James K's Electronic Evolution

Patrick No: So, I've heard that you grew up playing instruments like the guitar and violin? At what age did you pick up those instruments?

Jamie Krasner: I started playing violin when I was five, really young. That was the first instrument that I got lessons for and started playing when I was a kid. I learned it classically. I was gifted a guitar and started teaching myself to play around 12 years old. I stopped playing the violin around 15-16 years old. With guitar, I just learned and started writing songs around that age. I was kind of writing songs before that with violin a little bit. I never really learned guitar in a shredder type of way. I learned chords as a base to write songs. I still use guitar in most of my productions. It's pretty prevalent throughout most of the work I do. Sometimes, I'll flesh out songs on guitar, and I'll then kind of turn it electronic. Learning it was really what helped me with my songwriting. It started that process or kind of pushed it forward.

PN: When you were 12 playing the guitar, were you more into covering songs you liked or more about playing around with the instrument?

JK: I played covers, for sure. I definitely was learning other people's songs. For me, it was a great way to learn the instrument because I could get the immediate satisfaction of, "Oh, I can play that song. I can sing that song!"

PN: What were you covering?

JK: Back then I covered let's see... I was learning Tracy Chapman, Nick Drake, and Elliott Smith. A lot of singer/songwriter guitar tracks, I mean, it was like all over the place. Anything that I wanted to learn, really. People were like, "You should sing that Avril Lavigne song." I would learn it and sing it for my friends, you know? In high school, I did start doing open mics when I started writing songs.

JK: I was performing around, doing open mics, playing in bars and stuff. MySpace was a thing back then, so I would post songs on that. Sometimes people would book me via MySpace. There was an open mic that I would also go to in the East Village, at the SideWalk Cafe. I don't know if it's still a thing, but that was like a big open mic at the time, pretty legendary.

PN: You grew up in New York City, right?

JK: I was born in New York City, and then moved to New Rochelle, about 20 miles north of Manhattan.

PN: So after you were doing local open mics & bar gigs in the city, you went to RISD, correct?

JK: Yeah. Before and during, but Yes..

PN: I've heard that there was a prominent noise scene in Providence, at the time.

JK: So, I was at RISD from 2007 to 2011. The noise scene, I think, really started in the early 2000s. There was this whole warehouse scene that kind of popped off in Olneyville, which is pretty close to the school. Dropouts from RISD were a major aspect of forming that community. It kind of continued. It was still pretty vibrant when I was in school. It started dying off, I'd say in the early 2010s. Things were slowing down, a lot of people were moving to New York City. I was there for the tail end of that, and that influenced me a lot. I would go to shows often. There are some people I met from that time who are super inspiring to me, some that I've even collaborated with more recently.

PN: Who are the friends that you've made through that scene or collaborated with?

JK: Eli V Manuscript is someone who I met in Providence and worked with more recently. I just released this hour-long piece “Elektra.” It was a commissioned piece for Issue Project from when I did a residency there. It was a score that I wrote for four musicians. The score was an interpretation of Anne Carson's translation of Sophocles' Electra. Eli created beautiful textual alchemies from the score and text, which they projected along the walls and ceiling throughout the performance.

PN: That's what you dropped this past winter right? I guess relatively new to us listeners.

JK: Yeah, I put it out with iDEAL Recordings. The actual performance took place in 2018, and I released the live recording of it on CD with iDEAL last January.

PN: Tell me some more about your time at RISD. Did you get involved in a handful of bands?

JK: When I showed up there, I was really just playing my guitar and playing songs. I had just started learning how to produce, and I'd recorded some of those songs with a friend in New York. My production skills were pretty limited at that point. I'd be in a studio working with a friend on music and recording my like, folk... simply guitar and voice songs, then we added some instruments. I was learning synths and stuff like that towards the end of high school, this is when I bought my first Casio and a Tascam four-track. At RISD, I started playing & meeting people who did this weekly cafe open mic. I would play with them. That was off of the freak folk scene at that time. I played out with a couple of those [freak folk] bands, and I met bands and individual artists through that. It was really inspiring for me. That was my first two years at RISD. Back then, I was going to shows in the noise scene and in Olneyville. I became really inspired by that. That was a mixture of electronic music, noise, folk, and performance art. I met two people that I then started collaborating with, DJ Richard & Chris.

PN: Tell me more about Berlin now. You were there semi-permanently from 2014-2017. How did Berlin affect your music style?

