Transcription: 0332 - Scott Nordlund

Released: June 28, 2020



Darwin: Okay today, I get a chance to talk to somebody new. He's actually someone that one of the listeners suggested. And when I started looking into this guy's work, I was really pretty blown away. It spoke to me in a really profound way. His name's Scott Nordlund, his artist's name is, in talking with him - it's like, we don't necessarily have a pronunciation. It's I would call it Acreal, A-C-R-E-I-L, and he has a number of releases on band camp. But he also is very active in the the Pure Data coding community. I'm really excited to learn more about his work and his process. So with that, let's talk to Scott. Hey, Scott, how's it going?

Scott Nordlund: It's going okay. I'm a little on the hot and sweaty side.

Darwin: It's that time of year when that's going to start happening right

Scott: In the Southeast. It starts a little earlier than that.

Darwin: Yeah, indeed. So why don't we start off by having you talk a little bit about your work, the kinds of things that you do as your artistic practice?

Scott: Well, I guess I've always been interested in generative music and algorithmic composition and chaotic sound synthesis and microtonal music and those kinds of things. For a while when I was starting out, I didn't have much of an opportunity to really do what I wanted to, but since I started using Pure Data, I can do pretty much whatever I want. And I've kind of checked off all those boxes, I think, and satisfied all those desires. I got to where I wanted to be.

Darwin: That's, that's actually interesting way of putting it. What are those things in your cases? When I went to Bandcamp, I saw you actually had a large number of releases out there. What is it that, for you represents... I mean, if you were to explain it, what it is that your work is doing? I mean, Pure Data is literally the blank sheet of paper, right? It can do whatever you're compelled to do. What would you say is the thing that represents your voice?

Scott: Oh, I don't know. I don't think I particularly have any kind of sound at all. I mean, I do stuff that's entirely different from that as well; I'm tracking and playing by hand and that kind of thing. And I dunno, I don't really necessarily have any goal going into it. Usually it's just [that] I'm trying some kind of - say, like making a new kind of filter or something and I just mess around patching stuff with that, just to try it out. And then that suggests somewhere else to go. I mean, I don't work to any kind of manifesto or anything. I have preferences and I have interests and that's about it.

Darwin: That's interesting. That's actually cool because what it means is you is you are giving yourself the privilege of being able to go wherever your senses take you. And it's interesting because as I was listening to your work, I went back to some of the older stuff and I was surprised it had a very different sound than the newer stuff. I ended up like really getting hooked on the album, called "A Sample Item With Diameter 32". I don't know what it was about that album, but I couldn't stop listening to it. It really sucked me in, I'm curious: the name A Sample Item With Diameter 32 - does that come from a specific thing or is it just like random words that you glued together?

Scott: So I feel like titles aren't really that important, and it's just a space to play around, at least if you're doing relatively abstract music, you know. But I'd like to have a theme or something for a specific release that in some kind of way ties it together, it doesn't have to be something that's like an explicitly stated concept or anything like that. But I don't know, I had this big, big, big collection of titles; more than releases or pending works or anything. I have this large archive. Sometimes I just collect words that I think sound interesting and then just stick them together in different ways. But those in particular, I was watching YouTube videos and - you know how it's got the auto-generated subtitles? And it can translate it to English from whatever language? If a video contains more than one language, then it's going to try to translate it as all the same language. It only identifies one language. And so the stuff is that that's not correctly identified, it's going to come out as complete jibberish. And so I watched a number of these videos and I started collecting these really weird phrases from them. Because there was a lot of them and I accumulated a bunch of them. And so then I just started sticking them together.

Darwin: Oh, that's frigging brilliant. I love it.

Scott: I don't know. I just saw it. I was watching something and there was all this gibberish on the screen and I thought, well, I need to do something with that.

