Today we’re listening to Lusine, an American electronic musician from Texas. Jeff McIlwain got into electronic music growing up in Dallas, specifically techno through the local radio station 94.5 The Edge. He started making music in the ‘90s, after his friends got him into “Aphex Twin, Autechre, Orbital, stuff like that,” he said. Like those artists, he’s meticulous in his own composition. “I take a very long time,” he told us. “Sometimes something’s really flowing and I get it done in like two or three weeks, and that’s great, but I’m not one of these people who makes a track in three days.” His latest album, Melting Days, shows intense attention to texture, reflecting his interest in creating organic sounds. We’re also playing his 2004 album Serial Hodgepodge, which came early in his shift to making music “in the box.” A conversation with Jeff follows the streaming links.
Melting Days - Lusine (46m, some vocals on track 8)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal
Serial Hodgepodge - Lusine (55m, vocal notes on track 1)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal
What’s your earliest memory of music?
I always kind of go back to thinking about what I was listening to when I was five or six years old. I had the 45 of “Let My Love Open the Door,” which was maybe my first favorite song in the world. Maybe Sesame Street before that.
Did you later get into The Who?
No, I never really did. When I was in junior high, my sister got me into a combination of Led Zeppelin and Depeche Mode. I got heavy into Led Zeppelin for a while. Then as far as the classic rock stuff, Pink Floyd and a few others.
How’d you get into electronic music?
I grew up in Dallas, and Dallas in the early ‘90s was actually a pretty big techno city. We had this radio station that would play techno and breakbeat and stuff every weekend on Saturday nights. I started taping these broadcasts, and I would have mixtapes of all the Edge Club shows on 94.5 The Edge.
We had a big record shop in Dallas called Bill’s Records and Tapes. He just recently died, and they had a big writeup about his record store. It was kind of a big deal. They had a lot of electronic music back in ’92: Prodigy and Moby and Cybersonik, which was Richie Hawtin and a couple other guys. They all came on tour, and they all signed autographs over at Bill’s Records and Tapes. Dallas had somewhat of a scene, that’s how I got into it.
Do you still have those tapes?
I do. I’ve digitized three of them, but I have maybe four of them to go. One thing that’s a shame is that I was out one night when I was 18 or 19, and somebody broke into my car and stole a bunch of them. I had a lot more, but I still have a few, and they still play.
The lost Edge Tapes are floating around somewhere.
Yeah, they are. Although I think you can find old broadcasts of Edge Club on YouTube. A bunch of people like me put them on cassette tapes.
What were your first recordings like, and what did you use to make them?
My first recordings were trying to make beats, but more melodic I suppose. I didn’t start making music until the next year, when my friends got me into other stuff like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Orbital, stuff like that. I was starting to get into more melodic stuff. I had this Korg X3 workstation, and I had a drum machine called a RY-30. I would make songs using the workstation, a fairly limiting workstation but pretty cool for its time, and then syncing up the drums from the RY-30 with that.
Were those melodic techno?
I suppose you could call it that. I was using a lot of pianos and stuff. It was pretty rudimentary but you could call it melodic techno, sure.
Then your first couple albums – Steady State and Iron City – there’s not really a consistent style across those records. Maybe you could compare them to Aphex Twin in terms of the stylistic variation. There’s some ambient stuff, there’s some trip-hop stuff, and two-step comes into play to our ears. What was the composition process like for those? Did you make tracks within the file and pull the thread to assemble it bottoms-up, or something else?
Back then, I was still working with hardware more than software, which I moved forward with in the years after that. Honestly, software was a little more basic back then. I was making Pseudo Steady State back in like ’99, and Iron City I was making in like 2000 or 2001. I was probably messing around with FruityLoops back then, because I think it came out in ’98. I had a program called Software Audio Workshop which was like my DAW. But this was the pre-Ableton days. So I had a bunch of hardware. I had a hardware sampler, an analog synth, an effects unit, so I was coming up with basic loops with the workstation sequencer. Then I would record those loops to my computer, and then assemble the loops together in a DAW. But it wasn’t as malleable as it became later on. It was really assembling chunks rather than being able to form your tracks in a computer.
