12 questions for MALARKI

MALARKI is a mainstay in the electronic music scene of the Bay Area. An eclectic producer with many musical faces, he centers his creative work around emotionally charged compositions that have a very scenic quality to them. His first release on Errorgrid, the aptly titled ‘X7e4’ which saw the light of day a few months into a worldwide pandemic, dealt with a lot of mental charges ranging from despair to turmoil, while the current EP ‘Consequence Of Tomorrow’ paints a more positive and almost traditional musical picture, while retaining the artist’s high energy experimental approach.
We asked him our 12 famous questions.

1. What drives you to create music? What do you seek to achieve with it?

Music, for me, is mostly about aesthetic creative exploration, a time to escape from the complexities of our day to day lives. In some sense it’s a time for both meditation and mental rest. There’s many elements of technical exploration and experimentation too, but the technical side serves the creative work. At times I’ll be intrigued by the design of a hard-to-find electronic instrument or a sound synthesis technique I’m reading about, and I’ll build something similar in Max to better wrap my head around how it works.

At other times, I quietly practice piano, bass, or guitar to take myself far away the technical side and just focus on the personal experience of interacting with an instrument. I find a lot of personal reward in creating something lasting and unique, which motivates most of my recorded work. When performing live, I leave things a bit more flexible, with room for improvisation; I’m more interested in taking the live audience on a journey that plays out over a longer period of time than a recorded track. I respond a lot to things happening in the world, particularly how we relate to nature and to changes happening in our culture. It’s subconscious in the moment of creation, but I almost always recognize where it came from after finishing a new track or live set.

2. How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard music before?

It’s an artistic expression of the complexity, order, chaos, and creative and destructive forces in our world. My aesthetic sensibility comes from making personal sense of how these relate and stand at odds to each other, while being honest and unforced in my interpretation. It’s very personal, at times complicated, and often ends up in a much more restless place that I expect it to while I’m working on it.

3. Which album do you wish you had made?

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Brian Eno and David Byrne). It’s well outside my style, but I find it endlessly fascinating, often timeless, and an album that is very honest about being itself. It’s not afraid to change directions rapidly and unexpectedly and often mixes experimentation with more conventional approaches to composition.

4. If music is a form of therapy, what is it healing in you?

Music keeps me centered. The rest of life often wants to pull me in different directions, and music is a way for me to channel anything that feels off balance in my experience into a more restive place. Particularly now, as the world and our culture are rapidly going through a number of changes, it’s a reliable constant in my day to day experience.

5. If you could use one image to represent the intention of your work and burn it into your audience’s heads, what would this image be?

There’s many, but here’s an example from some personal photography. It’s a very iconic location in the Sierra Nevada that’s easily recognized if seen from traditional points of view. But looking closely, there’s dramatic visual evidence of the many messy natural processes that were involved in creating this place that we most often think of as majestic and peaceful.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEkNktkhZcb/

6. What do you consider your best piece of work yet? And why?

I’m really happy with how Consequence of Tomorrow turned out, as a whole. It was started well before X7e4 and finished well after it, so it had much more time for exploration and refinement. It also benefited from the breaks in its production to create X7e4 and my Data Cult Audio set (0195), which allowed it to shift directions and evolve over time. Message Fault is, for me, a concise shorter form expression of the release as a whole.

Of other recent work, I find Telos fascinating. It was created in a few fast and short bursts over a few years, and it represents the idea of finding a fated place of peace that we hope to get too. It’s much about raw emotion and how it can evolve slowly. A lot of people respond to Catalyst. It’s a eurorack track that evolved from a piano arrangement, and was much more of a planned arrangement, where I worked it all out before anything was recorded.

7. What is your sentiment about the current music scene, and how is it helping with the state of the world?

I love the increased accessibility of music creation tools and how it’s leading to such a diverse range of musical styles. Music is a powerful tool for both artistic expression and community building, and it can be a very honest way to communicate ideas and emotions. I personally imagine that local, community-centric music will continue to grow in importance, both for physically local communities and for online communities.

8. How would you describe ERRORGRID in your own words? What is it to you?

Errorgrid to me is about artistic expression that’s honest and innovative. Everyone involved has a personal vision and style, and everyone’s work, to me, sounds very unique and distinctive. The music is honest and doesn’t hold back in being allowed to be itself.

9. When do you consider a piece of music finished and ready for others to hear? 

For me, it’s ready when the experience of listening to the piece feels like a journey that’s complete. Some pieces are more dynamic, changing energy levels dramatically. Others are more sustained and gradually evolve, but they all need to be a journey for me. I pay a lot of attention to finding interesting sound design and the right pace of change in a track’s arrangement. In mixing, I pay particular attention to having a sense of space, one that’s sometimes stable and sometimes more dynamic. Recently, I’ve been emphasizing the relationships among voices a lot, using a lot of call-and-response patterns. Getting those to work together is an import part of getting to “finished.”

10. How much importance do you put into your tools?

I try not to take them too seriously, but at the same time recognize how important some are. I often put some favorite gear away for months or even years, typically when I start to get repetitive with how I’m using it. I find regular change invigorating, and I often return to a piece of gear later with new ideas about how to use it. It all needs to serve a creative goal; I try very hard to avoid the temptation of collecting gear for its own sake.

11. What is the one piece of equipment you will never part with?

The Nord Modular G2 is one. I learned a lot about modular synthesis from the software editor when it first came out. The editor also has a really good balance of multi-level abstraction and lower-level technical capability that I find lets me work really fast while easily finding something unique. It’s also a lot of fun for live performance, since you can combine keyboard performance and complex sequenced voices without bringing much gear. A decent portion of my Eurorack system is set up to mimic things I often do when using the G2. Max is also a critical tool. Sometimes I use it as a self contained production tool. But it most regularly gets used in conjunction with other gear when I have an idea but nothing on hand that can express it. It’s been used somewhere on every release I have out.

12. What do you have in the works/ what is next for you?

I’ve started what will likely be my next Errorgrid release, and it’ll pick up where Consequence of Tomorrow leaves off. Right now I’m planning to explore different forms of arrangements on this one, and have been using quick abstract sketches to get these broad structural ideas down. Alongside this, I’ve started working on another modular-centric collection of tracks, which I’m working through very quickly. I’ve recognized that keeping some faster-paced work going while working on a longer term project brings a lot of fresh ideas in. There’s also a few standalone tracks done that’ll appear on collaborative releases over the course of the coming year.

‘Consequence Of Tomorrow’ is now out on Bandcamp.