Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
Angus Finlayson wants to slow down. The Berlin-based producer, better known as Minor Science, has been making electronic music for over a decade now, and in that time, he has developed a knack for tangling sounds at an increasingly rapid clip. After a childhood colored by piano lessons, time behind the violin, and a stint in a local jazz ensemble, the London native found his way towards composition, the recording studio, and, eventually, Berlin. For his first release, 2012’s Train Window Girl, he took vintage Scott Walker cuts and reworked them, submerging Walker’s vocals in a deep smog of synthesizers and zero-gravity electronics. It’s a fitting starting point for his discography: since then, his work has reckoned with umpteen musical idioms and twisted them into new forms.
After the release of Train Window Girl, Finlayson stretched into all sorts of territories: claustrophobic house music in 2014’s Noble Gas; barely-there techno courtesy of 2015’s Whities 004; everything-at-once kind-of-dubstep via 2017’s Whities 012; and Dadaist ambient-music disorientation on 2014’s Blowing Up the Workshop 32, a.k.a. Absent Friends Vol. I. (More on that last one later.) In his practice, Finlayson moves between styles with an unmissable deliberation, mixing up motifs in a way that belies a seemingly unending curiosity. With each new release, he builds a kaleidoscope of histories, giving vintage styles so many coats of paint that they’re nearly unrecognizable.
Finlayson largely works in dance music—whatever that means—but his music often begs for headphone listening, with details layered upon details until the whole thing sounds positively pointillistic. In 2020, after nearly a decade of soundtracking left-field dancefloors, he released Second Language, a club-night amp-buster that rockets between styles, modes, and approaches. Listening to it, you can practically hear him twisting knobs every which way, nurturing a carefully controlled explosion throughout. It’s a remarkable achievement, to be sure, but its stylistic reaches beg the question: now what?
Since then, Finlayson has answered that in two wildly different ways. One month before he released Second Language, he played at Bang Face, a critical festival for gut-busting hardcore and old-school rave music. That offers a window into one angle: in a series of can’t-miss DJ sets, he has underlined his love for big blends and chaotic hardcore, leaning hard into fast-and-messy dance music. This version of Minor Science is aimed squarely at the club-night lifers; it’s a vision of electronic music as an everything-at-once barrage. This coincided with the formation of STRIPE N CO, a cheeky alter ego with a decidedly Gremlins-esque approach to club music. It’s dance music as an exercise in audacity: even in a relatively lean discography, he’s reimagined Evanescence, Kylie Minogue, and “Auld Lang Syne” as hardcore classics.
But if you’re looking for something for the morning after, he’s got you covered, too. Finlayson has made a version of ambient music for years now, and while it may be a bit sludgier and more confrontational than you might expect from the style, it’s not exactly hardcore, either. Absent Friends Vol. III, his latest album as Minor Science, is a remarkable entry in a running series of sort-of ambient-music records: it is slow and richly textured, moving with a glacial patience but never settling down. You could connect it to all sorts of contemporary ambient-music producers—KMRU’s disorienting field-recording abstractions and Jake Muir’s bleary-eyed ambient-dub experimentalism both come to mind—but Finlayson is looking elsewhere. If anything, this is music inspired by the histories of spiritual jazz, dusty ECM records, and twentieth-century progressive electronics. In its own way, it feels deeply out of time. In slowing down just a bit, Finlayson has opened up entire universes.
Ahead of the release of Absent Friends Vol. III, we got a chance to connect with Finlayson, speaking on the influences behind his latest LP, how his creative process has shifted in the past few years, the power structures behind samples and bootlegs, and lots more.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
What’s some art that you connected with early on?
Minor Science: I’m gonna go with what my subconscious gave me at the moment, which is not necessarily the neat answer. I’m thinking of the CDs, or maybe cassettes, that my dad would play in the car—this would have been the mid-to-late ’90s. He’d play “Adiemus,” by Karl Jenkins, a pop-classical and post-minimalist classical composer whose work is quite accessible. “Adiemus” combines “world music” and choral music in a way that is very palatable for people who aren’t so familiar with those things. There were lots of chanting choirs, storm drums, and the like.
To broaden that out, though, there was a lot of music around when I was a kid. Neither of my parents are musicians, but my dad has played piano on and off, and he’s sung in choirs. Both of my parents enjoy a lot of music. So there were things around at that early point that led me to engage in music. I think that my parents may regret some decisions they made at that point, because both my brother and I are professional musicians now, and I think that wasn’t really what they had in mind. I guess parenting goes in unexpected directions sometimes, doesn’t it?
How did you find your way towards production?
Minor Science: I had a lot of music schooling when I was going through the education system. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States, but it’s a bit of a cliché here: if you have middle-class parents of a certain persuasion, and if they detect any hint of the slightest whisper of musical talent in you, they’ll force an orchestral instrument in your hands and make you go to lessons. That’s what happened with me. I learned piano first—my brother and I both had the same terrifying piano teacher. I vividly remember going to a lesson with her, and I guess that I had been playing outside, because my hands were clammy. I was sweating dirt onto her piano keys. This was, of course, a disaster.