JK: A lot of my friends at the time had moved there. I was really into club music and the scene at that time. Beyond that, it was a more affordable choice to live there than living in New York. I wanted to take the chance of living in another country and I ended up meeting a ton of people who I'm super close with still. Berlin is like a hub for people and artists in their 20s, maybe early 30s. I've met so many friends from all over the world there. At the same time, it is very transient. So people would come and go often.

PN: People try the city "out" and party for a couple of months, then head out. Was Berlin the time when you started dialing in on producing electronic music?

JK: Yeah, yes. So, I was already producing and playing out quite a lot in NY before I moved to Berlin. By the time I moved to Berlin, I had already released an EP on Uno, and I had released some singles as James K. In Berlin, I had a studio, and I was full-time producing, playing out live, and touring. A little bit of my decision to move to Berlin was influenced by my starting to tour in Europe. In Europe, especially at that time, I felt that there were more avenues for the type of music I make in terms of playing live. I think people were just more in tune or open to a listening experience, and more attentive.. Again, the infrastructure for the club scene at that time was really different from New York.

PN: I feel like there were clubs there that have been open for like...

JK: A long time. There's institutional support for those clubs. Living in Berlin, it was exciting for me to go see music on good sound systems, and in spaces that also had thoughtout environments. If you want people to stay for a show, or a whole night, the most important thing is that the sound be very good, this creates attentive and sustained listening, otherwise you will exhaust the audience quickly.

PN: Let's switch over to talking about your music now. Shoegaze, downtempo, trip hop, ambient. atmospheric. All genres that are used to describe the sound

JK: In terms of style, I am drawn to shoegaze as a sound. I'm drawn to it for a variety of reasons. When I first heard shoegaze, like My Bloody Valentine, or Cocteau Twins, when I was a teenager, I had this 'aha moment' where I was like, "Oh, this is the sound that I've been looking for." When I was a little kid, I liked listening to Led Zeppelin or anything that my parents were into, some classic rock. There are some Led Zeppelin songs that I feel could be proto proto shoegaze. Weirdly, I was also inspired by Jungle and Drum and Bass when I was pretty young. I found this mixtape jungle CD, and I got into that stuff- I would listen to jungle and D&B to do like my math homework. I started getting into electronic music more in my teens, and trip hop, also blues, and folk, but I also listened to all kinds of pop from different eras. So, all those influences are formative to when I started writing music, and recently I’m leaning on those more in my work. Really though there were and are many many other types of music I was listening to and continue to listen to, which even if they aren’t so obvious in the sound, they are definitely somewhere existing in the music. I’m truly down to listen to everything, and as a result, I’m always pulling from a large net of influences in my decision processes making and working on music. I try to pull from, collage, and combine distinct influences within tracks, as well as when putting together an overall body of work, like an album—this is a major part of my process as an artist.

PN: Do you find that your previous practice with the violin, had an effect in terms of the ethereal soundscapes that you've been creating over the years? Maybe something with your history in classical composition?

JK: That's a good question. I don't know. I actually was using the violin a little bit when I was writing my last record, Random Girl. There's violin in that music, but I was using it in a really abrasive way, 'noise violin,’ I call it. Putting it through effects, really playing it irregularly or ‘wrong.’ I was using it as a way to create abject sound. There's pain in the violin. There's such emotion in the sound of that instrument. If you really push the strings, it can create this scream and ache. So, I was using it that way on my last full-length album.

JK: I was in a lot of choirs growing up as well. I think there is maybe just that classical background embedded in my subconscious. I did music theory in high school, things like that are embedded in me. I'd say the most soundscape-y or classical record would be some of the songs off of Random Girl. Some songs have that approach to more score writing. From 2016-2019, I was really writing more long-form compositions and scores. More experimental sonically, and pushing my production abilities, versus making more structured pop. I'm recently coming kind of back around and really focusing more on pop structure songs at the moment. As you move forward as an artist, it's like everything just snowballs and all these things are incorporated in some sense. So, the production that I was emphasizing during Random Girl is definitely still a part of and influencing what I'm doing now, even if what I'm doing now is a little more on the pop side of things.

PN: So I've seen you play twice, once at Sara's Worldwide, which was like, last year.

JK: Oh yeah! For Nick Klein's thing.