Darwin: I think there's actually something to that mistranslation stuff that is funny. You know, where I run into it is with the interviews that I do now, I also do transcriptions of them and I use this automated transcription service. That's just a shell around the Google translate system. But especially if I'm working with somebody, I mean, I've got a goofy, accent myself, but if I'm working with somebody else with a different accent, it is some really bizarre translation attempts come of that. And while they gives each word a score, sometimes it's really, really sure that it's right. And it couldn't be farther from correct. So it's actually, it's actually interesting to get some of those. I never really thought of that as being like something that I should be collecting though. That's actually really smart.

Scott: Well, I think if you, if you think working with art and technology and that kind of thing, I think it's important to notice failures and errors and things like that. And you know, those kind of change over time. I mean, it used to be structural film and things like that sort of exploiting the artifacts of 16 millimeter films. And as media changes the failures and the errors change along with them. And I figured that it's kind of a good fit if I'm trying to do algorithmic music. I mean, it's not artificial intelligence because it doesn't employ any kind of machine learning or anything like that. But this kind of failure of artificial intelligence where it's transliterating one language into another, into some sort of complete nonsense and then machine translating that into English and just generating all this jibberish. I don't know. I thought it kind of fits.

Darwin: Well, it does. I mean, it's hilarious because... I don't know how I never made the connection, but you just actually made this connection for me, which is: some of the original, modern glitch artists, they were taking advantage of like DAC converters not being able to handle a scratched CD or something like that. And so it would just produce jibberish. I never made the connection of that with like the modern things we see whether it's like a scrambled JPEGs or bad translations of texts or whatever, but of course I should have because that's exactly what it is. You're right!

Scott: Well, I mean, people did stuff like that with say image files. They did data bending. I don't know if anybody's still does that anymore, but like you open an image file in a text editor and you start overriding parts of it and then you open it, see what the image looks like.

Darwin: Right, exactly. And it's still happening. I recently saw somebody actually do a performance doing that live and it was - it was quite a bit of shredding. It was pretty amazing. Now, one of the things that I came out of listening to your music wondering, though, is how you composite this stuff. Because as a Pure Data programmer, I can imagine a lot of these sounds being developed as patches, but you also have a greater layer that's like a structural layer, you know? So for the structure of the piece, or even the structure of the albums, it seems like you're employing something else, but I don't know what it is. Am I correct in assuming that you have other technology that you use, or are these all self-constructed PD patches that produce the entire work?

Scott: It depends a lot. Some of the stuff is just a straight Pure Data patch on the largest timescale. It's pretty much completely static, right? So I've got all this randomization and automation controlling all these individual sounds, but on the whole it's not progressing anywhere. And in those cases, I just record a bunch of it and pick an excerpt. Other ones contain some amount of high-level automation. Basically I make a patch that's got a bunch of delay things and basically all envelopes and stuff, and that will control, say, the amplitudes of different parts and that kind of thing. And so that'll change over the course of the piece and that's automated, that's not randomized. That's something that I am explicitly composing, I guess, constructing it that way. And then I'll just record the app for the patch that way other stuff is made from multiple different patches. So I might record one sound with one patch and another sound with a different patch and then reprocess one of the sounds, one of the recordings through another patch, and then you just mix it all together. And some just really basic audio editor - I'm using Audacity currently, because all I'm doing is just mixing them together in a super basic way, not applying any effects or anything.

Darwin: So all, so literally all the effects are, are part of your PD patch. That's doing the originating sound.

Scott: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was always interested in things like reverberation algorithms and so I figured I'd start developing them and then some of them got kinda good and then I made some other stuff and that got kind of good. And I don't know, I have a pretty decent set of them now, so I don't need to use anything external.

Darwin: That's amazing because my expectation was that you were going to say that you use something like Reaper or Logic or something like that to do large-form compositing because some of these compositions are pretty, I wouldn't use the word or "ornate", but definitely complicated. And, it's really interesting to think of this being like scaled sets of patches where maybe you're doing source material creation. And then the next level is playback and mixing with automation and all that stuff. That really sounds like that takes a lot of organization in your mind just to be able to pull it off.