Most people who have that route into music have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with it, because it’s pushed onto you. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was also a bit of a chore. I later learned to play the violin and a few other instruments, but I wouldn’t have described it as my passion.
When I was a little older, as a teenager, I began to have my own tastes. As teenagers do, you begin to identify very strongly with certain kinds of music, and it’s really formative in shaping your identity. I played bass guitar, and my brother and I had a couple of bands. I went on to study composition at university. I suppose I was working on music from the age of seven onwards, in different forms. My idea of what I wanted to do with it was always changing; that I’ve ended up doing music that involves me sitting in a chair and clicking with a mouse was not preordained. Who knows if it was the best outcome? But it’s the way things went.
In the blurb for your Sunday Mix for Crack, you said that you find the ’70s and ’90s more surprising and exciting than the present. Has that always been the case?
Minor Science: That’s a recent thing for sure. In a sense, it’s been something of a return for me: this connects back to listening to “Adiemus” with my dad as a kid. This was the music that my dad was into: this strain of contemporary jazz that stretches back into the ’90s, and certain bits of classical music from the second half of the 20th century. As a teenager, I got really into jazz bass. I played in a local ensemble, and we’d replay classic albums: Head Hunters, Sketches of Spain, that kind of thing.
As I got older and left home, my engagement with music moved towards electronic music, and I became quite neophilic about it. I didn’t have much appetite for digging through the canon and understanding histories. I worked as a music journalist for seven or eight years, so I’d be writing about new music every week. Also, as a DJ, there’s a similar dynamic at play: you’re invested in keeping up-to-date. That depends on what kind of DJ you are, but I’m fairly invested in keeping up with releases week-by-week. If you’re putting your energy into that, you have less energy to dig around and go backwards.
Decoupling from that has been a slow process. I’m trying to ask myself what I want to engage with, rather than just hearing what’s being pushed in front of me on social media. By doing that, I’ve rediscovered a deeper relationship with music. It’s less focused on the ways that music can be used and more focused on enjoyment. It’s a prelogical and aesthetic response: “that makes me feel good; I want to hear that.” That’s led me on voyages of discovery that, often, end up leading into the past. I keep up with what’s going on now, but in general, my listening orientation has shifted somewhat towards the past.
In the writing that accompanied that Crack mix, I was specifically talking about ambient music, and the music that influences that side of what I do. I feel some distance to much of the music that gets put out under the rubric of “ambient.” This is especially true of the past few years—there was an explosion of it with the pandemic. Some of it’s great! A lot of it very faithfully follows the initial philosophy of the genre, the Brian Eno stuff that kicked it all off—”This is almost not music; it’s functional sound.” That can be a license to create music that is quite formulaic. And that’s fine. If it’s intended as background and it does that, then it’s successful on its own terms. I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, but for me, it’s not particularly interesting.
When I engage with that world and make music that’s in that zone, as I was with Absent Friends Vol. III, I’ll look towards things outside of that space. I was searching for things that would surprise or challenge me, and for things that would spark other ideas. I suppose I found it in these other decades and genres.
Would you call Volume III an ambient record?
Minor Science: It’s such a cliché for musicians to reject the term that’s most easily applied to their music; I always roll my eyes a bit when people do that. So, in that spirit, I use the word “ambient” to describe the album as a shorthand for people when I’m trying to explain it and how it relates to the other music that I do. And the label that it’s released on—Balmat—is quite explicitly an ambient label; they’ve released loads of great records in that vein. And, clearly, in end effect, significant parts of the album are quite firmly in that post-Eno heritage. With that in mind, I would never say it’s not ambient music; that would be absurd.
I have some discomfort with slotting it into that box, though. While I was making that music, what made it most interesting to me were the ways in which it deviated from, or pushed outside of, that space: the aspects of the music that are slightly more unsettled or unsettling. Those aspects are really important to me, and those are the qualities that could diminish its effect as an ambient listening experience.
Especially as the record reaches its back half, I feel like there’s a focus on song structures, in a way that you might not expect in ambient music: when you get to minute nine, it’s going to have shifted meaningfully from minute one. Does that track for you? Are there any composers or producers you were looking towards while structuring the record?
Minor Science: Your read is on point, yeah. I don’t know if I had anyone in mind specifically beyond the world of influences that are reflected in that Crack mix: spiritual jazz, ECM stuff from the ‘80s, that kind of thing.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
To broaden that out, though, there was a lot of music around when I was a kid. Neither of my parents are musicians, but my dad has played piano on and off, and he’s sung in choirs. Both of my parents enjoy a lot of music. So there were things around at that early point that led me to engage in music. I think that my parents may regret some decisions they made at that point, because both my brother and I are professional musicians now, and I think that wasn’t really what they had in mind. I guess parenting goes in unexpected directions sometimes, doesn’t it?
