Interview: Andrew Swafford

Andrew Swafford, looking very ambient himself

Last month, I started a new feature where I interview my friends who are artists. My first interview was with my friend Jake Ward; I had fun with that, so I thought I'd try it again, this time with my buddy Andrew Swafford.

I met Andrew two years ago when he accepted a job as an English teacher at the same high school where I taught—he's since moved on to a different school, but since we're both still living in Knoxville, it was easy to sit down and chat with him.

A few things to know about Andrew: he and I both attended UT at the same time, though we somehow never met. I've been told he is my doppelgänger. He is an avid movie buff, more so than even I am, given that co-leads the film podcast Cinematary and has written extensively for the companion site, as well as created a handful of video essays; you may have seen me link to the site here a few times here when I've had a piece published there, and you can thank Andrew for that—he was my connection to Cinematary. Most importantly for this interview, though, Andrew is a composer of ambient music.

Currently, Andrew has released two albums of ambient music: Synth Tests and Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, and in the interview, we talk extensively about his work and his connection to the ambient genre. I am a pretty novice listener of ambient music, but Andrew has a deep reservoir of knowledge of the genre and has a lot of interesting things to say about this music. He's also helpfully provided links to the music he mentions in the interview, so you can listen along to what he's talking about. I hope you enjoy the conversation!


Interview

Michael: What got you started with music?

Andrew: I think that my earliest music memory is about wanting to make music, even before wanting to listen to music. There were definitely teenybopper bands that everyone was listening to when I was a little kid, like Aaron Carter and NSYNC and stuff like that. But the first time that music made a really big impression on me was when an older cousin of mine came to visit the house and brought his acoustic guitar and played songs for my dad, who also played acoustic guitar. So I remember seeing this dude who was much older than me and thinking he was really cool and wanting to do that. And then a couple years later, I got an acoustic guitar of my own and started to learn—I think I was getting into listening to music around the same time. What was really popular then was the mall-goth and pop-punk stuff: Green Day, blink-182, My Chemical Romance, and all those bands. I was in middle school and listening to all that and covering music by those bands. I didn’t have a lot of great equipment. But what that music is made of is so rudimentary—you just had to know how to make power chords with like three fingers and just move around to make different progressions.

M: So mall-goth to ambient—where’s that bridge?

A: Well, for most of my “career” as a musician, I’ve been inside the singer-songwriter genre, writing music on acoustic and electric guitars and playing and singing stuff that I wrote through high school and college, going to open mics and playing at what were called “Acoustic Nights” that UT would put on now and then. I put together a handful of original songs—probably a grand total of about eight or nine—but I just hit a wall after a little while. There were a few reasons, one being that in terms of guitar playing, there’s a certain emphasis on technicality and honing your technical skills that I was only going to go so far with; for a lot of folks who get into playing electric guitar, one of their main interests is, “I want to learn how to play fast solos; I want to play ‘Sweet Child of Mine.’”

M: Or “Eruption.”

A: [laughs] Or “Eruption.” So I think that there are physical limitations that I have as a guitar player, but I also don’t have a lot of interest in being able to pick or move my fingers really fast. I can only do so much with the guitar, and mostly what I was interested in when I was playing the guitar primarily were pedals and making my guitar sound like other things and making different atmospheres and textures with the sound of my guitar. There was a really influential interview that I read with Omar Rodríguez-López of The Mars Volta, where he was talking about the last days of At the Drive-In, the band he was in before The Mars Volta. He said that at that time, he was most interested in making his guitar sound like not a guitar, and I remember taking that as an ethos of mine and trying to go with it. In high school I was making a lot of recordings just with a little pedal I had, one of those all-in-one kits that had like a dozen different sounds, and just making weird collage music with the electric guitar. But I hit a wall there on a technical level and became a little bored with guitar music.