Scott: Oh, not really. I don't think it's that hard. I mean, most of the stuff that's happening in the patch is randomized or whatever. It's some kind of a systematic part of the patch. I'm not having to specify it. All the automation that I'm doing deliberately, I might have maybe like 10 or 12 different things with the most of them controlling, but it's really just like fade-in at this point, fade-out at this point. And that's usually, it's usually that's simple. And when I'm mixing the stuff externally in Audacity, there might be, I don't know. I mean, the, the, the number of tracks that I'm mixing might vary a lot, but it's usually like maybe six or something, stereo tracks. And again, I'm just doing the same thing, like fade-in here, fade-out here. And if I listen to it and I hear this part I don't like, I'll just mute it for that point and fill it up with something else. So I mean, compared to what a lot of people do, I think the mixing stuff and the automation is really pretty basic. I try to make everything kind of randomized and process-based as much as possible. I try to rely on that.

Darwin: Interesting. I'm blown away because what you're doing is you're doing really complex work, but it also sounds like all the complexity is in building these voices and then the rest of the compositing and mixing and all that stuff - you're allowing the quality of the voices themselves to carry the day,

Scott: You know, when I started, I think that's just because - let me think about that. If you approach it kind of like a knob-twiddler thing, as opposed to a composer, you know, I mean, I frowned upon that kind of stuff. That sort of self-indulgent, knob-twiddly sort of stuff, but you tend to just let things go and let things sort of drone on. Whereas if you're approaching things like an electro-acoustic composer, especially somebody like Stockhausen or whatever, I mean, there might be like hundreds of edits in a minute, right. Where the sounds may be very simple, but the process of putting things together is really complicated. And then I think just the fact that people tend to approach things now more as knob-twiddlers and people screwing around and improvising, maybe I think that's an influence because I mean, when I would do stuff earlier, it would, it was boring and not that good, but it would be of that sort of thing. Just record the droning thing and fool around with it for awhile.

Darwin: Right. Yeah.

Scott: Right. And so, I figured I don't have to be tweaking on it with my hands because, one - you've only got two hands and there might be potentially a lot of different controls. It's also really easy to get confused when you're doing something like that. You know what I mean? And you're twiddling some knob and you're like, is this changing the sound or not? And then you realize that you're messing with the wrong thing. You've been doing that for the last 30 seconds and not doing anything!

Darwin: You're turning a knob in a part of the patch that's like muted or something.

Scott: And I figured if you listen to Tangerine Dream or Berlin school stuff, it's worse for them because 1) they were probably really high and, 2) there's like three people all doing stuff independently. It's hard to even keep track of what you're doing. Then you might be listening to what somebody else is doing while you're messing around with like twiddling your knobs, and be confused as to what you're doing there. So I figured that the bar's kind of low for randomly messing with stuff. If you can just affect different parameters over time in some kind of an organic a way such that it's always different. It doesn't repeat. I mean, it's that part isn't really that hard.

Darwin: Well, but what's interesting is what you're talking about then is actually... I mean, in a way it's a little bit in between the knob-twiddling and that you're not necessarily doing twiddling the knobs, you're building the systems that do it, but you're not also not like hyper-obsessing over doing the 50 edits a minute a thing; you're building a system that expresses your composition.

Scott: Well, yeah. And so the thing is I'm too lazy to do the edit.

Darwin: Okay.

Scott: So that's why I do it. Because that takes a lot of work and then it takes a lot of decision-making and I don't have the capacity for that.

Darwin: Sure, but you know, it's that decision making process that also ends up being part of what makes your artistic voice, I think - and listening to stuff, I would say that you have one, you have a voice it's really quite beautiful. Now, before we go down that ramp too much farther, I want to talk about something that's key to my podcast. And that is learning about how people got to be the artists and creator that they are. And I'm curious in your case, because first of all, it sounds like you have some very particular ways that you think of music and it's not just arbitrary you. It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this. It's some very informed decisions based on your thoughts about music and music creation over history, I guess. But, also. a lot of it is very 'now' oriented. I mean, coding as an artistic practice, and specifically this idea of building all your own tooling or the majority of your tooling that you, that you use through these PD patches and stuff, I'm curious where you're coming from, because this is not going to be the standard "I learned to play and joined the band" kind of story.

