Martyn (Interview)

Good morning.

It’s Friday so we’re listening to something more upbeat. Today we’re listening to Martyn, an electronic music producer from The Netherlands now based in Virginia. His latest album Through Lines came out earlier this month. It collects material recorded between 2005 and 2015, which was inspired by UK dubstep artists like Kode9 and Digital Mystikz (as he notes below). We’re also playing his debut LP, Great Lengths, which came out in 2009 and was our first powerful introduction to his inventive and genre-fusing production style. An interview with Martyn follows the streaming links.

Through Lines - Martyn (70m, some vocal samples)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

Great Lengths - Martyn (70m, some vocal samples)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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What's your earliest memory of music?

Not quite sure what would've been my earliest memory but my most prominent musical memory of my childhood was probably listening to my dad's vinyl collection. He was a soccer player and every other Sunday to get in the zone for the upcoming match he played a series of his favorite records. It was always a really eclectic mix of stuff ranging from soul/funk like Stevie Wonder, wavey / post punk bands like The Talking Heads (still one of my favorite bands to this day) or Roxy Music and also a lot of very unhip (Southern) rock like Little Feat, The Band.. and folk music, stuff like that. And he played them LOUD, very LOUD. I loved browsing the family record collection, checking out sleeve art and the notes on the back. At a super young age I started making my own tapes, recording songs from the radio, and I started buying my own records from the moment I got an allowance at 7 (!).

When did you start getting into electronic music?

There was never a sort of singular moment. I guess growing up in The Netherlands in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s, electronic music as a sound wasn't mainstream but you also didn't have to spend a lot of time finding it. It was already pretty established, even back then you had New Beat and very early House tracks in the Top 40 like “Sound of C” or Farley Jackmaster Funk. But I used to listen to a lot of hip-hop and punk rock (you guessed it, I also skated), then gradually got into indie bands and some industrial like Meat Beat Manifesto and Front 242. I got seriously into house/techno when I was at clubbing age – going to this small local after hours spot called Funki Bizniz that had a bunch of really great DJs playing a mix of Detroit/Chicago and Dutch and Belgian house music.

Tell us about some of the first music that you produced. What gear/software did you use, and what were some tricks/best practices that you learned early on?

The very earliest music I made was using an Amiga computer with Protracker. I haven't touched a Tracker in years, but it's interesting how the music making process feels more like “coding” than to anything remotely artistic. It's probably why I stuck with it since I had no formal music training. What I did learn was the ability to see structure in music, discern patterns and single out what individual instruments do in a larger piece. Much later, after I had already been DJing for several years I started collecting some studio gear and dabbled in production, but I only got serious about it after I was broke and had to sell most of the gear and was left with a simple PC and a cracked copy of Logic. To just have a super minimal setup definitely helped to get more creative and push myself to actually finish music rather than drown in the overabundance of options.

Who were the main influences on Great Lengths, your 2009 debut LP? We detect some percussive influences from Burial, dub, and classic Detroit techno.

I started off making mostly drum ‘n bass in the early ‘00s, but quickly found myself not being able to fit musical ideas onto a tempo that fast. Instead of simplifying those ideas, I slowed down the tempo of the music, and that's how a lot of the songs on Great Lengths as well as on Through Lines were born. This was mostly inspired by listening to Kode9 & Spaceape, Digital Mystikz first and foremost, as they really captured the vibe I loved from drum 'n bass and other bass music, but executed it at a slower pace. Burial I love as well, but more for the earthiness of his music and the collage style of putting sound together which reminds me of earlier IDM like The Orb and Future Sound of London.

Do you listen to music while doing busywork, like answering emails, etc.? If so, what are your go-to albums, artists, or stations?

