LOSTON INTERVIEW

It was a secret song on a Glassjaw album from 2000 that I always liked. It was actually called Losten but i switched it out to get the sound cloud page. Very boring story.

I played in bands a lot growing up and had been djing for a few years but not really writing at all. I wanted to get back into writing and I guess the ease of making music digitally appealed to me. Its a very personal exercise, and I really do not sleep much or well so it gave me a productive outlet to make me feel like less of a crackhead.

I started writing and learning the programs in July last year. I never had any real intention of releasing anything, it was more of just a personal project , but after some friends heard it I decided to put up a sound cloud.

It starts with some basic inspiration and moves in to total doubt, quickly transforming into self loathing for about 3 weeks then I scrap the whole idea and put the song together in about an hour. Im a graphic designer, it is exactly the same process, persistence is the key, you need to wade through a whole lot of shit to get to something good.

Not at all. I actually thought it was funny when I first started making it, that was the first thing I ever worked on so it was hard to tell when it was actually finished. It still ends super abruptly but i think I will probably extend it slightly for live sets. I have a whole second verse that is really cool but i just never finished it. As I said before, I legitimately had no intention on releasing it, so the final version on soundcloud is literally what was floating around in my car when my friends heard it.

I have played with chopping them into a sampler and pitching them like that, but generally i prefer to work in waveforms rather than midi, so I usually just chop, pitch and reverse shit. Everything starts with a vocal for me, so ill make a loop or a number of loops and structure it that way. I am not heavily into dance music so its more natural for me to put a beat to a melody rather than the other way around.

Haha fuck I really don’t know. The retrograde synth was actually a section of the original pitched real high with 3 other synths behind it. Im pretty sure if some people saw my workflow they would laugh. I just revise and add things until I get the sound I like. I have no real idea about synths, I just scroll through and manipulate things until I get the sound that I want.

I have very little interest in EDM. I listen to a lot of melancholy shit like james blake, xxyyxx, jai paul etc, and a lot of rap and rap production stuff, i feel like a lot of rap production is really forward thinking in comparison to EDM.

Ummm, its not really that personal, I am always working on 5 or 6 projects at a time but when I really get into something it takes a long time for me to be happy with it. The sampha remix has over 15 completely different songs, like completely different songs based on that one vocal hook. I was sort of happy with most of them but knew they weren’t great, then late one night i wrote the hook and knew that that was the one. I think you need to be that self critical, people sub conscisouly appreciate that. Maybe.

I have a bunch of originals I am working on and a few tracks for some rappers. I am going to release a rework of  a Banks song in the next couple of weeks then start dropping some originals and a few other loop based reworks I have not yet put out.  I’ll be playing shows as of April and probably traveling around a bit.

Be sure to stalk Loston in everything he does.

Seriously, find out what he had for breakfast:

https://soundcloud.com/loston

https://www.facebook.com/lostonnn