Scott: So you're onto me already. So I always liked music, but I was mainly attracted to strange synthesizers sounds and things like that. And so from the time that I was like four years old or so my favorite band was always Devo and I was always interested in that kind of thing. You know, aside from that, also things that are harmonically really strange and do a lot of unexpected things, which also shows up a lot in what I do, I wasn't really all that interested in a lot of normal music. So I'm rather embarrassed to admit this, but I was raised Southern Baptist, and my grandmother would sing and play piano in a church. So they had a piano with their house and I would mess around with it.

Well, I was more interested in the inside of the piano; if I figured out how to take the front of it off, I would have gone all like John Cage on it. But, fortunately for them, I didn't know how to take the front panel thing off. So my grandmother noticed me messing around with the piano, like frequently, and made me take piano lessons when I was six maybe. And I always hated it. And I was the laziest imaginable piano student, and I never practiced and I hated playing because it just made me uncomfortable. It just gave me the anxiety and I still really don't like play. So at the first opportunity I quit when I was maybe seven. Because I couldn't stand it. And I was dull and there was nothing about it that I liked because I didn't see any potential there for me because I saw the only future that I really saw was I'm going to be the person playing piano in church.

I mean, it did not occur to me that Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo is actually playing all those parts. At least on the early Devo albums, that's not a sequencer - they're playing all that by hand and they are really, really, really tight. And so they're playing that stuff really well. You know, that didn't occur to me to translate piano practice to Devo. It only seems to me that it would translate to playing piano in a church. And I have to say that white Southern Baptist church music is the dullest thing on the planet. And I didn't really want any part in that. So I quit. I mean, it would have been nice if I had some kind of mentor or something, but I didn't really have anything. And so then I was later told that one of the people that was like my second piano instructor, she cried when she heard that I quit.

Because she thought that I was such a promising student and I thought, well, that's news to me. Because I was so like really lazy, but I guess, despite not practicing ever, I did actually manage to learn it. So I guess I picked it up pretty quickly. So after that I didn't do anything until I was like 14. And I was, at this point again, interested in the idea of music, but I didn't know how to approach it. I didn't have any kind of guide. I was interested in electronics and I was building electronic stuff. So I started collecting tape recorders, and then I was messing with them so they'd play the tape backwards. And I was building basic electronic circuits to make horrible beeping sounds and collecting things and made strange sounds. And so when I was around 15 or so, I tried experimentally, making some recordings with that.

Knowing that this was not going to be a conventionally musical venture and I didn't really have much taste for such radically avant-garde stuff at the time, but it was just desperation and that stuff. I mean, it was garbage, but it was an interesting thing to explore. And so I was at that point listening to Warp Records stuff, and - this is overly naive, but it seemed obvious to me that listening to that stuff, it seemed like if you can just use a computer, you don't really need any kind of conventional musical skill. I had always figured at that point that I was completely hopeless as far as any sort of instrumental performance goes. And that's the only way that I could deal with doing anything is if something probed my brain and read my thoughts, but the computer - or the illusion of the computer anyway - the idea of the computer seems to need some kind of a salvation. Well, I started using Buzz Tracker and it kind of sucks. And I started using, you know, buying hardware stuff. I was reading a lot of interviews with, experimental people at the time, like, Frank Zappa and, Wendy Carlos and I guess Morton Subotnick or something.

And so I, I didn't realize this until later when I was going through old stuff from high school, but I had sketched out - when I was about 16 - the goals that I wanted to pursue musically. And it's pretty much all the stuff that I'm doing now. I had completely forgotten about that, but I wanted to do all this like algorithmic microtonal stuff. And I wanted to do like chaotic sound synthesis and program sounds such that they don't repeat make some kind of music that potentially goes on for any length of time that you want. I kind of forgotten about that, but I guess the idea is stayed with me, but it was a really long time before I was able to explore those in any useful way, the stuff I was messing with for a long time, I wasn't really capable of... I mean I try and sort of make a little bit of progress and I guess in the process got pretty good at programming sounds.