But what I was playing when I was playing out in front of an audience was the singer-songwriter, four-chord stuff. And another reason I gave up on that was that I hate, hate, hate writing lyrics. When I was really in that juvenile phase in high school where you feel like all your thoughts and emotions really matter and people need to hear about my personal struggle, it was easier for me then, but with a certain amount of self-consciousness and also studying literature and poetry and stuff like that, I raised the standards for myself in terms of what would I want my lyrics to be like. I don’t know if I’m capable of stuff like that; I’m just not a great creative writer. And also, it’s just a frustrating process for me, so at a certain point, I decided that if I’m going to continue to make music, I want it to be instrumental music. And because there are so many limitations when it comes to the guitar, I wanted to branch out and find a way to create a broader palette of sounds. Another big chapter of this story involves me being an accompanist to other people. So, for example, I played lead guitar in a praise and worship band for my church, I ended up playing guitar for a touring praise and worship band that played in a youth conference in Gatlinburg one summer, and I ended up playing lead guitar for a friend of mine, Christina Daugherty; she makes folksy music on the classical guitar, and I joined up with her specifically to make atmospheric sounds around her. I was doing that thing where I was playing electric guitar but trying to make it sound not like an electric guitar. Doing that for her made me realize a) in a rock or folk context, I am much more of a helping hand than a lead, and b) I was more interested in making atmospheres and textures than I was making structured songs. (I use the word “song” a lot, but that’s really more of a fallback. I don’t really make songs; I make “tracks” or “compositions” or whatever you want to call them.) So that was a huge stepping stone, where I thought, “What if I made music that was just primarily ambient as opposed to providing a backing track for someone who was doing something more conventional?”

M: So that’s all, of course, collaborative. Most music that has some sort of live component is collaborative to an extent, with multiple instrumentalists and stuff like that. And there are some examples of collaboration in ambient music; there’s the Fripp and Eno collaborations. Have you ever thought about musical collaborations with your ambient music?

A: I would love to do some collaborations on the ambient side. I don’t know many people who make instrumentally focused music. I have friends who play guitar and friends who play banjo and drums and stuff like that, but mostly in a folk or indie-rock context. One thing I am very interested in doing is maybe making some music with my friend Dylan, who’s been a big source of feedback for me. He plays the viola, and every day, he will get his viola out and practice around with some scales or sheet music or drones that he makes up. I think that we could be a really good pairing if we were ever able to have an extended jam/recording session making music that had electronics on the one hand and this very organic, classical sound on the other hand. I think that’s been done by various people, like Maya Beiser—she makes experimental music on the cello. There’s a Icelandic musician, Hildur Guðnadóttir, with an album called Without Sinking, who makes ambient music with the cello along the lines of Sigur Rós. That could be interesting new sonic territory for me to branch out into.

M: So you’ve given us the big picture of the journey, but when was it that you definitively started making ambient music?

A: So just like two and a half years ago, I used my tax return to buy a synthesizer with a pretty comprehensive bank of sounds specifically well-suited for atmospheric, instrumental stuff, and I just made it a project of mine to play around with it and record the things that I was making—basically, my guesswork. I didn’t have any training on the piano or keyboard, so I was figuring it out as I went along and documenting the process, and that became an album.

M: Synth Tests.

A: Yeah, that was my first album.

M: So stuff that we hear on Synth Tests, I assume that’s curated? Like, “Synth Test 1” isn’t the first time you hit record, right?

A: There was a lot of playing around and improvisation before I decided to hit record on anything, but eventually I was like, “I know what a lot of the sounds on this machine do; what could I make if I stacked them—if I went into Garage Band and recorded multiple tracks and made something that more resembled a song or an ambient track? The first track on Synth Tests literally is that first recording that I did. There were other things that I did after that; I tried to start other recordings and abandoned them. But for the most part, those ten tracks on Synth Tests are the ten compositional experiments that I did when I was teaching myself how to play and record the synthesizer.

M: Had you been listening to ambient music already at this point?

