Interview With Andrew Souter - Head Of Galbanum

Your website looks incredible and provides an immediate feeling for the sounds and products you create. Are visual design and musical design essentially just two different sides of the same coin to you?

The short answer is  yes, I do think of them generally as manifestations of the same underlying organizational principles.  I’m a bit of a philosopher I guess, not unlike Pythagoras, and I subscribe to ideas such as ideal proportions and the like.  Color, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and even melody mean roughly the same thing in one dimensional art such as music, as they do in two dimensional art such as still visual arts and graphic design.  In fact, they even translate quite well into three dimensions such as sculpture and motion pictures and animation.

I am benefited by two facts:  I have been extremely involved with U&I Software’s MetaSynth for over a decade, and I have done a good job of surrounding myself with people who are much more talented at the visual arts than myself from whom I have begged, borrowed, and stolen many secrets from.  However, outside of producing highly mathematically based images for MetaSynth use, and designing and implementing the original GUI for our 2Caudio Aether plugin,  and overseeing the Galbanum product artwork from mostly a QA level, visual arts and graphic design are more of a hobby for me at this point.  I really enjoy them, and find the work refreshing and inspiring, but there are people out there much better than me at visual art, and I am thankful to work with some of them.

Your CV mentions you're a “developer, mastering engineer, music producer, composer and artist“. Why did you decide to found Galbanum and add the duties (and joys) of a sound designer to that long list?

It was simply the natural evolution of duties (and joys) I was already performing.  I was involved with electronic music and scoring, and these fields are highly dependent on novel sound-design.  I am also generally a very obsessive person and like to do everything myself-to a fault sometimes-and I have a very explorative and curious soul which is always trying to figure things out and incessantly asking  “why?“ ad nauseum.  Thus, a very large part of my work was  already sound-design.   Furthermore, I am not a DJ and have no real desire to become one, so my artist revenues for electronic music are somewhat limited by this fact.  Sharing my work through commercial sound-design projects therefore seemed a logical decision.

One of the user-compliments on your site congratulates your products for “ jumpstarting the creative process“. Would that be a good description of what you're aiming for with Galbanum?

Yes, absolutely, and I think this is one of the best compliments I could receive.  Galbanum’s slogan is “Sonic Science Aural Allusion“.  “Sonic Science“ effectively represents technical excellence.  “Aural Allusion“ represents the oral tradition if you will, and is a reminder to keep the human element in focus at all times as well.  Music exists to help communicate emotions, and tell a story of some form.  Good sound-design will resonate with the given story one wishes to tell and ideally will function as an impetus to unlock it from within the storyteller and release it to the outside world.  It functions much like the way a certain scent can trigger deep memories in  a person, or almost like a guided meditation in which the musician is provided a rich environment of possibility to explore and play with and discover interesting and novel things within.

What do you start with when working on a lick, loop or a sound?

There is no formula.  Use any technique, method, or order that works.  Then, just for fun, do it backwards, sideways, and blindfolded as well.

Do you feel it is important to be a fan of the genres you're workin in? Do you draw inspiration and ideas from listening to records, going to the clubs etc? How important is the input of trusted artists for the finished product? How closely are you working with them?

I feel it is wise to at least be aware of your peers and what they are doing yes.  I’ve released artist works on Perfecto records some years ago, and recently did sound-design on the Sasha Inol2ver album, so certainly it is important to know what is happening for this type of work.  Fortunately for me, I really enjoy almost all of Sasha’s DJ and production work, and really admire his talents.  He was really a big inspiration to and influence on me in my younger years, so it was a honor working together.  The music industry, like most other creative fields, is a constant balance between masturbation and prostitution. You can go off in your own corner and be the perfect hedonist, doing exactly what brings you, yourself the most pleasure, and you can do it without concern for what is going on in the rest of the world. Alternatively, you can do exactly what the market expects and desires of you at the expense of your own vision and individuality. The ideal is a balance between the two. The ideal is to recognize the conditions which exist within the industry and work within and around these conditions to create something which is true to your vision, but is accessible to the largest group possible. In other words, if you go to Russia, speak Russian, not Chinese; but speak Russian artfully, beautifully, soulfully, and articulately, and push the boundaries of the language with your own unique message.

What does the process for producing loops look like?

A giant red and green hyper-cube full of Greek letters, math symbols, Lorenz attractors, jumper-cables, and sine waves.

I could imagine that one of the hardest parts in sound design is to keep your loops from turning into finished songs – where do you draw the line for yourself to leave enough space for users?

I first make myself a box or frame, and then I force myself to paint  in the lines.  So for Abstraction Sample Line products, I simply decided I was creating two measure loops.  That was the rule, and I did not break it.  Sometimes you must limit yourself to free yourself from paralysis by over-analysis which can easily occur in the world of infinite possibilities.  Of course there were many instances where I use my own commercial loop samples to start my own artist material, and admittedly sometimes the loop creation process gets derailed for a day or two by entering composition mode because my own loop product led me into artist mode where I begin to write full songs.  For commercial loop collections though, I stick  to my rules, as it is much more efficient this way.

What does the concept of “ found sound“ entail for you?

All the cool kids were meme-ing it so I went with it. I could have said Abstraction Volume 4 “Music Concrete“, but well, that is just old-fashioned, no longer in vogue, and well, French, isn’t it?  LOL.  But seriously, “found sound“ to me is simply the concept of making music out of anything and everything that produces sound and more specifically and purposefully concentrating on pushing the extremes of what you can get away with in making some form of musically meaningful organization out of what is effectively semi-chaotic, and atonal in the traditional sense, noise to begin with.

From your statements, I was under the impression that customization the most essential aspect of your products. Is that a correct perception? You're an independent company and are not necessarily under the gun of a creative marketing department (as with a company like Yamaha). In how far are “ commercial“ considerations nonetheless necessary a part of your decision process when it comes to your work?  

Well I’ve never had a real job, so for better or worse I don’t really know what it is like to have a boss dictating what I should do creatively.  I suppose the closest thing I can relate to in this regard is scoring work where 50 different people up the food chain must approve the final product. That can be, ah,  interesting at times, sure, so I can imagine. I do like working with other people though especially when I can build a synergy with them.  I guess it is the same with commercial considerations and customer expectations as well.   So yes, I first try to be aware of expectations.  Then I try exceed them by adding my own variation on a theme that is as unique as possible.  I’m not afraid to fail by trying to go too far though.  Life’s a journey and everything is a lesson.  Ultimately people are most impressed not when you give them exactly what they want as they envision it, but rather when you give them something that goes down this semi familiar path as they know it, but continues right past this point to reach four moves ahead in the chess game that they did not envision for themselves...  I don’t measure my self worth based on my financial success or failure, but I am not ashamed to strive to excel in business either.  Again the ideal is to find a way to be successful doing something that is true to your passion which at the same time gives something back to the larger community in some fashion.  If you can manage that, you have truly mastered the great game...