1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?
The pitch control on my modded Walkmans.. This lets me tune my tape loop drones and samples to other musicians and play the tape like a synth / pitched instrument. It’s hard to measure the exact range but i figure its approximately +/- 2 octaves.
2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?
This combines sampling with real time pitching, looping and FX.. most people here probably know all about it I’ve had nearly all the Kaoss pads in my musical kit at various times but in my opinion Korg hit perfection with this
device. Every rebuild or updated KP never got near- it’s so hands on it feels like a guitar or a synth It’s hard to find a fault but to be over picky, the external midi sync (which i never use) is not great.
3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?
I always travel light so its my Laptop. The act of travel I always find inspirational. the sense of motion and chaos all around is a crazy energy and i like to work in the midst of that. I’m generally doing video work (Davinci Resolve) or Ableton while in transit.
4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?
Granular synthesis -there are a few great plugins for this- i’d love a hardware version with real time input if possible.. i know there is a Mutable device out there but i don’t own one. perhaps ill get me one for Christmas I’d love if it was possible to emulate a Tapeloop in software.. I’ve tried (badly) coding something like this a few times and there is something approaching an emu on my website, but it’s so basic and doesn’t get near what you can do with actual tapes.
5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?
I once owned a Fender Rhodes.. When i bought it me and a buddy carried about 1km back to my house because we couldn’t get a taxi to stop.. it was so heavy! i sold it at a
time when i really needed cash.. it paid the rent that month. On buying.. no. if i don’t like something i’ll usually sell it on or gift it. I’m quite active in the second hand market.
6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?
Its 2 fold.. I started out in music playing guitar, recording into tape machines.. firstly boom boxes and standard tape machines (anything that would record basically) soon into this journey i needed to start dubbing so 4-tracks and eventually reel to reel machines. I still use this setup alot but nowadays the process is often in reverse.
7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?
A good workhorse hardware polyphonic synth with 2 or 3 oscillators and a great filter / LFO.. You can do so much with synthesis that you can’t do with most other instruments on their own.
8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that
you just can’t live without?
Again its the PWM modded tape players I use for live performances. Because the machines are so old and fragile and i can’t resist tweaking the mods they are often breaking down. that’s why i always have 2 in my rig so i can at least guarantee i’ll get a sound out of one of them.
9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?
I enjoy it when you can make a piece of kit “play itself” like the krell patch in modular world or when you get a synth to self oscillate or a guitar to feedback and you start playing, or more precisely trying to control the instrument.
Artist or Band name?
Marc Aubele
Genre?
Anti Pop
Selfie?
Where are you from?
I grew up in the cotswolds in the english countryside but spent time in Germany as a teenager before coming back to London to go to College. I’m half Irish, half German and i now live in a very rural area of Wexford which i adore. I genuinely feel at home in any of these 3 countries.
How did you get into music?
As a kid i was completely obsessed by football/soccer and was heading towards a career in sports until a new music teacher arrived at the school in Frankfurt. I was around 13 at the time and in the first lesson of term, at the start of the class, the Teacher pulled out a record player and played 3 songs. “Battery” by Metallica, “Satisfaction” by the Stones and “I don’t need no doctor” by WASP. my parents played
alot of music in the house and in the car but it was a lot of 60s and 70s stuff.. I had never heard anything like the heavy metal before. i went out with my pocket money that weekend and bought Master of Puppets and a Stones greatest hits which was as
far as the pocket money stretched. I stopped playing sports immediately and got a guitar for my next birthday. I played literally every waking moment outside of school, learning songs by listening to them and playing along and i gone then.
What still drives you to make music?
If you fall hard into it I think music is something like a vocation rather than a trade or a hobby. Every time i step into my studio I feel something like inocent. I love that you can walk in to the space and when you walk out something exists that didn’t before.
How do you most often start a new track?
I’m sometimes pulled into the studio because an idea drops into my head and i need to go and work it out.. sometimes i just sit down with the gear because i’m bored. Typically i start with Tape, synth or guitar i never start with a beatloop for example and just “see what happens”.. Also playing with other people helps bring things out. I’ve been playing with an improvised ensemble “Der-Aunch-A-Thon” for a little over a year now.. We do gigs where we improvise every note from start to finish of the gig. It’s exhilarating as you don’t know whats happening beyond the moment you’re in and you exist in the moment of creation all the time. Last thing we did was go to a house in Donegal where we built “a studio” on the Friday, played all night and all
Saturday and left on Sunday. We will be releasing that in some form either late this year or early next. It will be a long form work.
How do you know when a track is finished?
I think you just have to call it. Often demos are better than the finished article, often a session is finished when My Cat Marjorie wants us to go to bed
Show us your current studio
Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?
“It’s the goal of every artist to give of their very best just once” – a friend once wrote that in a dedication of a book he gave me. The book was Barfly by Charles Bukowski. That was a long time ago and it still inspires me.
Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link
This is my last long form release.. it’s called “There is a Chasm between what is Said and what is Done” Pt1