A few years ago, Steven Shade found himself alone in a hotel room when church bells started ringing outside. Inspired by the chimes, he sat down at his computer and tried to recreate them only using the digital tools at his disposal. The result can be heard at the start "Concreté Misery", the title track from the 31-year-old's debut album as Sevendeaths. But whereas bell tones are usually open and uplifting, they turn corroded and staticy in Shade's hands, as if filtered through an empty phone line. The droning pulses were an apt reflection of the Edinburgh producer's lonely mindstate at the time, as he was drifting from faceless UK town to faceless UK town as part of his job as a software developer.
Soon after those fateful bells, though, Shade's wife became pregnant with their daughter Isla and he decided to put the ominous ambient music he was making on hold—it didn't match his refreshed outlook as a new dad. Still, he couldn't shake those forceful waves of digital drones he created on his laptop. So he returned to them, trying to balance the endless darkness of bands like Sunn O))) with a twinkling positivity courtesy of chirping synth oscillations.
And that push and pull can be heard throughout Concreté Misery's six overwhelming tracks, which recall the distorted sounds of artists like Fennesz, Emeralds, and Tim Hecker, but with a surreally exacting touch. The wailing feedback of each guitar comes through with an unnatural clarity, probably due to the fact that the album's "guitars"—and every single other sound, for that matter—were largely built by Shade from the ground up using an array of computer software and hardware. The sculptures he's chosen for Concreté Misery's art—pictured above—transmit the music's spare, hand-crafted approach.
"The whole musique concrète movement was about making music from real instruments, which was the exact opposite of what I was doing," explains the producer, talking about the album's sly title. "I set myself some early ground rules with this project: I could only use synthetic sounds but I couldn't use any traditional beats or drum machines. So I played a MIDI guitar to make some of it, which is a bit silly since it would have been a lot easier with a real guitar, but I like the daftness of that. On a technical level, it's interesting to put these constraints around things."
This self-consciously limiting philosophy is akin to Jack White's—minus the Luddite tendencies and old-fashioned sense of analog authenticity. And it works wonders for Shade, who grew up as a grunge kid playing Nirvana covers before discovering the work of artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass and making his own electronic music in his free time. The admitted "geek" also played in a number of math-rock bands and is currently a member of the maximalist quartet American Men. Finally, though, Shade is learning to funnel his copious technical and musical chops in powerful ways with Sevendeaths. He can do it all, and now he knows he doesn't have to.
"When [my daughter] was really young, we were struggling to get her to sleep, and that's when our musical connection started... We ended up listening to these eight-hour-long YouTube videos of hair dryers or vacuum cleaners."
Pitchfork: What programs and equipment did you use to make this album?
SS: I built my own software arpeggiator where you can trigger it by using different elements. I'm quite keen on having random, computer-controlled sound and not having full control over them. It keeps it fresh—no two tracks will ever sound exactly the same. A lot of plugins offer you pseudo-analog type of sounds, but I tried to stay clear of that. I thought it was profound to build up my own thing for this album, and that's probably what gives it a different sound.
For example, "All Night Graves" has sounds from an arpeggio tool I'd built up and was triggering from this tool called the Tenori-On, which is good for making little minimalist sounds. I used it to trigger how long the notes would last, which results in these waves of octaves.
Pitchfork: Some musicians talk about today's music-making digital technology as a bad thing, but you seem to think the opposite.
SS: Well, certain technologies can make it very straightforward to make music, and the problem with using technology within music is it can offer too many options. You've got everything at your disposal when you're sitting at a computer: a string quartet, a jazz band, all these different drum sounds, beats, everything. It's all there. So it's useful to create some ground rules, which also makes the music more interesting.
Pitchfork: Have you played the Sevendeaths material for your daughter at all?
SS: She hears the slow process it took to get to the album—when I'm making music and she's listening to the same few seconds over and over, it's probably not very enjoyable. [laughs]
Pitchfork: This music could be a bit frightening to a child.
SS: Yeah, if I forced her to listen, that might be a little scary. She's into some drone music though. When she was really young, we were struggling to get her to sleep, and that's when our musical connection started. I would try and play really calming drone or chamber music, but even the small changes in that would wake her up. So we ended up listening to these eight-hour-long YouTube videos of hair dryers or vacuum cleaners. She now goes to bed listening to Stars of the Lid every single night. I don't know what possible effect that might have later on, but it's beautiful music.
Pitchfork: Do you think those vacuum cleaner sounds influenced this album?
SS: [laughs] Possibly.