How did you find your way towards production?
Minor Science: I had a lot of music schooling when I was going through the education system. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States, but it’s a bit of a cliché here: if you have middle-class parents of a certain persuasion, and if they detect any hint of the slightest whisper of musical talent in you, they’ll force an orchestral instrument in your hands and make you go to lessons. That’s what happened with me. I learned piano first—my brother and I both had the same terrifying piano teacher. I vividly remember going to a lesson with her, and I guess that I had been playing outside, because my hands were clammy. I was sweating dirt onto her piano keys. This was, of course, a disaster.
Most people who have that route into music have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with it, because it’s pushed onto you. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was also a bit of a chore. I later learned to play the violin and a few other instruments, but I wouldn’t have described it as my passion.
When I was a little older, as a teenager, I began to have my own tastes. As teenagers do, you begin to identify very strongly with certain kinds of music, and it’s really formative in shaping your identity. I played bass guitar, and my brother and I had a couple of bands. I went on to study composition at university. I suppose I was working on music from the age of seven onwards, in different forms. My idea of what I wanted to do with it was always changing; that I’ve ended up doing music that involves me sitting in a chair and clicking with a mouse was not preordained. Who knows if it was the best outcome? But it’s the way things went.
In the blurb for your Sunday Mix for Crack, you said that you find the ’70s and ’90s more surprising and exciting than the present. Has that always been the case?
Minor Science: That’s a recent thing for sure. In a sense, it’s been something of a return for me: this connects back to listening to “Adiemus” with my dad as a kid. This was the music that my dad was into: this strain of contemporary jazz that stretches back into the ’90s, and certain bits of classical music from the second half of the 20th century. As a teenager, I got really into jazz bass. I played in a local ensemble, and we’d replay classic albums: Head Hunters, Sketches of Spain, that kind of thing.
As I got older and left home, my engagement with music moved towards electronic music, and I became quite neophilic about it. I didn’t have much appetite for digging through the canon and understanding histories. I worked as a music journalist for seven or eight years, so I’d be writing about new music every week. Also, as a DJ, there’s a similar dynamic at play: you’re invested in keeping up-to-date. That depends on what kind of DJ you are, but I’m fairly invested in keeping up with releases week-by-week. If you’re putting your energy into that, you have less energy to dig around and go backwards.
Decoupling from that has been a slow process. I’m trying to ask myself what I want to engage with, rather than just hearing what’s being pushed in front of me on social media. By doing that, I’ve rediscovered a deeper relationship with music. It’s less focused on the ways that music can be used and more focused on enjoyment. It’s a prelogical and aesthetic response: “that makes me feel good; I want to hear that.” That’s led me on voyages of discovery that, often, end up leading into the past. I keep up with what’s going on now, but in general, my listening orientation has shifted somewhat towards the past.
In the writing that accompanied that Crack mix, I was specifically talking about ambient music, and the music that influences that side of what I do. I feel some distance to much of the music that gets put out under the rubric of “ambient.” This is especially true of the past few years—there was an explosion of it with the pandemic. Some of it’s great! A lot of it very faithfully follows the initial philosophy of the genre, the Brian Eno stuff that kicked it all off—”This is almost not music; it’s functional sound.” That can be a license to create music that is quite formulaic. And that’s fine. If it’s intended as background and it does that, then it’s successful on its own terms. I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, but for me, it’s not particularly interesting.
When I engage with that world and make music that’s in that zone, as I was with Absent Friends Vol. III, I’ll look towards things outside of that space. I was searching for things that would surprise or challenge me, and for things that would spark other ideas. I suppose I found it in these other decades and genres.
Would you call Volume III an ambient record?
Minor Science: It’s such a cliché for musicians to reject the term that’s most easily applied to their music; I always roll my eyes a bit when people do that. So, in that spirit, I use the word “ambient” to describe the album as a shorthand for people when I’m trying to explain it and how it relates to the other music that I do. And the label that it’s released on—Balmat—is quite explicitly an ambient label; they’ve released loads of great records in that vein. And, clearly, in end effect, significant parts of the album are quite firmly in that post-Eno heritage. With that in mind, I would never say it’s not ambient music; that would be absurd.
I have some discomfort with slotting it into that box, though. While I was making that music, what made it most interesting to me were the ways in which it deviated from, or pushed outside of, that space: the aspects of the music that are slightly more unsettled or unsettling. Those aspects are really important to me, and those are the qualities that could diminish its effect as an ambient listening experience.
Especially as the record reaches its back half, I feel like there’s a focus on song structures, in a way that you might not expect in ambient music: when you get to minute nine, it’s going to have shifted meaningfully from minute one. Does that track for you? Are there any composers or producers you were looking towards while structuring the record?
