decent systems. I’m not perfect though there could be times when my music doesn’t sound the greatest on low quality speakers depending on what they are and/or if they have audio enhancements of some sort on, but I don’t really trip off of it too much. Usually though in my experience, when I show people my music on whatever consumer system, bluetooth speaker, or audio set up that they have, it sounds decent.
Do you consider your music club driven? In which place or state of mind do you imagine people might listen to your music?
I guess some tracks could be considered “club driven”. For a lot of my work though, probably not in the typical sense. Though, it’s definitely energetic, intense, and bass heavy. When it comes to live performance I imagine most of my music being played in more of a concert setting than a rave or a nightclub. People might listen to my music loud when they’re angry or have pent up aggression they want to get out. This is often the case actually. I have been told by many listeners that they listen to my music when they’ve had a bad day, or when they are feeling certain emotions and want to escape.
What is your biggest fear?
Technical difficulties during a live set. I’ve never played a show as CLOZVRE but I have under different names during the past decade. Usually it goes well but up until recently everything I was doing was on cheap or old laptops and there was a higher chance something could crash or stop working. I’ve been working on my CLOZVRE debut live set and there is a bit of complexity to it – launching clips, midi mapping & fx triggering, and with live visuals. The visuals could fall out of sync with the music, my controllers could stop responding, Ableton or Max could crash, etc. But I’m doing everything I can to make sure that these possibilities are minimal.
If you were asked to rescore a film, which one would you choose?
Probably the film “ANON”. The score it has fits well but I think I would have done something a little different.
Thank you!
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