It was good practice programming sounds on, like hardware, synthesizers and stuff. And I mean I wanted to do like a, like some chaotic sounds. Something that wouldn't ever repeat and would always be unpredictable. And so I was using an Ensoniq EPS.

Darwin: Okay. That's what I was wondering. What platform were you're trying to do this on, because you know, like a simple analog synth would have run dry on some of that pretty quickly. So the EPS was one of the tools...

Scott: Basically what motivated me at the time I did this - it was like 2000, 2001. And I was 16. I didn't really have a lot of money and people were starting to get on this analog bandwagon thing. The prices were not as inflated as they are now, but they were starting to go up. And it was well past the point where you could buy something really cool at a pawn shop for $200. I mean, I went in the pawn shops and it wasn't promising. And so since I wanted to do like esoteric complicated stuff, I was pretty firm in that. I figured that I would just get the most sophisticated over-complicated, difficult to use digital stuff that I could could afford. I just, you know, and I'd read the user manuals and I think about it and I think this seems really promising that nobody's ever actually used this in this way. But if you take this really not very sexy digital synthesizer and you program the hell out of it, probably it's going to do something really weird. And I was just excited by those possibilities. Yes. So I list all the gear that I use on most of the releases. It wasn't really anything that spectacular,

Darwin: But you programmed the teeth out of them. You programmed them like crazy.

Scott: Well, I tried to, yeah. I mean, looking back at, I probably could have done better, but I mean, for 16 it was okay. Anyway, there's no formal education here. When I went to college, I studied electrical engineering, never any formal musical training.

Darwin: Interesting. Now I do in fact have about a million questions, but before I get to those, what was the point at which you jumped from a hardware synths into Pure Data? Because that is obviously something that was a a sea change for you.

Scott: Well, okay. So the thing is, I don't really think I particularly evolve. It's more than I'm doing 10 different things at the same time. So everything's ongoing simultaneously, or at least I'll work on something for a couple months and then try on something completely different and kind of, most of the strains of what I'm doing stylistically have always been there in one capacity or another. And so it's not like I'm making some kind of a transition from one thing to something completely different. I'm doing all of these in parallel. But I started using Pure Data in, I think, 2008 and that was really just kinda messing around with it at first. I'd used Reaktor briefly before that, but didn't really get anything very satisfactory out of it. I guess the first stuff that started happening with Pure Data that was any good was around 2010 or so. That was still early, I guess, maybe I don't think I really got good until a little later, but I mean, I was serious in Pure Data in like 2010.

Darwin: Got it. So, all right, this helps me piece together some things because, and the reason I say that is because, I had in preparing for this a little research on you and I dug into your WordPress site - which was this like crazy quilt combination of really super-detailed, deep dives into the technology of different kinds of synths to the point of pulling and dumping the EPROMS or like doing a deep, review of the chips that were in the sound engines. And now I get where that's coming from. That's this idea of let's take a thing that maybe had a common use and let's see what is in there that might be able to be made much more complex , or where's the complexity that I could tap. Right?

Scott: Yeah. So I mean like a lot of that is if you look at a DSP textbook and you look at say reverberation design, chorus, or filter, oscillator or whatever, it's going to give you just like one totally standard design that's probably not really that good. And I think a lot of people that get into this stuff assume that if you see it presented in that way, that's all there really is to it. You know, I think that's why a lot of VSTs - like the early era of them, [they] sounded really bad and why people said hardware always sounds better than VSTs - until relatively recently, like a few years ago. But if you look into commercial hardware, if you look into old like Computer Music Journal articles, patents from different companies, you'll see for each of these things a tremendous diversity in different techniques.