It really depends on what I'm doing exactly. I do a jazz show on NTS Radio called The Darkest Light and for that I constantly go through my collection trying to find nice pieces to play. Not all jazz is “background friendly” but I do find myself listening to it a lot while doing “busywork.” I generally listen to mostly non-electronic music anyways. I think it keeps me fresher in the studio or in the DJ booth, or for my teaching/mentoring work where I listen to other people's music and provide suggestions on how to improve it. Besides jazz vinyl I listen to a lot of shows on NTS, the morning shows there are excellent especially Scratcha and Flo Dill's, and another fav is Raga Vibrations which is a Indian classical show. Another thing I love is old pirate radio recordings, especially from the early dubstep and drum 'n bass eras. There's a couple good Soundcloud accounts that upload tape rips, like Futurepastzine, Keep it Locked, and Hardscore.

With Through Lines, tell us about the process of mining your own personal archives, the experience of revisiting music composed by an earlier version of yourself, and the filtering you did to arrive at the final tracklist.

Even though I made some of the music almost 20 years ago, I've engaged with those tracks in several different ways since. First as a DJ playing the music in clubs, then as a live performer dissecting the tracks and turning them into live iterations. In the past few years I've also been mentoring other musicians and I often use my own music to illustrate creative decisionmaking. Not because I think the tracks are particularly good but because they are examples of how fluid the process often is. Some music is born in that ideal “flow state” :) while other tracks are the result of months, sometimes years of revisiting ideas, tinkering and identifying the things you were looking for. And for the Through Lines compilation I used the tracks as jumping off points for a series of essays about music making. By looking at the same work in four different ways it really made me appreciate my “old stuff,” doing something interesting (to me) and new with the material without feeling like you are reliving the past.

The essay you published in

First Floor

and the other writings that accompany Through Lines amount to artist participation in critical discourse, which seems to be on the rise (though it's not entirely new). What do you think about musicians participating in discourse about music, especially in light of the rise of social media and other platform shifts?

That's a great question. I think despite the whole “music media is dying” narrative, it is actually a great time for fresh perspectives in music writing. I feel like traditional writing about electronic music of the ‘90s and early ‘00s favored a pretty narrow historic retelling of the facts or tried to anchor new developments to old tropes. And since almost all those writers were part of the same demographic they missed out on a lot of interesting socio-cultural and musicological context. Over the last ten years however, the most interesting writing comes from people who weren't observers but were active participants in these musical movements, often musicians but also photographers, archivists, exposing connections the outside world wasn't aware of yet, lifting up unsung heroes or bringing their deeply personal experience guided by the music or its scene to the forefront. There are lots of great examples but I want to mention Emma Warren, Elijah, Dan Hancox, Joe Muggs in England and Dan Charnas, Marcus Moore and Hanif Abdurraqib stateside. A lot of their ideas and stories don't fit the clickbaity format of a music website or the traditional paper magazine, but longform newsletters, IG posts with pointy statements or questions, audio books on Bandcamp and pamphlets, even graphic novels can also be canvases for these writers.

As you listen to Through Lines, what influences do you recognize on the specific tracks on that album? Who are you indebted to the most?

I guess like the title of the compilation suggests, there's no starting point, no “ground zero,” or an artist that made a specific piece of music that kickstarted my or anyone's journey in music. Everything is part of a through line, a cultural tradition with certain principles that you can follow and endlessly expand upon in whichever direction you like. To me personally, the “bass continuum,” the black music strain that revolves around bass and movement (dancing) is the through line that connects all music from roots reggae via all these different genres like hip hop or drum 'n bass or dubstep and through different eras to where we are now.

Name an underrated musician from the past 50 years.

Dean Blunt

What are you working on next?

I'm constantly putting out new music on my label 3024. The next larger project is a series of three compilations featuring music by the producers on my mentoring program. We've done 5 (!) of these in the past couple years and they are a lot of fun. Besides that I will also be focusing on more writing – I've been working on a book project off and on over the last few years so I'm going to try and pick that up after the summer, as well as my newsletter on Substack called

Four Things

, which is a nice outlet for recommending things that inspire me. On the music front, putting out Through Lines and the accompanying essays are starting to feel like a slate that's being wiped clean so that will give me some room to write new music. I've been experimenting with sound design a lot in recent years but apart from some collabs and remixes I've not yet put those sounds to good use.

via Instagram