A while ago we introduced you all to the Amercian avant-garde electonica musician Huunter. His second album The Ultraviolet Catastrophe caught our ear here at BnB headquarters and hopefully yours as well.
Lloyd Bourne, as Huunter is known to friends and relatives, released his debut album Shanith back in 2008. Earlier this year he released his second album The Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This second album is an exploration into avant-garde/classical music and scored a massive 8.8/10 rating here on BnB. Curious about who was behind this Brian Eno-esque album we decided to go for a chat with the man behind Huunter.
Hey Huunter, how is life treating you lately? It's been great. I just moved to NYC and ever since I got over the initial culture shock of moving it has been a blast. I am originally from Jackson, Mississippi so going from a city like that to NYC was pretty crazy. But it has be an awesome ride. There are so many opportunities and things going on. I have my first show next month and I hope to keep going from there.
Can you tell us something about yourself? What do you do and how does music fit in? Are you full-time working on music? Haha I wish, that's kind of my goal, to be basically creative professionally. Whether its animating music videos or writing music I just want to have the time to pursue my creativity full time. I moved to NYC in hopes that something like that can be achieved. Right now I just have a job to make money and I write music in my spare time. I'm just going to keep promoting my music with live shows and other things and see where that takes me.
You create a blend of classical compositions and 4/4 dance music. What inspired you to do this unique combination? I had been into "classical music" for a while. I put the quotations around that because I'm not too big on classical musicians or classical music. What I do like are the sounds that orchestras and classical instruments make so I guess in a way that's classical music. The artist that got me into classical music was Rob Dougan. He combines classical orchestrations, trip hop beats, and bluesy vocals. You might recognize his music from the Matrix trilogy. Anyway, his record Furious Angels kind of opened my eyes to the potential classical music has when its combined with other genres.
I emphasize the combination of classical music and other genres because I think that kind of removes classical music from all of its academic pretensions. My first album, Shantih, had classical instrumentation and minimalist electronic drums. During the last month of mixing I went to Lollapalooza 2008 with my brother. I went mainly for Bloc Party and Radiohead, both of which were the first day so for the rest of the festival I just kind of wandered around listening to various bands. That was when I ran into Booka Shade. That was my first experience with dance music and I was totally blown away by the crowd's reaction. I decided right then and there that I wanted to write a dance album with classical music.
How does it work? I mean, how do you create your music, how does the combination of classical instruments and dance music come together? To be honest I had a bit of a laugh when I read your site's review of my album. The reviewer said he thought I had this awesome studio where I made my album. The assumption was really flattering and I am glad he thought my album sounded like that but it couldn't be further from the truth. All I have is a laptop haha! The classical instruments come from a sample library called "East West Quantum Leap". Basically you choose what kind of playing style per instrument i.e. legato, vibrato, staccato ect. and then play with those sounds on your keyboard. Pretty much all the other sounds came from Logic Pro.
The way I approach the writing is I usually start out with a drum beat and then I choose a particular playing style of a violin or cello. In the beginning stages I'm not too critical and I don't do any editing. I just write basically a phrase on top of a drum beat and then I try to compliment it with a couple more layers. After I have about 10 or so of these phrases I go and choose what I think is the most promising and then I write more based off of that initial phrase. I made that sound kind of easy but it totally wasn't, most of the songs took me about 6 months to write. The album was a pretty huge mess up until I wrote The Entanglement, that was the song that kind of made all the others make sense.
After it was finished I went back and pretty much rewrote the other three from the ground up. I think I'll end this part of the interview with a quote from U2's Bono "Making records is like making hot dogs. You'll probably enjoy them more if you don't see how it's done."
Some will argue that the way you create your music is nowhere near the way classical music was or is made...How would you prove them wrong? I wouldn't, can't and really don't want to. Although I think a lot of music professors would argue with me about this I think I have the same problem with classical music as I do with modern dance music. During the writing process I was listening to a lot of Tiesto and Dash Berlin just so I could kind of understand how dance music worked. By the time I got around to mixing I started hating everything about the way the genre was mixed.
Everything is so perfect and boring! It's too perfect, it sounds like computers made those songs not humans. So back to your original question, I can't stand how much thought goes into classical music. I think it leaves the music kind of plastic, emotionless and in a certain sense perfect. So although its two extremes, classical music and modern dance music I think the lack of humanity is really terrible.
I wanted to introduce imperfection to my music, so that's why I mixed and got it professionally mastered with emulated vintage compressors and EQ's. I wanted to put some humanity and imperfection back in my music. Since I really didn't decide to go down that path until the mixing phase I don't really feel like I was able to achieve my goal of imperfection. I'm leaving a lot of room on my next record for human involvement and imperfection.
Do you like the classical composers as well? I'm talking Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, or do you like modern music more? I am not the biggest fan of classical music. There are some great modern composers that I enjoy like Penderecki and John Cage but thats about it. Also, ironically, not really a fan of electronic music. I really love rock music, like Dredg, U2, Mew, Colour Revolt, and bands like that. I have always been a rock fan and I love going to rock shows. My dad is a huge U2 fan and he has taken me to a couple of their shows. I also was brought up listening to Pop, Zooropa, and Achtung Baby in his car which was a huge influence to me.
Do you think classical music is still relevant in todays music? Not really. Not if it stays as pretentious as it is now. It's not really the music but the people that make it so bad. That's why I love Rob Dougan he took classical music, used it in a really interesting way and didn't do it pretentiously at all.
What equipment did you use to record the album? Any cool tech tips & tricks you can share? I really just used my laptop for all of the music. I hope that one day I can have a room devoted to music but until then I'll just be writing on my Mac. I guess my one little tip is, buy the PSP Vintage Warmer 2. It is the BEST compressor that I have ever used, it is on almost all of the individual tracks on my songs. Also here is another tip, don't write songs with 250 tracks...it's not fun to mix haha.
Are you planning on performing live? And if so, how will you transfer the human atmosphere of the album to the crowd in a live act? Any plans to work with real musicians? Thank you for that question, I'm glad you thought there was a real human side to the album! I am planning on playing here in NYC and around the north east. I have two string players who will be playing with me live and I am really excited about that. As I mentioned I wanted to put some humanity back in my music so I think it's going to be awesome having some of the orchestrations played live.
We would like to thank Lloyd for this time and make sure you check out his album and clip right below!