Minor Science: Your read is on point, yeah. I don’t know if I had anyone in mind specifically beyond the world of influences that are reflected in that Crack mix: spiritual jazz, ECM stuff from the ‘80s, that kind of thing.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
Most people who have that route into music have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with it, because it’s pushed onto you. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was also a bit of a chore. I later learned to play the violin and a few other instruments, but I wouldn’t have described it as my passion.
When I was a little older, as a teenager, I began to have my own tastes. As teenagers do, you begin to identify very strongly with certain kinds of music, and it’s really formative in shaping your identity. I played bass guitar, and my brother and I had a couple of bands. I went on to study composition at university. I suppose I was working on music from the age of seven onwards, in different forms. My idea of what I wanted to do with it was always changing; that I’ve ended up doing music that involves me sitting in a chair and clicking with a mouse was not preordained. Who knows if it was the best outcome? But it’s the way things went.
In the blurb for your Sunday Mix for Crack, you said that you find the ’70s and ’90s more surprising and exciting than the present. Has that always been the case?
Minor Science: That’s a recent thing for sure. In a sense, it’s been something of a return for me: this connects back to listening to “Adiemus” with my dad as a kid. This was the music that my dad was into: this strain of contemporary jazz that stretches back into the ’90s, and certain bits of classical music from the second half of the 20th century. As a teenager, I got really into jazz bass. I played in a local ensemble, and we’d replay classic albums: Head Hunters, Sketches of Spain, that kind of thing.
As I got older and left home, my engagement with music moved towards electronic music, and I became quite neophilic about it. I didn’t have much appetite for digging through the canon and understanding histories. I worked as a music journalist for seven or eight years, so I’d be writing about new music every week. Also, as a DJ, there’s a similar dynamic at play: you’re invested in keeping up-to-date. That depends on what kind of DJ you are, but I’m fairly invested in keeping up with releases week-by-week. If you’re putting your energy into that, you have less energy to dig around and go backwards.
Decoupling from that has been a slow process. I’m trying to ask myself what I want to engage with, rather than just hearing what’s being pushed in front of me on social media. By doing that, I’ve rediscovered a deeper relationship with music. It’s less focused on the ways that music can be used and more focused on enjoyment. It’s a prelogical and aesthetic response: “that makes me feel good; I want to hear that.” That’s led me on voyages of discovery that, often, end up leading into the past. I keep up with what’s going on now, but in general, my listening orientation has shifted somewhat towards the past.
In the writing that accompanied that Crack mix, I was specifically talking about ambient music, and the music that influences that side of what I do. I feel some distance to much of the music that gets put out under the rubric of “ambient.” This is especially true of the past few years—there was an explosion of it with the pandemic. Some of it’s great! A lot of it very faithfully follows the initial philosophy of the genre, the Brian Eno stuff that kicked it all off—”This is almost not music; it’s functional sound.” That can be a license to create music that is quite formulaic. And that’s fine. If it’s intended as background and it does that, then it’s successful on its own terms. I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, but for me, it’s not particularly interesting.
When I engage with that world and make music that’s in that zone, as I was with Absent Friends Vol. III, I’ll look towards things outside of that space. I was searching for things that would surprise or challenge me, and for things that would spark other ideas. I suppose I found it in these other decades and genres.
Would you call Volume III an ambient record?
Minor Science: It’s such a cliché for musicians to reject the term that’s most easily applied to their music; I always roll my eyes a bit when people do that. So, in that spirit, I use the word “ambient” to describe the album as a shorthand for people when I’m trying to explain it and how it relates to the other music that I do. And the label that it’s released on—Balmat—is quite explicitly an ambient label; they’ve released loads of great records in that vein. And, clearly, in end effect, significant parts of the album are quite firmly in that post-Eno heritage. With that in mind, I would never say it’s not ambient music; that would be absurd.
I have some discomfort with slotting it into that box, though. While I was making that music, what made it most interesting to me were the ways in which it deviated from, or pushed outside of, that space: the aspects of the music that are slightly more unsettled or unsettling. Those aspects are really important to me, and those are the qualities that could diminish its effect as an ambient listening experience.
Especially as the record reaches its back half, I feel like there’s a focus on song structures, in a way that you might not expect in ambient music: when you get to minute nine, it’s going to have shifted meaningfully from minute one. Does that track for you? Are there any composers or producers you were looking towards while structuring the record?
Minor Science: Your read is on point, yeah. I don’t know if I had anyone in mind specifically beyond the world of influences that are reflected in that Crack mix: spiritual jazz, ECM stuff from the ‘80s, that kind of thing.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
As I got older and left home, my engagement with music moved towards electronic music, and I became quite neophilic about it. I didn’t have much appetite for digging through the canon and understanding histories. I worked as a music journalist for seven or eight years, so I’d be writing about new music every week. Also, as a DJ, there’s a similar dynamic at play: you’re invested in keeping up-to-date. That depends on what kind of DJ you are, but I’m fairly invested in keeping up with releases week-by-week. If you’re putting your energy into that, you have less energy to dig around and go backwards.
