Written interview with Skinnerbox (Olaf Hilgenfeld and Iftah Gabbai) for FWD.DJ 2017

You guys really seem to be a fountain of creativity, often I run across your new music because I’m listening to my music on shuffle and go “man what’s this sweet and fresh tune?” and look to see it’s something by you… what would you site as your inspiration for electronic music and music generally? What got you into it and what inspires you to make sounds of the nature you do?

First of all, thank you for the flattering words! We both have been into electronic music for about 20 years now of which 14 are a common journey, regarding inspiration, its probably a lot of things such as emotions, technical ideas, music that we discovered throughout our tours in remote parts of the planet and even a loop that stays in our head after an intense weekend tour. It's safe to say that what got us into (apart of the obvious sonic possibilities and the fact that we love technology and music) it is the ability to orchestrate a whole bunch of sound without being depended on people. The machines just do what we tell them :)

Your knowledge of music and gear seems to be really deep at a technical level. Did you take classes/lessons or just spend billions of hours tweaking knobs? How do you thrive in the endless possibilities of modern electronic music (and your setup) and do you have any recommendations for people trying to wrap their head around the mind numbing possibilities?

We both have traditional / classical musical education, we don’t really feel confused by the endless possibilities of modern electronic music but this might be related to the fact that by now we really know what we want. our technical knowledge is mostly DIY tho and came from necessity - which is what we can recommend to people that are just getting into it and feeling confused; things tend to be easier to learn once you have a concrete need or cause!

What other artists/labels are you really enjoying right now? Who do you recommend people check out?

Lately we have been enjoying “Mytron & Ofofo” which brought out the super charming “Si Jambo“ EP on Multi Culti!

I know you guys have covered your studio setup in a number of other interviews but can you walk our listeners through it quickly?

Our studio is pretty modular, we use a bunch of analog synths and hardware samplers, a eurorack system, computer and an 8 track cassette recorder. the heart of the studio is a big patchbay and two identical mixing boards that allow us to interconnect and route everything to everything!

If you had to reduce your setup to 3 pieces of gear for all studio and live production over the next 5 years what would you choose and why?

The minimoog, because its the ultimate performance synth, elektron digitakt because its super intuitive and fun and a computer because its such a versatile instrument and basically do everything :)

Have you found any ways to make Ableton effects and routing more modular, short of just piping a modular synth into Ableton? What are some great Ableton hacks you think people should know?

We actually found a lot of ways to do so! Here are two tutorials we’ve published:

https://youtu.be/_0IAjnmIEsE

https://youtu.be/pcE2w_C1CPM

You guys are legendary for your MaxMSP prowess. You have anything in the pipeline now that you are working on for release?

We do! but we cant say anything about this yet :)

Your live sets feel really “flow of consciousness” – a real feat for electronic music. What do you attribute to that and do you have any recommendations to other live artists who are looking to sound more spontaneous?

A lot of this flow is achieved by making sure that the technical side of things is properly tuned so we can feel free on stage and can concentrate on music making on the fly, also, limiting the setup is important because too much control is control loss. Another important point is realizing that while improvising there is no such thing as mistakes, and how morph “mistakes” into musical ideas - but that's just the tip of the iceberg and since this is such a huge topic for us we would love to refer you to a series of articles we wrote about how to play live electronic music on stage:

https://www.imusiciandigital.com/en/how-to-perform-your-electronic-music-live-an-introduction-by-skinnerbox/

Do you guys have any social/political perspectives that inform, on some level, the music you make and feeling you want to give people? Is that part of life important to you or something you try to avoid?

We totally do! We live in a super challenging world which is full of xenophobic, racist, bigot, sexist, queerophobic assholes. Unfortunately the electronic music scene is not untouched by this (kindly put). Avoiding this and claiming that its all about the party / music for the sake of music would be delusional and cowardly!

This live set is really energetic and vibrant. How and where was it recorded? Anything our listeners should know?

This set was recorded in an sunny autumn Sunday morning on the dancefloor of “ipse”, a super nice Berliner club, the listeners should know that we had a lot of fun playing it! :)

What projects, shows or releases do you guys have in the pipelines

On the music front we have an EP coming out on “Fantôme de Nuit” records and some remixes on darkroom dubs. We are just back from 2 weeks tour in Cameroon which was an epiphany, apart of playing shows we had the chance to work with some local musicians which were extremely talented, we did tons of recordings and we are currently editing and arranging, this will all be released in 2018. We are going to be busy touring Europe during the winter and we are going to tour south Africa for the first time in January 2018 as well, so we are pretty excited!

We are also going to continue our “TSSP” live stream series from the studio with some amazing guests so stay tuned!

https://www.facebook.com/myskinnerbox/

Tags: Ableton, Berlin, Live Sets, Max MSP, Skinnerbox