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4mat interview

 

Never try to pull rank on 4mat - 15 questions

 

According to my survey of Chiptunes, 4mat is The Best Artist of the genre,

90's Amiga musician, who also feels at home with Electronica, Hip Hop, and  J-POP. He describes his sound as Arpeggios, modulated pulse waves, drums less than 1k in size - that alone is already enough for me to start to immerse myself into his art. And music is just beautiful.

Oh, did I mention that 4mat is based in United Kingdom and working in the games industry.

Here you have a rare chance to look at his creative process, equipment he is using, and find out about who his favorite artists are.

 

1. Where does a 4mat’s original style come from? Is it something you can consciously develop? Or does it just happen?

Hmm.. I guess the 4mat stuff only got a style in the last couple of years. It's either Japanese sh'mup game style crossed with glitchy breakcore beats, or miserable dirges using simple instruments. Depends what mood I'm in, but those two are the ones I use most often, perhaps they'll meld into one style next year. I've always liked Konami's game stuff since the MSX days. The glitchy drums were a way of replacing chip drums with more powerful ones, and that freeform playing is well suited to tracker work, you have a lot of control there.

2. Which musicians are you envious of at the moment?

The really complex tracks Zabutom makes are great (don't have that level of patience myself) and I love Tempest 's natural funk. MinusBaby's 'Left' as well, I mean that's like a real 'year zero' work, you can give that to anybody and say 'THIS is chipmusic', they'll get it. It's the first chip album for me where there's no gimmick, it's a serious piece of work that's not ruled by the hardware it's made on. He's a clever clever guy.

3. Do you have a philosophy?

Not really, do positive stuff I guess, create things, give stuff away, whatever, god knows there's not really anything else anymore.

4. What is your approach to building a track?

Melody first, or a riff. I might put down about 20 seconds on the piano and then a track gets built up in stops and starts, there's usually at least 5 songs on the go and if I'm lucky they'll all survive to the end. Lot of cut and pasting too, choruses from one end up in another and so on. Working on games uses a whole other method, the inspiration there comes from getting inside the project and sort of 'living' it for a while.

5. What outboard gear do you currently use?

I still use an old Line 6 POD  for my guitar/bass work. Got rid of my Trace bass stack recently, at the minute I don't need a lot of output as it's all recorded.

6. What’s the first song you ever created? Is it available?

It'd be some old Amiga tracker MOD. I've lost most of those from 1989, they're all gone.

7. Do you write every day?

I did recently for the 30songs30days event, but normally no.

8. Do you usually have a pre-conceived idea of what you want a record sound like?

For games yes but hardly ever for my own stuff, though eventually you get that "on rails" moment. (same as writers get) Like a point of clarity, almost like cresting a hill really. From there you can guide the thing home, great feeling that.

9. Who do you think was the greatest electronic music artist?

Just one? Kraftwerk. If I had more there'd be Delia Derbyshire and Y.M.O as well. You can even hear the dust in the Radiophonic workshop on her work, it's so beautiful. Y.M.O's music I grew up with without knowing who they were for years, Yukihiro Takahashi is one of my favourite drummers too.

10. What was your first set up when you started?

Amiga 500, plugged into the TV. In mono. I didn't realize the tracker tools had stereo so my early work has instruments swapping channels a lot. Live I was playing bass in a band for a few years, still got my pretentious 5-string from back then, I took the low B off it now though.

11. What’s your current set up?

Depends, chip stuff is just me, Dosbox & FastTracker2. For real and game stuff I use Sonar, Audition, bunch of VSTs, guitars, bass, mics etc. I think most people use fairly similar gear these days. I do a lot of post work on the production, I like to have an 'ambient' microphone recording even if I'm not doing anything live. Put that track low in the mix to give it some sense of where it was recorded, even if you're just banging away on a master keyboard with headphones. I mean, the best recorded songs to me are the ones where you can hear the squeak of the piano stool or the hum of the 8-track, it adds so much.

12. What do you think of the dubstep sound?

I don't really listen to modern dance stuff, too much categorization, it's like being a librarian rather than a musician.

13. Are you good at networking?

I used to be ok (had a freelance music company) but haven't had to do it for so long now.

14. What gear do you use live?

If it's chip stuff I'll be on laptop with custom software, wrote that ages ago but it's not been tried live unfortunately. Realtime MOD mixing with a virtual 'record bag' of tracks, got quite into writing that.

15. Is there one musician whom you still listen to the most?

Real stuff I'm listening to Elliott Smith a heck of a lot, there's so few good songwriters around, sadly now there's one less. In games I like Hip Tanaka's NES works, the Konami KuKeiHa Club, demos it's got to be The Mighty Bogg and Kjell Nordbo.

16. What is it about your music that you think people are responding to so strongly?

What I've heard from a few people is they like the more controlled musical structure I use. (which I got from doing games and demoscene for so long) I hope there's also a bit of 'depth' to the tracks, I try to put some sort of vague meaning in there.

Visit 4mat at MySpace, FaceBook, and his Blog.

Would you like a mad OGOGO peacock?..

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