Decoupling from that has been a slow process. I’m trying to ask myself what I want to engage with, rather than just hearing what’s being pushed in front of me on social media. By doing that, I’ve rediscovered a deeper relationship with music. It’s less focused on the ways that music can be used and more focused on enjoyment. It’s a prelogical and aesthetic response: “that makes me feel good; I want to hear that.” That’s led me on voyages of discovery that, often, end up leading into the past. I keep up with what’s going on now, but in general, my listening orientation has shifted somewhat towards the past.
In the writing that accompanied that Crack mix, I was specifically talking about ambient music, and the music that influences that side of what I do. I feel some distance to much of the music that gets put out under the rubric of “ambient.” This is especially true of the past few years—there was an explosion of it with the pandemic. Some of it’s great! A lot of it very faithfully follows the initial philosophy of the genre, the Brian Eno stuff that kicked it all off—”This is almost not music; it’s functional sound.” That can be a license to create music that is quite formulaic. And that’s fine. If it’s intended as background and it does that, then it’s successful on its own terms. I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, but for me, it’s not particularly interesting.
When I engage with that world and make music that’s in that zone, as I was with Absent Friends Vol. III, I’ll look towards things outside of that space. I was searching for things that would surprise or challenge me, and for things that would spark other ideas. I suppose I found it in these other decades and genres.
Would you call Volume III an ambient record?
Minor Science: It’s such a cliché for musicians to reject the term that’s most easily applied to their music; I always roll my eyes a bit when people do that. So, in that spirit, I use the word “ambient” to describe the album as a shorthand for people when I’m trying to explain it and how it relates to the other music that I do. And the label that it’s released on—Balmat—is quite explicitly an ambient label; they’ve released loads of great records in that vein. And, clearly, in end effect, significant parts of the album are quite firmly in that post-Eno heritage. With that in mind, I would never say it’s not ambient music; that would be absurd.
I have some discomfort with slotting it into that box, though. While I was making that music, what made it most interesting to me were the ways in which it deviated from, or pushed outside of, that space: the aspects of the music that are slightly more unsettled or unsettling. Those aspects are really important to me, and those are the qualities that could diminish its effect as an ambient listening experience.
Especially as the record reaches its back half, I feel like there’s a focus on song structures, in a way that you might not expect in ambient music: when you get to minute nine, it’s going to have shifted meaningfully from minute one. Does that track for you? Are there any composers or producers you were looking towards while structuring the record?
Minor Science: Your read is on point, yeah. I don’t know if I had anyone in mind specifically beyond the world of influences that are reflected in that Crack mix: spiritual jazz, ECM stuff from the ‘80s, that kind of thing.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
I have some discomfort with slotting it into that box, though. While I was making that music, what made it most interesting to me were the ways in which it deviated from, or pushed outside of, that space: the aspects of the music that are slightly more unsettled or unsettling. Those aspects are really important to me, and those are the qualities that could diminish its effect as an ambient listening experience.
Especially as the record reaches its back half, I feel like there’s a focus on song structures, in a way that you might not expect in ambient music: when you get to minute nine, it’s going to have shifted meaningfully from minute one. Does that track for you? Are there any composers or producers you were looking towards while structuring the record?
Minor Science: Your read is on point, yeah. I don’t know if I had anyone in mind specifically beyond the world of influences that are reflected in that Crack mix: spiritual jazz, ECM stuff from the ‘80s, that kind of thing.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
The song structures are simply a product of the way I make music butting up against this idea of making relatively static, or stretched-out, music. If you compare my music to similar material, on average, I’d say it’s fairly event-heavy. I like for things to happen quite frequently, and I like the things that happen to be quite striking.
I’m not saying that makes the music better. One of the big things that I’ve had to learn, and that I’m still learning, is how to hold back and not cram too many events into a piece of music, which makes things quite crowded. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s common to basically all of my music. When I was structuring the stuff on Absent Friends Vol. III, there was a question of, “this is a nice drone, but where’s it going?” So, often, I’d end up sneaking some kind of event in there, where someone else might have let something sit.
Why return to Absent Friends now? How does this project, in your mind, sit in relation to the first two?
Minor Science: The simplest distinction between the volumes is one of format. The first was a mix for an online platform called Blowing Up the Workshop, and the second was a cassette and mini-site where the mix was on loop. We were calling them mixtapes; you can call them mixes, or whatever you like. But they were assemblages of mostly other people’s music. The way that I put my stamp on it was through the nature and extent of that collaging. Especially in volume two, the editing is pretty far beyond what you’d typically do if you were making a mixtape or a podcast mix. It took me a really long time; there’s many layers of different tracks, and lots of snipping out certain bits and subtle processing to make things work together. So that was where the creativity came in, above and beyond the creativity that’s already present in a mix.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
Having done those two mixes, I decided the obvious next step would be to do something similar, but where I’d made all the music instead of using other material. Then the pandemic happened, and I had more time and fewer opportunities to perform. I ended up having the idea of doing a live version of Absent Friends. This took the form of me generating lots of audio in the studio, to make what I considered to be stems, in the same way that you might look at the stems of a song. I worked out a way to use four CDJs, a couple of synths, and some effects to recombine these stems live and create a performance that’s different each time. The stems get layered up, and they can go in different directions. So it’s still in that collagistic spirit.
