What inspired the name of the band? What are your influences and are they the same as when you started out?
Hi this is DiipSilence, my artist’s name is coming from the meaning of my original name, deep and silent. I’m a big fan of trip-hop and experimental music, bands like CocoRosie, Massive Attack, Björk are some of my influences. Also, I like ancient Chinese poems, which inspired me in writing lyrics. Math is a big influence too, I’m a math major, well both music and math are dealing with digits, right? J.S. Bach’s fugue is so logical, and I can almost see a fractal picture from his music. My goal is kinda the same, to bring out the image of what I can see in my music, and share my emotion as genuine as I can.
How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?
My songwriting usually starts with sound designing of different field recordings. I tend to bring a hand recorder with me while traveling, or just go out to grab some noises. After editing and de-noising the field recordings, I’ll put the sounds into modular/granular/wavetable synth or samplers, to design my own instruments for that track. Talking about the exploration of themes, to me it’s very natural to go with the flow of the sounds, also the image of the location as where I recorded it. Most of my songs are coming from the “picture in my head”, memories, duality, physics, maths, transcendence, and spirits are some of the themes I’m keen to explore more. Also, I’m quite interested in the “connections” among anything, just like “everything can be music”. “Transformation” is another cool topic, for example, I can sound design a rock-hitting metal sound into bass, drum, mallet, or a synth lead, etc. After the patch is finished, I don’t even recognize the original sound recording. My music is full of transformations of sound. The transformation of sound is also related to Fourier transformation from math, aha we are back to the topic of “connections”.
How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?
My songwriting usually starts with sound designing of different field recordings. I tend to bring a hand recorder with me while traveling, or just go out to grab some noises. After editing and de-noising the field recordings, I’ll put the sounds into modular/granular/wavetable synth or samplers, to design my own instruments for that track. Talking about the exploration of themes, to me it’s very natural to go with the flow of the sounds, also the image of the location as where I recorded it. Most of my songs are coming from the “picture in my head”, memories, duality, physics, maths, transcendence, and spirits are some of the themes I’m keen to explore more. Also, I’m quite interested in the “connections” among anything, just like “everything can be music”. “Transformation” is another cool topic, for example, I can sound design a rock-hitting metal sound into bass, drum, mallet, or a synth lead, etc. After the patch is finished, I don’t even recognize the original sound recording. My music is full of transformations of sound. The transformation of sound is also related to Fourier transformation from math, aha we are back to the topic of “connections”.
Why do you write the sort of music that you do?
Because I feel a “flow” in my heart while writing this sort of music. I know it’s based on noises and not many others will like it, but it’s the real sound in my head. I write it very naturally, it seems like the melodies are already there, I just need to “copy” the sound in my heart. To be honest, I don’t know exactly “why” do I write this sort of music, it’s just like a zone in my body and spirit, in that zone, every noise can be made into music, I just need to follow the path to make it. I’m not trying to write songs that resonate with the masses, but I do believe some people will feel the same as me, so writing music is a way for me to find them, or they can find me.
How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?
Lots of my music is created in Ableton Live, so I tend to chop them up into clips in Ableton, trigger them with my midi controllers, that’s the small part of preparing the “sound”. The big part is to process the sounds live and manipulate the effects differently on set. For example, I may have a clip of claps that I can play, I already pre add on an effect chain such as delays, chorus, phaser, reverb, etc. But I can turn on and change the parameters of any of those effects, indeed the effects are set, but which to play and which parameter to tweak is decided by how do I feel on that day, and it’s sort of like a reflection of the audience. To me, each live set is not replicable, and it cannot be the same. Even if I have the same setup, I may do some effects completely different than the other show. I hope this will give my show a unique flavor to the audience.
How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?
Lots of my music is created in Ableton Live, so I tend to chop them up into clips in Ableton, trigger them with my midi controllers, that’s the small part of preparing the “sound”. The big part is to process the sounds live and manipulate the effects differently on set. For example, I may have a clip of claps that I can play, I already pre add on an effect chain such as delays, chorus, phaser, reverb, etc. But I can turn on and change the parameters of any of those effects, indeed the effects are set, but which to play and which parameter to tweak is decided by how do I feel on that day, and it’s sort of like a reflection of the audience. To me, each live set is not replicable, and it cannot be the same. Even if I have the same setup, I may do some effects completely different than the other show. I hope this will give my show a unique flavor to the audience.
What plans do you have for the future?
My new album “The Ten” was just released this March, each track is coming from field recordings of different locations, most of them are the national parks that I’ve been to during the last five years. And my next album is under production, it’s about the weather, which will come from some environmental sounds like the wind, the thunder, the rain, and so on. Stay tuned and hope you’ll like them!
The Ten can be streamed here: https://smarturl.it/the-ten
All music releases and social links: https://smarturl.it/diipsilence_music
Thanks so much for having me here!