Interview with Deskhop
So who exactly is deskhop? Picture? Age? Name? Care to disclose any info?
My name is Ian Wells. I’m 20 and a junior at Cornell University.
How did you get into mashups and how long have you been doing it?
I started messing around with digital production in high school. A couple friends and I would record guitar into the mic that came with the computer, then I’d sequence it on a very basic audio editor. It was really just us, the bad mic, and the bad audio editor. This lack of material to work with kind of forced me to find what I needed in other songs – to fill out the mix with any little snippets I could isolate from old familiar tracks. We were too self-conscious to sing, so I started laying acapellas over our instrumentals – I mean literally laying them over and trying to match the peaks and valleys. It was ugly. When the guitar player wasn’t there, all I had were his recordings and my samples. If there wasn’t enough material to be considered a ‘song,’ I would just chop it up and rearrange it to mimic the structure of a standard rock track, with an intro, verse, chorus, etc. This took forever on the program I was using at the time. But that’s pretty much how I first got into sample-based music.
How did you get the name Deskhop?
No idea.
Software? Hardware?
I started with Audacity, then Cubase. Now it’s Ableton Live. In the past, I’ve used a microKorg and Kaoss pad too.
What inspires you? What kind of music do you like? Favorite artists?
The music I’m inspired by only sometimes makes it into my tracks. The inspiration is usually more stylistic than, like, ‘I want to sample this.’ And it doesn’t always come from music that I like, or music I would normally sit down and listen to. Any weird drum break or build up can be inspiring, even if it’s in an awful song. Inversely, while my favorite artist is Conor Oberst (don’t tell anyone), I try to keep the amount of Bright Eyes samples to a minimum for obvious reasons. Well, I don’t know. I guess we could just have really depressing shows – everyone moping around feeling sorry for themselves. That could be fun.
Are the instrumentals of your mashups other songs or is some of it beats you’ve made yourself?
Almost all of the tonal stuff I use is from other songs, but I arrange my own percussion parts. This is a really hard question, though. I guess it depends on what we are going to consider a piece of ‘sampled music.’ If someone samples a fifth of a second clip from one of the cowbell hits at the beginning of “Working for the Weekend,” processes it, and then arranges it on the upbeat of a drum loop, is that a sampled beat? What if the kick is also sampled? I try to find everything I want in other songs, even if the clips I sample are very small, so that the final product becomes more of an audible collage. And this just complicates things. So I can’t say whether the music I arrange is mine or theirs. Ownership comes in degrees now.
What is playing live like? Do you prefer it?
No it’s awful. Just kidding. Nothing beats a live show, if the crowd is feeling it. But obviously it’s very different than sitting down and editing. I trigger all my loops on the spot, in Ableton, so the live sound is definitely less complex than what I release, and more prone to breaking down. Sometimes I mess up, or someone steps on a cord, and the show disintegrates (my laptop got drenched by supersoaker misfires at a show at Washington University in St. Louis). But that’s part of the atmosphere. It’s not a polished performance; it’s a party. We’re all pulling something out of nothing. We pretend I’m a musician, and the crowd pretends they are the audience.
How much time do you spend on your music?
Making a track takes weeks or months, or longer. I work very slowly. I’m always going back and changing what I’ve made, somewhat compulsively, so each track is an ongoing process. It’s hard to just let one go and call it done. Some days I spend more time deleting what I’ve made than arranging new material. I make so much shitty music that the hardest part is often knowing what to delete. It sort of presents a problem. Here’s this genre of music that celebrates excess, in both content and form, and yet you still have to present something coherent. You can definitely feel that tension between minimalism and excess when creating this stuff.
What are you doing in your free time?
During the school year, making music is my free time. Or at least it should be – sometimes it takes over and I put off studying.
What is your view on the legality of mashups? Do you consider yourself and activist for the movement, or do you prefer not to deal with those kinds of things (just in it for the music)?
No, I’m not an activist. It’s weird, I probably should be concerned with legality issues, seeing as it sort of determines my ability to keep releasing music. But I’m too preoccupied making music to care. Some of the ideas underwriting the legal stuff are very interesting though. I think the consequences of debates over these ideas – of digitalness, of ownership in the digital age, and sampling – are larger than just mashup music… larger than the legality of some noname’s music like myself. I mean, what’s going on with sampling – and this isn’t a new thing at all, but it’s proliferating like crazy now – is transforming our aesthetic experience on the whole. That sounds melodramatic but I think it’s true. Listening to a good mashup …you don’t just hear the song, you experience yourself hearing the song, hearing the song in the moment, and, simultaneously, being conscious of yourself having heard it in the past. This overlap or excess or whatever it is can be overwhelming sometimes – and I think it should be. It shouldn’t be easy listening or background music. Have you ever heard mashup music playing quietly in the background? It’s awful. The whole effect is lost unless you’re in the moment listening to it. It should overwhelm the listener. I want people to cry after hearing my songs. Or have to turn off their speakers. I haven’t heard of this happening yet, but I’m working on it for the next album.
Do you like listening to other people’s mashups or do you just like making them?
Every once and awhile I’ll throw on Secret Diary or Unstoppable for a laugh. That early stuff is amazing in my opinion – almost satirical. In general though I don’t listen to much – it’s hard enough hearing my own all day while making it.
Favorite song you have made?
Sex in D Minor. It’s pretty bad, but that’s kind of why I like it. It was probably the first full mashup I made, using Audacity. Two friends and I handed it in as our final project for a class senior year of high school. It’s unclear how that track had anything to do with the class. But we somehow passed. My friend Tip did some synth lines and helped me match pitches. We also recorded my other friend Armen’s drums for a couple fills.
Tips for aspiring mashup artists? Or tips on how to get started?
Hmm…I don’t know. I’m still in the early stages, learning a lot every time I work on tracks or practice for live shows. But I think with any digital music production, starting with a very simple editing program forces you to get your hands dirty, to get comfortable with the actual waveforms, and to see what happens when you manipulate them.
Plans for the future? Any goals? What can we look forward to?
I plan on releasing my second full-length album in the late fall or early winter. I’m pretty deep into it already. It’s going to be professionally mastered, so that’s exciting. Once the post-production stuff is set in stone, I will put up a release date online. Let’s see… I’m going back to Washington University in St. Louis in two weeks to play their fall concert, with Method Man & Redman and Passion Pit. I have some more college shows lined up for the fall, so hopefully I can take time away from school and make it out for those as well. In terms of the more distant future, I think it would be great if, after the second album drops, I could set up a larger-scale college tour for next fall and spring.
Favorite pizza topping, candy, color?
Sausage/onion, Crest Pro-Health, either dark grey or light grey – it’s a toss up.
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