What sampler and synth models?
I had an E-mu ESI-32 sampler, it had I want to say 16MB of RAM. I had an ARP Odyssey that I got back in ’95, which was my baseline analog synth that I still have today. I was still using the Yamaha RY30, still using the Korg X3. I had a DigiTech TSR-12 effects processor. Probably a couple other things.
Was that the setup going into the Ghostly records? Or did your setup change going into those?
I went and played Winter Music Conference in 2003, and it was a sponsored show by M-Audio. M-Audio gave me a copy of Ableton, a very early copy of Ableton. FruityLoops was also coming on a little bit better. I was using Cubase as well. I could start doing things a little bit more “in the box” by the time I got to Serial Hodgepodge, but I was still using quite a bit of hardware at that point. I still use hardware today, I’m just talking about the formation of the tracks.
Compositionally, what changed with Hodgepodge?
I was able to be more meticulous in the box than I had been before. I could come up with full loops of music and not have to commit right away. I was able to think a bit more about where I wanted the track to go before making that commitment to record it in. That probably changed how I wrote music at the time. Also, I was able to do more tricky edits, for better and worse. I was still printing in the effects, but you could do it a lot more easily when you weren’t just dealing with hardware. I think that had a huge change on my sound, being able to manipulate audio in the box a little more easily. I had moved on from my very old DAW to, I think at that point, Cubase, for just the audio portion of it. And then I was probably using FruityLoops for the programming side of it.
Was Language Barrier your first ambient-focused project?
Yeah, a lot of my earlier tracks had ambient stuff in there, but I was working on a film score at the time, so I was in that headspace. I had all these ideas as I was working on the score for how I could turn those into ambient tracks, so it came out of that.
We’re interested in the difference between film score composition and personal music composition. How do you approach those two different kinds of projects?
With film scores, you’re really working off of what the director wants, which is a big difference. You’re not necessarily making music for you; you’re putting yourself into something that’s very much directed by the director. A lot of the film scores I’ve worked on were not traditional scores. We use some strings and some traditional stuff, but also they were heavily sample-based. Most of the scores I’ve worked on were that way. You have the director who’s basically sending you stuff and it has temp music. You’re trying to find a balance between the temp music that they send, which gives the scene a certain feel, and how you could do it in your style. A lot of the time it ends up sounding like you, and other times the director’s like, “I really like the temp music here,” so you have to push it to be closer to the temp music. It’s a different flow altogether, which I kind of like, because sometimes I like having other people tell me what they want, and it challenges me to push myself outside of what I usually do. So taking those ideas that I did at the time – this is for a movie called Snow Angels – I was thinking about what I did and how I could turn that into an album, which has its own challenge. When you’re doing your own stuff, that has its own challenge, which is that you don’t have a time limit, and nobody’s telling you what works and what doesn’t, so you can frustrate yourself working on something over and over. But at the same time, you’re free to do what you want.
With your own projects, do you share completed tracks or projects with people and ask for their opinions, or are you more like, this is what I think is good and I’m gonna put it out.
It’s definitely the latter. I don’t get people’s advice at all on my music. You’ll just confuse yourself. At least, that’s my opinion. One thing is I’m very hard on myself, so if I don’t absolutely love what I finished, then the track isn’t done. I know later on I’ll have issues with all of my tracks, so you basically make it so that you’re absolutely confident with everything you put out, which takes a long time. Everybody’s got an opinion. You’d have to weigh their tastes against your taste, and that would just complicate things I think.
How long do you give yourself to become certain that it’s ready?
You always want to step back from it and then come back to it. Usually, I know that a track isn’t done for most of the time I’m working on it. But sometimes I’ll be like, “Yeah this sounds great, but I don’t know if I’m going to like it in a couple days, so let me come back tomorrow and see what it sounds like.” That always helps: stepping away from it and then coming back and seeing what it sounds like. I’ll be honest, some of my tracks I’ve spent like four or five months working on. I take a very long time. Sometimes something’s really flowing and I get it done in like two or three weeks, and that’s great, but I’m not one of these people who makes a track in three days. That’s never really been me.