Through doing that, certain compositions emerged—I’d find myself frequently combining certain stems. It became clear that it would be a good idea to formalize those songs by reassembling them in the studio and releasing them. So that became Absent Friends Vol. III. The live set is still ongoing; the set will change now this music is out in the world. Maybe it will give rise to new music, which might make for a fourth volume, and so on.
How did this record surprise you?
Minor Science: The biggest thing goes back to what I was saying about learning to hold back in my music. The last thing I released before this year was an album called Second Language. That was the apex of what I was calling this “event-heavy” kind of composition. Memorably, a journalist writing for Wire called it a speed-run through different genres, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’ll take it. The tempos are quite accelerated; there’s moment-to-moment density. That kind of music is, by its nature, painstakingly composed. The way I work involves working intensely on short passages, refining and developing things until it becomes quite embellished and dense. Since 2020, my musical direction of travel is away from that way of working.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
This album was a step away from that, partially because of its conception. The tracks were already there, in the live set. When you’re performing live, you only have so many hands, and there’s only so many things you can do. There’s an inherent limitation to how dense the music can be. So, the foundation of the music was already very different from what I might have done if I had sat in the studio and spent ages hunched over the screen. That gave me a kind of freedom to let the music breathe, because I wanted the tracks to be honest to what the live set is.
The other record I did this year as Minor Science, “Workahol / Casheine,” also shows that quality. Compared to previous stuff I did, those tracks are less ornate and more direct. I’m trying to let things breathe and be confident in allowing ideas to present themselves without excessive embellishment.
You’ve spoken in the past about your name stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “minor science.” My understanding is that with minor sciences, you’re deriving a logic from a thing, as compared to a royal science, where you impose a logic upon the world. That speaks to sampling, historiography, and collagery. I think about your first record, Train Window Girl, where you flipped Scott Walker tracks, and about the first two Absent Friends entries. Do you think about your relationship to sampling in your work now?
Minor Science: I read Deleuze and Guattari in my student days. I took a cultural studies course and Deleuze was trendy at the time in those kinds of courses. But I was never an expert. I took a phrase that I thought was interesting and seemed to capture something about what I was doing. As you say, the thing I felt it captured was specifically to do with sampling.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
Any Deleuze experts can correct me on this, but the understanding I took is that with a major, or royal, science, you construct a system of universal rules and apply those to every context. This is the dominant mode of scientific inquiry that our society is built on. The idea of a minor science is that you derive a system of knowledge that is expedient for that moment, without worrying about whether it can be consistently applied across different contexts. If you do that, you end up with different results that can be quite powerful.
There’s something in there about the relationship between centralized and decentralized power structures, and something about a deep suspicion of the state. But, to me, this was about sampling. When I worked with those Scott Walker tracks, I was trying to find certain logics to work with, and to extract something interesting from them or to transform them in an interesting way. At that point, I was being guided by the material in a given moment. My relationship to sampling has changed a lot over the years. It was really central to how I worked for a long time, but over the years, it’s become less important. Now, I’m more interested in generating my own material.
With Absent Friends Vol. II, there’s all sorts of names I hear doing something similar: that reckoning with, and reframing of, histories. I think of the Miles Davis and Oneohtrix Point Never samples on there—names that took existing idioms and said, “What happens if I turn this 90 degrees?”
Minor Science: Some of the most influential music of the past couple of decades engages with the historiography of music, transforming it into something that tells us something about our culture. Oneohtrix Point Never is a great example. When he first emerged, the dominant analysis of his material was this idea of reclaiming a lost future: trying to find routes out of a cultural impasse by going back to the past and using that to open pathways that we didn’t go down. These days, I’m not really interested in having such an explicit dialogue with the history of recorded music. It’s a kind of archivist mode that can be common in electronic music. It’s baked into the tools: as soon as sampling becomes broadly accessible, you have people who think, “I can have an interesting conversation with the past by sampling it.” You have that in hip-hop, in techno, in house, in all kinds of music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
Inasmuch as I take influence from music from the past, which is sometimes quite a lot, I’m less interested in sampling it than I am in trying to do new things that are inspired by the processes, attitudes, or aesthetics that went into it. When you sample an artist, you end up placing the artists you sample into a different category from yourself. You’re saying, “This recording is a part of the canon,” and you’re just responding to it. Nothing can be added. You can only comment on what’s already there.