PN: Yeah! Then also at Dripping in the Summer. Let's talk about your live shows. You have a range of equipment that you bring on stage. You have this stethoscope or heartbeat instrument that is super unique and fascinating to me. I find that it literally puts you into the music. Has this concept been something you've been experimenting with for a while now?

JK: Yeah. I was using a lot of contact microphones at a certain point. My mom is actually a doctor, and I just asked her if I could use her old stethoscope. I built this little electret microphone, and I attached it with a piece of rubber basically, to the stethoscope. The stethoscope is an amplifier. It just amplifies the heartbeat. If you put a mic into it, then it's amplifying that sound and you can turn it into an electrical signal. Then you can amplify it in a sound system. I was playing around with how I could make sounds from my inside, I really wanted an internal sound. I made a lot of mics that I also dipped in rubbers that you could put inside your mouth to get well, mouth sounds. I think the stethoscope mic was just coming out of me wanting to play around with sourcing sound from contact mics, honestly. It came out of seeing performances from various artists... It's prevalent—people putting a contact mic on a metal object and then hooking that up to some chain of effects, then hitting that metal object on something to make sound. It's also a performance. You're including your body or you're including an object. So there's a depth to that, beyond the sound. So yea, It was definitely coming out of that exploration of using contact mics, and being like, "Oh, how do I contact mic my voice through my throat and maintain the body as part of the voice?”

PN: In your opinion, what's the importance of putting your body into the music?

JK: Using something [instrument] that includes the body, physically and sonically, grounds the sound in the physical, and reminds you that I am human, this is still human, even if it's being interpreted through machines. It also brings into question how we as humans, as bodies, interface with technology, and how we are changed. All of this is organic, in some sense. It's coming from something organic, and it's being translated through machinery. I think it's cool. I think with the stethoscope mic, it's interesting to be reminded of the body, being reminded of where music is ultimately coming from. There's also music that I've been making recently where I'm using field recordings I made in nature, bug sounds, things like that. I think it's not just the body, too. I think it's also the larger body, the environment you're in. It's really interesting to bring some of that sound or to make sounds that remind me of nature, or the body. Playing between the line of machine and the body or the organic is interesting to me.

PN: Let's talk about your AD93 release, Scorpio. Scorpio was one of my favorite songs of the past year. Let's talk about the process between you and hoodie on that project. How was it working with Special Guest DJ & Naemi?

JK: Yeah, I loved working with Shy and Naemi. Shy sent me a demo of the beat him and Naemi made, and then I wrote the melody and lyrics for the song and sent it back to them. They really responded to it and loved it. That's when I realized, "Oh, we're gonna, like, keep working on this and fine tune it." It felt natural, very natural. I collaborate with tons of friends. A lot of the time I’m working on projects through email, passing projects back and forth. And then sometimes if it's possible, we'll meet up. ‘Scorpio’ was really special. I think after the song was written and before it was fully produced, we all realized it was a special song.

PN: Let's talk about some of the new stuff you're working on. Like you said, it's gonna be a bit more pop-oriented, but still with the typical James K lush atmosphere. What other ideas are you trying to explore with your new music?

JK: The new music is exploring love, in an expansive sense of that word. In some ways, the music is similar to what I was attempting with my first album, PET or my EP 036, and focusing on songwriting. I’ve also been collaborating with a bunch of incredible producers - so with more minds in the mix, It's definitely like, leveled up. I'm really excited about it. It's super lush. It's definitely a bit of shoegaze, ambient and trip hop, but experimental sonically as well. There's also kind of a band sensibility to some of it--live drums and live guitar. There's also a lot of electronics. It's really incorporating everything in a very cohesive way. I'm really proud of it and proud of the collaborative effort everyone had in it. It's also very lyric-driven. There's a lot of pop structure to the songs that I play around with. I try not to make anything too straightforward, which is very important to me. Even if it is a pop song, I don't want it to just be flat or obvious- structurally or lyrically. The thing with pop music is that you want it to feel familiar. I want to play with that familiarity, but take it in unexpected directions sometimes; mixing it with sounds or structures that you might not expect. 

PN: I'm excited. When do you think it's gonna come out?

JK: Everything's done. Release date TBD. Next year.

PN: Anything else?

JK: Some singles, collaborations, compilations, etc.

PN: Who are you collaborating with?

JK: I made some music with Oli XL. Something with the band Moin as well. Some others.

PN: No way! I love Moin. I can't wait for these new releases.