Steam Engine Blues

‘I use so many different sounds that have been sampled so many previous times in Hip Hop. Those sounds have such a lineage to them you know, and using those sounds in my songs pays homage to the music I listened to growing up and to the beautiful world of Hip Hop. It was really interesting coming into ‘Sounding the Collection’ because it was the chance to do that from a completely different historical context, which I was now predisposed to learn about and use in the same manner.’

I was really drawn to the steam engine sample as a metaphor for how I perceive myself to continuously pursue my career. It inspired me to build the song around this motif of a steam engine constantly whirring. It's a really driving sound. That's all I was thinking about when I was making that song – what really drives me to keep going in spite of all these obstacles.

The industrial revolution was because of a steam engine. And I feel like we're going through a cultural revolution here in Sydney. The things we do now could be considered as the steam engine pushing everything forward. I was like, that'll be really cool to build the track around, because I think the steam engine itself signifies a lot of change: new developments, new ideas and new technology, which considering everything that's happening now in Sydney is becoming more relevant.

‘I used the Automaton for some type of percussion. I just heard it and I thought, ‘Oh this will sound really sick just being something that's constantly ticking through the beat’. Because the beat changes so much and the samples do so many different things I felt there needed to be something that grounded the entire song. I found out that's kind of the function [of the automaton]. It's keeping a consistent time. It serves its intended purpose.

The Atari made random little squeaky sounds but I found it really interesting to flip it. I brought out the harmonic frequencies, so it sounded like it had a note. I distorted it to make it louder and I ended up adding a tail to it. It kind of sounded like a vocal sample if you didn't know what it was. I treated it like that because I love when beats or songs have random little vocal shouts or little one-shots they use only a few times in the beat.

The sound [tuning fork] has a really long release to it and it's a really dull sound as well. This is what's used to tune instruments but the actual note itself was sort of de-tuned. So, I took it as a challenge to make something melodic out of that tuning fork sample and ended up turning it into the chords you hear in the first half of the song. To be able to take something as resonant and as sharp as a tuning fork and turn it into something really soft, really lush and really melodically pretty.

I'm such a bare necessities producer. It just has to make sense in the context of the song. Being presented with a sample library was like, ‘Oh okay, I actually don't have the free reign that I do normally’. Being constricted to only these sounds and having to figure out what my taste aligned with I think really helped me exercise a muscle in terms of ingenuity. Like, ’You've only got this much, what can you make out of this? What kind of story can you pull from these sounds?’ Seeing my ideas still drive underneath all that really affirmed me.

The samples are whatever you make of them. You can go into it and have an idea you already want to convey, or a story you already want to tell, and these samples can get you there. It's up to you how you interpret the use of them, how you want to stretch them. We live in such a time now where you can make a sound out of anything. You are just bound by your idea and your interpretation of whatever you think that sounds like.