Scott: And all of them have a characteristic sound and some of them are kind of known and iconic and some of them are unknown and unexplored. And so I figured that in digging into those things, there's a much broader range of ideas to explore. And, too, I don't have to feel like mystified the way a lot of people seem to fixate on certain pieces of hardware. So they have this kind of a magical sound. You know, if I understand how it works and I could make it sound like that in software, or I can make it sound like that - but more of the way that I want it to sound. And I've got more control that way. And the third interesting aspect of that is that it kinda makes everything boring interesting again, because you can look at all these like home keyboards that nobody cares about: eighties home organs and things like that. And technologically, they're actually really interesting because they have a lot of exotic, innovative, weird stuff that wasn't ever used in anything else.

Darwin: Well, that explains you like digging into things like Seiko synths or the Wersi and stuff that, that explains that too.

Scott: So the thing that inspired me to buy those kinds of things to start with is that it's just that they were so obscure and marginal and weird that I thought that you'd have to, you must be able to do something really deeply perverse with them. And that's always what got me excited about something, but beyond that, it's like a bunch of Casio home keyboards compared to synthesizers might as well have like some kind of like arcane, alien technology and a lot of ways they're really totally different from anything else. And it's not that the instruments themselves are that useful necessarily, but if I can figure out how they work and make some kind of a software implementation and adjust that to my liking, right. Then I can find a bunch of new things to explore a bunch of, not necessarily like totally novel unprecedented sounds, but, but different flavors of things.

Darwin: Oh, that's really interesting. You don't have to worry about necessarily making everything from whole cloth. You can use their ideas as a launching point for some experimentation,

Scott: Yeah. Well, so I don't think a lot of what people are doing and like VSTS now is like trying to make really accurate emulations of things. But I tend to think it's more interesting to like see the unexploded potential of something like what variations could they have made to a certain instrument that would have made it maybe more interesting or more useful. And since you can copy and paste things like endlessly, think of what, if you had a Casio keyboard that had 100 D tuneable oscillators and whatever,

Darwin: Right. With the background in electrical engineering and all of this alien technology surfing that you're doing, have you ever been compelled to try your hand at hardware development?

Scott: That was initially why I studied electrical engineering! I mean, like I said, I was into electronics first and I mean, I was messing with that seriously, since I was about 10. And I had tried to make, as I mentioned earlier, some basic like sound effect, generator circuits, nothing really that great, but the way that I made it was all screwed up. And so it came out really weird. And so I at that point nobody really had pointed me in the direction of like, "This is a synthesizer and it has these features." I think I had seen like a photo of a Minimoog or something before, but I didn't really like know how it worked. So once I started exploring on the internet and I was actually looking at these things, it seems really obvious to me that I should be like Raymond Scott or something. You know, I figured that would be like the right direction to go into. Or there was a guy, Joe Paradiso. So he works at MIT and he had on the synthesizer museum website an interview where he had made this really big and elaborate modular synthesizer. And he would describe making, I think like generative patches and things like that. So I thought that's what I'm going to do, but I realized I really hate actually building stuff.

Scott: I mean, it takes way too long and I hate soldering and I hate drilling holes and I hate stripping wires and I hate troubleshooting - it's tedious. And the thing that really grated on me was that if you want to really make something, then you need to decide before you make it, before you finalize it, all the controls that it's going to have and how you're going to use it. And I didn't really have that kind of foresight. And so it would always just get bogged down at that point. And I figured that if I could just like make a prototype and that would be it, and that would be like the usable final product. And that would be so much better than I could like mess with it and change it around easily. And it turns out that Pure Data satisfies my needs that way, much more because it basically is a prototype. And then the added advantage of that is that you can, once you finish something, then you can copy and paste it as many times as you want. And it doesn't count cost any extra. I mean, you know that synthesize guy Jurgen Haible? He died a few years ago and Aphex Twin bought some of his stuff. I mean, that was initially the thing that I envisioned myself doing, but think of how much work that took!

Darwin: Yeah. I hear you. I've worked side by side with these people, and you know, one thing that you say that really resonates with me is this idea that you have to have like the knobs and the interface and what it's going to sound like. You have to have all that pre-cooked before you really get to do much experiment thing. And so the, the potential for it to just like, somewhere along that path, just be just feel disappointing. And you're just like, "I don't even know why I'm going to follow up with this!", you know?