Tons of interesting art has been made that way; I’m not saying that’s an invalid approach. But these days, I’m much more interested in something else. Take Miles Davis—those incredible albums he made in the ‘70s, these uncategorizable fusion-y and oceanic long-form compositions. Rather than saying, “I’m going to sample that, and I’m going to find something in its grain,” I’m thinking, “What was he thinking at the time? How did they record this? What frames did they put around their creativity?” I’m trying to think about these people as musicians in the way that I’m a musician. Of course, I’m not on Miles Davis’s level in terms of the scale of artistic contribution, but I’d rather get inspired by people like that than look at them as an archivist would.
In dance music, people sometimes obsess over the sound of particular eras in particular places, to the extent that they get the same equipment and try to reproduce that music—or, indeed, they sample the music and frame it in a way that shows that admiration. For me, that places the music on a pedestal; “whatever we do now could never attain these heights.” Some great music can be made that way, but it’s a bit of a sad indictment of creative self-confidence if that’s the only way we can relate now. You can look at what producers do and get inspired by it, and even try to emulate or sample the sound, but combine it with things that make sense now rather than getting lost in the past.
In that context, talk to me about making Linkin Park flips.
Minor Science: It’s interesting to place that in conversation with bootleg culture. To me, one of the defining aspects of bootleg culture in club music is that it’s fundamentally disrespectful, even though it comes from a love for the source material. That’s certainly the case for me: it’s not ironic. It comes from a place of genuine love for the things I’m flipping and for the way I’m doing it. Nonetheless, the primary goal is to elicit some kind of response in a club, and not so much to have a respectful and thoughtful dialog with some aspects of the past or engagement with the canon.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
There’s a lot of heated discussion about edits at the moment. A lot of the criticism hinges on a sense that there’s a lack of respect for forebears, or a lack of care about history, with the focus instead being solely on cheap thrills. But that’s precisely what’s productive about it: people aren’t overly concerned with being in conversation with the past. Paying your dues is important and necessary, and I’m not dismissing that idea out of hand. But a good bootleg has the feeling of, “I can’t believe you did that.” It would be a shame if that was lost.
Can you unpack your use of “disrespectful” there?
Minor Science: I guess I used it provocatively. It might be more accurate to say that respect is not the primary consideration: if a few feathers are ruffled, but the tune bangs, maybe that’s okay. This has to be held in conversation with the growing awareness about the need to respect the roots of dance-music culture, and specifically the contributions of people of color, and especially queer scenes, and especially in the States. To me, these are almost two different things. They are in close conversation, but they’re somewhat separate. One is an aesthetic argument, and the other is structural.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
The structural question is: how is it that a Black producer from Detroit who pioneered something in the ’80s-’90s, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, can’t pay their rent? This is criminal. We need to recognize the contributions of people who are important to this culture so they can receive even the minimum level of respect for the things they’ve done.
The other question is a more abstract one: what can, say, young people do in dance-music culture that we consider to be in line with the canon? What things do we think are cheap, nasty tricks that make it seem like you’re “ruining the scene”? These things don’t map onto each other neatly.
It’s also the case that a lot of younger producers of color, and queer producers, are very involved in edit culture. They’ll do things that older, often white, and often European, self-styled arbiters of the dance-music scene would consider disrespectful. I think it’s important to hold those thoughts in your head simultaneously.
You’re making me think of east-coast club or footwork records—hyper-specific microscenes that have birthed entire universes. So many of these styles are built upon sampling, upon rubbernecking—upon flipping, I don’t know, “The Bells.”
Minor Science: There’s always a question of power. A scene coming out of a relatively disadvantaged community sampling a chart-pop record is very different from the inverse: say, a successful middle-class European producer sampling a classic record made by a working-class Black American producer. I’m not saying the second one should never be allowed, but you have to consider the dynamics. The question of respect is different depending on who’s doing it. If you’re in a position of relative social, cultural, and economic power, you have more responsibility to consider the implications of your artistic practice. You have to think about how it might be treading on toes and happening at the expense of people who don’t have the same opportunities.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
At the same time, boiling it down to a set of rules, and policing a scene according to those rules, is a way to kill creativity. There has to be an extent to which people are infringing upon perceived rules and doing things for aesthetic pleasure. Different people have different levels of responsibility to consider. Jeff Mills has undoubtedly faced incredible racism and obstacles in his career, and he certainly could be more celebrated than he is. But, nonetheless, there’s something about the ubiquity of “The Bells”; anyone could probably bootleg it without it feeling disrespectful.
Is that relationship between sampling and power part of why you’ve moved away from it in your work?
Minor Science: I would say so. I don’t think the ethical consideration comes before the creative decisions. But internalizing some of these ideas about what sampling is really about has made me less enthusiastic about the idea. I used to look for samples that conveyed a certain kind of authenticity. Now, I’m more likely to interrogate why I think that is, if it’s really true, and question what’s going on behind that assumption.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
In the past few years, you’ve leaned into what you’ve called “dumb club music.” This ties back to your work as STRIPE N CO, as well as your ties to Bang Face. Why lean into hardcore now?