For Melting Days, one aspect that stuck out is the texture, which to borrow one critic’s term for it, is vaporous. It’s a soft static layer over the music – does that description resonate, and in any case where does that sound come from?
For a long time I’ve been really into organic sounds, trying to make it as earthy as I can. Sometimes the way I make music can sound sterile, and when I hear other music that’s super clean and almost sterile, I don’t really like it. I’m always trying to figure out a way to make things a little more organic, and sometimes it’s adding textures, and other times it’s finding samples that are already kind of dirty to begin with. Sometimes it’s bringing those textures out with effects and EQ and whatnot. It is a sound I try to go for.
What were some of the more obscure sample sources for this record?
Oh, god. I won’t go too far into this, but I like to buy really old records for like a dollar, and find really weird old samples. Sometimes these are instrumental tracks, like one of them is a Japanese koto recording that I really liked. You record it in and it has all the nastiness and texture of the vinyl from being that old, but I obscure it to a point where you absolutely cannot tell what it is. I tend to go back to those records to pull a weird loop here and there. Sometimes it’s just a single instrument playing one note but it has a lot of texture to it. It’s nicer than going to a synth playing a flute, to pull in a sample of a flute being played which has all kinds of weird crackles and stuff.
What do you do to samples like that to make them unrecognizable?
It’s usually integrated within a whole bunch of other stuff. Sometimes I’m cutting it in ways that you can’t even tell that it’s the instrument I picked. A lot of times it’s one sample among many that pops up. I have this huge library on my computer of samples I’ve recorded over the years, and I’ll just pull random ones in. A lot of times I don’t remember what the sample was that I used, but it just had a particular quality that fit that specific spot in the track.
Is a lot of your studio time spent listening to old one-dollar records?
No, I’ll go in there and do a session of recording a bunch of samples. And then that’s that. Then I have all that stuff on my computer. This is just one thing that I’ll do to find interesting sounds. These days, a lot of software programs have really interesting capabilities to make organic sounding stuff as well.
Which plugins?
I got really into knowing how to work on Current, made by a company called Minimal Audio. It’s a cool piece of software. A lot of the music they cater to is not in my wheelhouse, but you can do all the interesting organic modulations and stuff. They have a huge library of samples that you can pull in there, then you can bring in your own samples, and it’s a modern software program that combines all kinds of synthesis and sampling stuff. It’s a competitor with a lot of the popular “EDM” software, so it’s got all the tricky modulations and synthesis techniques. A lot of those I don’t necessarily use because my music doesn’t have those kinds of new techniques that the kids are using. But you can still do anything you want within it.
So you’re not hitting the dubstep growl drop.
No, I’m not. And I’m not dissing on that at all. A lot of times these software programs are sort of focused on that stuff. But I am interested in trying to figure out how I could use that for myself, like those kinds of sounds, like how can you pull something different out of that. Additive synthesis is the big thing. Sometimes I’m going back to additive techniques and seeing if there are ways I can do something interesting. I think Clark does some really cool stuff with those kinds of styles. But he makes it his own.
His recent albums have been amazing. What artists/albums were you listening to over the past year or two that informed what you did on Melting Days?
Oh, god. I did not generate a list that I can run off of. Sometimes I do have a list running of artists I’ve listened to. Sometimes I forget, and then I have to pull up stuff. Going back to Clark, I really liked that album he did, like that track “Dolgoch Tape” I really love off Sus Dog (2023). There’s this record, do you know Kelly Moran?
Her album Don’t Trust Mirrors I really liked. That one, I was on a train listening to that record, being like, “Wow, this has some really cool timbres, and is very musical.” A lot of the stuff that I’m pulling from is older stuff, like Susumu Yokota. Have you heard of the group Mountains?
Nope.
You should check that stuff out. It’s super beautiful. I need to probably reach out to them. It’s hard to find them – there’s more than one Mountains. One of their records was like a badly digitized thing, so if you listen to it on Apple Music, it has some glitches that aren’t on the original album. Somebody should probably reach out to them to get that fixed. You should check out their album Choral, which came out in 2009. It’s really good.
I like the precise honesty of Lusine in every of his answers!
✨🖤✨ a lovely read!