Scott: Well, I mean, because you ended up putting knobs on it that don't really do anything useful. If you want to, and there's like way too many and then it gets too expensive or it's missing something that you wanted...

Darwin: [And you have] to revert the design.

Scott: And so I would just find myself working on these prototypes and I would make these test recordings with this prototype and I'd get like excited about that, but then I wouldn't know what to do and it would kind of trail off - or if I actually finished something, I never used it again. I thought like doing stuff yourself, that's great, but I don't want it to get in the way of using it, of making music. I mean, I know Pure Data, Max and whatever that's supposed to be like really time-consuming and difficult and whatever, but it's actually very fast compared to building hardware.

Darwin: It is. And well, the other thing is that you just actually said the sentence that this is all pointing to, which is that in the end it's supposed to serve making music. And boy, I can't tell you the number of people that get involved and it's not just hardware, it's software builders too. But the people that get so involved in the building that they forgot that they got into it because they enjoyed making music. And so that's what if we get down to the core of why I was so fascinated by your work, it's that and said I saw you doing these highly technical things. You know, I saw some of the Pure Data patches you were doing. And I was thinking "This is technically amazing stuff, but it was also paired with the actual creation of music." And I was blown away. I just loved it.

Scott: You know, if you were wondering where I'm coming from and how I've developed my ideas, basically I've tried a lot of things and I've examined a lot of things and I've decided that the vast majority of them are not really satisfying in one way or another. And so just by process of exclusion, I ended up doing the things that I do. I didn't really set out to do them necessarily.

Darwin: Well, that takes a lot of self honesty and you know what, a lot of times, it's not easy for us to be honest enough with ourselves to say, "Eh, this is the direction I need to not go because I shouldn't." That's interesting.

Scott: I tried that a lot. I found out when I was younger, I guess I found myself easily influenced by what other people said and did and their approaches. And I would internalize this idea of this is what it means to be an artist. I have to go in this direction. And so I would try that and it just wasn't working for me. And I mean, I would do stuff with it that would be like, I guess it was okay at the time, but I'd lose interest in it. And I wouldn't feel like going down that path anymore.

Darwin: Right. Right. Well, Scott, unfortunately our time is up, but before I let you go, what if have you got anything, on the burner here that you're working on? Any releases that plan that you have planned or any like tech wonders that you've got at your fingertips that you're about to share?

Scott: So basically what I'm going to say is that my working habits are terrible.

Darwin: Okay.

Scott: And I alluded previously to doing a bunch of things in parallel. Rather than evolving from one kind of a style to another. But along with that come just to complete this organization. So I'm pretty much always working on like at least like six albums or something. Okay. At least I'm like, that's on my mind. And generally when I release something, it's because I'm really tired of thinking about it and I just want it to be out of my mind.

Darwin: Okay.

Scott: But I've got two that are pretty much almost finished. And I got, I don't know, there's if I were less lazy than I could probably release like seven albums this year. And I mean, that's not, that's not like the end of it. That's just the stuff that's almost done right now.

Darwin: I see. Wow. That's wild. That's fantastic. Is it just that you, when you get in a flow, you tend to be really prolific then?

Scott: No, I don't think I'm especially prolific. It's more like I said, my working habits are really bad. I get inspired by something. And then I obsessive we work on it for awhile and then I reached some sort of an impasse or for whatever reason run out of stuff, it just sits there and it might sit there for six months or 10 years or who knows.

Darwin: Interesting. Well, cool. I'll be looking forward to this stuff, whenever it does show up. It's like I said, I've become a fan, so I appreciate regardless of what your work habits are. I really love the outcome.

Scott: Okay. Well thank you.

Darwin: All right. And with that, I am going to let you have the rest of your evening. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to have this chat.

Scott: Ah, you're welcome. I wasn't doing anything anyway.

Darwin: Good for me! All right, man. We'll talk again soon.

Scott: Alright.

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