Minor Science: I think the seed of it was always there. I’ve been attending Bang Face since the late 2000s. For a long time, I struggled to understand the link between the music that I would enjoy there and things that I would make, play, or enjoy in other spaces—for a long time, there was very little cultural crosstalk between those worlds. But there has been a move, in the last few years, towards a broader reassessment of a lot of music that was previously considered too gauche, brash, or heavy to be acceptable in the broader non-mainstream club industry, that centered around house, techno and related styles.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
So I think that’s been a tectonic shift: that music has become more of a part of the conversation. I DJ’d at Bang Face in 2020, and it was revelatory. It was the first time I performed there, and it was the last rave I went to before the pandemic—it was the weekend before lockdowns in Europe. In trying to work out what to play there, I had to find music that split the difference between those two worlds, or at least music that did the Bang Face thing in a way that made sense to me with other stuff I’d done. I was helped in that by tons of other artists who were already doing interesting things at that time. I often namecheck SHERELLE; the way she was mixing things at 160 BPM and connecting threads between all sorts of genres was really inspiring. Putting that set together was a watershed moment for me.
I use “dumb” with some level of irony and/or self-awareness that I can’t fully articulate, but I’m not trying to be snobby. I had a running joke with a friend about the idea that clubs should have both a decibel meter and an IQ meter. If the IQ reading gets too high, the soundsystem should shut off. There’s a fundamental truth to dance music: it’s most effective when it connects with you on a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. In the value system of the contemporary club scene, that can be obscured, because we’ve inherited a set of values about artistry, connoisseurship, and tastefulness. That can lead us to think that flashy, clever, and articulate music is somehow more valuable. But we can’t get away from the fact that, on the dancefloor, you have a visceral—almost pre-linguistic—response, and that dictates the value of the experience. Afterwards, you might be able to rationalize it, or you might not, but that’s secondary. In that sense, dance music is fundamentally dumb. That could mean “stupid,” but it also could mean that it doesn’t speak; it engages with the pre-linguistic part of our brain.
There’s a change to the kinds of dance music I’ve been into, making, and playing: faster, harder, and sillier, towards bootlegs and edits. But there’s also a broader development of my sense of what’s valuable about club music, towards prizing the unintellictualizable aspects of the experience rather than worrying about the trappings that get put around the music afterwards.
You’ve been a bit coy about this in the past, so I understand if you don’t want to dig into this. Did STRIPE N CO emerge out of an effort to create space for another kind of music without confusing what “Minor Science” is about?
Minor Science: I’m not coy about it. I’ve enjoyed constructing an elaborate joke online that STRIPE N CO isn’t me, and I hate the music. But I’m not invested enough in that to maintain the secret. STRIPE N CO is pretty much just me. My partner was involved in some early tracks; she did vocals and some production. From there, though, I ran with it, and it’s been just me for the last few years.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
It was a space to have fun exploring without worrying about how it might be received, or about how it might fit into a somewhat fixed sense of my musical identity. I think a lot of people still don’t know that it’s me. For people that do, those worlds have sufficiently converged now that most people don’t mind. But, sometimes you get the sense that people are a bit bemused. I think there was some value in maintaining that separation.
It’s something I’d recommend as a creative strategy for anybody who makes art and feels blocked: if you take off your identity, like it’s a costume, all kinds of creative decisions open up. Before, you might have said, “That’s not me; I don’t do that.” I found it to be an incredibly fruitful creative experience, even aside from the project’s specific aesthetic coordinates. It’s fed into the Minor Science tracks in a very productive way: the record that came out earlier this year, “Workahol / Casheine,” is a direct result of having started the STRIPE stuff, learning new techniques and approaches, and feeding that back into my work.
How do your approaches to club music and listening music speak to each other?
Minor Science: I’ve never been able to control where my creativity goes, and when I’ve tried to control it, I’ve tended to get stuck. So I’ve learned to indulge it; it’s sometimes a quite violent series of U-turns and swings. So on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis, I’ll jump between contrasting obsessions. One week, I’ll be doing a remix for someone in a way that’s consistent with the Minor Science stuff that I’ve put out. The next week—I’m drawing on recent experience here—I’ll get obsessed with digging hard house from the ’90s and ’00s. There was a week where I discovered The Necks and dug through their whole discography. These transitions can be quite jarring, and there’s no obvious link. Sometimes I wish I could do one consistent thing where everything made sense, but this is how my brain works, so I’m somewhat stuck with it.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Minor Science: I don’t know. Time is tight for me these days, and finding time for music is tough. When I have a record out, or I’m performing a bit more, that takes up the time I would otherwise use in the studio. It’s been a somewhat fitful year in terms of music-making, which can be frustrating, because that’s the main reason I do all this stuff. Performing is really nice, of course, but the main thing I always want to be doing is making music.