Lyeform
London - Sep 14th 2024
Lyeform at Barbican Center
Photo Georgina Cook
Polo : Hi Ben, welcome to the first FT interview. You're releasing an awaited 5 tracks EP on French Tabloïd this friday. First of all, where are you from ? Where are you living now ?
Lyeform : Hey Polo! Well I was born in Toronto but I grew up in suburban SW London in a place called Worcester Park. I have been living in East London mostly the past decade but moved back out to the SW Suburbs recently.
Polo : When did you start making music and why ?
Lyeform : like most people of my generation I started on music 2000 on the Playstation. Making hip hop beats mostly. I moved onto fruity loops around the mid 2000s and then discovered Ableton in 2010, which was really when I started to spend serious time writing music. I was massively into dubstep and grime and just basically tried to make the type of tunes I really liked from those scenes and just so I could listen them in my car and imagine they were being played on pirate radio.
Polo : What are your influences ?
Lyeform : Originally just kind of obvious hip hop, dubstep and grime really. Jungle too but more inspiration than influence.
I think I then fell into the trap of spending so much time focused on music that my interests went a lot more into sound design and digging for stuff outside of the 'norm' which is when I started adding cinematic influences and experimental stuff into my music.
I also think around 2012 I was really influenced by the kind of fall out of dubstep and how the splintering of that scene meant there was a place for doing something that didn't quite fit into anywhere. I made thousands of tracks around 2012-14 which kind of helped me find what I wanted to make. Not sure I'd be releasing music now without that whole 130 sound from Keysound etc at that time. Which is the label I ended up releasing on mostly a few years after.
Polo : What gear did you start with ? What gear do you use now ?
Lyeform : When I started really focusing on music I was purely soft synths, samples and Ableton for about 5 years. I've slowly started to move into hardware in the past decade. I write mostly on a prophet rev2, a small eurorack system, and digitakt, with bits of other synths like my novation bass station, minologue, volcas and little drum machines. I also use pedals and cheap behringer stuff to just play with. I find music production gear is mostly about what inspires you to play and get in flow rather than what sounds necessarily 'good', hardware is just a luxury to play with if I'm honest. I've found some of my best riffs or drum programming etc come from complete accidents playing around. Like I accidently dropped a synth midi I had played in with my rev2 onto a drum channel in Ableton and after some tweaks it became one of the drum loops on the EP (won't say which lol).
Polo : Tell me about Neon Belly, your EP coming out this friday on French Tabloïd. What's the story behind it ?
Lyeform : Never planned to write this as an EP. I was just writing tunes since covid for myself, sending out dubs to people I knew and liked to enjoy if they got onto the radio or played out. I've had about 15 emails/DMS about Neon Belly in particular (almost entirely from the Ben UFO rinse show with Four Tet a few years ago which got a fair bit of coverage). So I thought it might make a good release. The rest of the EP kind of made sense based on tunes that had made it on radio and kind of just 'worked'. Pretty happy with it tbh! My girlfriend says it's the best thing I've done in years, so I'm pleased with the early feedback.
Polo : What music or tunes are you into right now ?
Lyeform : I am trying to get as out of the box as possible just to enjoy the process of being playful and enjoying writing. Shaping sounds into actual tracks that make sense as pieces of music can get a bit boring if that's the entire production process. So the music I'm making is kind of whatever comes out of that process! Which means quite an eclectic output the past few years. I've made lots of music that falls into ambient tunes, jungle/dnb, techno, garage, and the kind of 'idm' genre that I guess I get put into (but is a shit genre name).
Polo : Last question, what are your projects ?
Lyeform : I mostly keep away from thinking of my music as projects. It would make me release more consistently I guess. But as music is my hobby rather than my job so I enjoy the casual nature of writing lots of music just because I enjoy it. That being said, the fun like Neon Belly to later package up that output into a project is a lot of fun. I've recently been involved in some VAs such as the one on FT. I've also been writing music with Kellen 303 for the past 6 or 7 years which we have been writing under Lets Be Assassins (LBA) which really stems from our shared love of science fiction and horror film soundtracks, and our own take on them. But similarly we have been writing music without any formal plan to release till something really makes sense and falls into place organically.
Polo : Thank you for playing the game for the first FT interview.
Lyeform : Thanks for the interview and hope I didn't waffle on too much! I'm excited about my first EP with French Tabloïd!
'Neon Belly' is out now on French Tabloïd.
Stream the EP here.