A: I definitely got into listening to ambient music way before I was interested in making ambient music. I think it was something I discovered in college. I don’t have a vivid memory of what the first ambient album I got was, but I know that one of the reasons for my interest was that I was looking for music to help me go to sleep. I think a common criticism of ambient music is, “Oh, this is so boring, it’s putting me to sleep,” but that is kind of the point. I want music that really relaxes me. There are a lot of ambient albums that I’ve listened to the end of very few times because I am so often asleep before I get to the end. So I would say that I explored the genre and listened to a lot of the big figures and albums in the genre for close to ten years before I decided to start making ambient music of my own. By then, I had a pretty broad pool of influences to pull from. When I first started recording ambient music and I was putting my synth tests on Soundcloud with no intention of making an album, in the description of every track I would put what the influences where for that track, like, “For this track, I’m trying to do a Steve Roach thing,” or “I’m trying to do a GAS thing,” or whatever. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I always have a lot of different personal inspirations bouncing around in my head. I am often trying to imitate the sounds of various artists and put them together in interesting ways.

M: I’ve listened to ambient music, but not nearly as much as you have, and one of the things that I find is that—well, it’s not that the music is same-y, but if I listen to, like, Music for Airports or if you listen to some of Aphex Twin’s ambient music, I would hear that music and not understand what different permutations can be made of this. Which is different from, like, rock music, which can have a lot of the same instrumental backing, but the lyrics can change. Since rock or R&B or music that’s more concretely grounded in live performances, etc., has more of a tangible structure, for me personally as a listener, I can better understand how people can interchange different parts to create something new. Whereas with ambient music, I can understand that ambient tracks are different from one another, but I couldn’t come up with something new, if that makes sense. As a creator, is it hard to figure out new variations?

A: That’s a good question, because I do feel like the variations are so much more infinite in ambient music. I’ve probably listened to rock music longer than any other genre, and I feel like there are not a lot of surprises in store for me in what rock music can be. But I have yet to exhaust the scope of what ambient music can sound like. It can be noise music—some people would describe Sunn O)))’s music as ambient, or the first Earth album, both of which are these metal experiments. And then on the other end of the spectrum you can have someone like William Basinski, who’s just putting these soft, warm loops on for like an hour-plus. Or Steve Roden, who did Forms of Paper—he has created these weird musical experiments by putting really high-powered condenser mics on pieces of paper and getting different sounds from crumpling and rolling paper. It’s such a broad spectrum that it’s hard to know where the borders of this genre lie. And so because there are so many different takes on it, I feel like, as a creator, it’s easy for me to look at what has been done and go like, “Okay, let’s do this style mixed with this style and try to find an interesting middle ground here.” For me, I think that one thing that sets my ambient music apart from others is that because I’m coming from a background of listening to rock music and playing to singer-songwriter-type music, I often approach ambient music instinctually with more of a structure than other folks do. Rather than having these broad expanses of sound that could go on for five minutes or fifty minutes, a lot of my stuff ends up having a premeditated arc to it. That is something I’ve tried to break out of. If you listen to Synth Tests from beginning to end, you’ll notice that one of the big changes from Track 1 to Track 10 is that the tracks get longer, and they get a little bit more meandering and exploratory. I can’t tell if the fact that I tend to put a structure into my music is a positive thing or a negative thing. I want to be able to flex my drone muscles a little bit more, but part of my programming as a rock/singer-songwriter musician precludes me from doing that.

M: Related to that, in the notes for your most recent album [Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits], you have a little treatise where you talk about how it’s “an ambient album haunted by pop music.” On a literal level, there are two pop song covers on the album, but more generally, tell me about the interplay between ambient and pop on the record.

A: It was an evolution of what I was doing on Synth Tests. On Synth Tests, it has two bookending tracks that use elements from poetry; there are lyrics on “Synth Test 1” and “Synth Test 10,” and they both come from famous poets. “Synth Test 1” has a line from William Blake’s “To Nobodaddy” that’s repeated multiple times, and then “Synth Test 10” has a couplet from Pablo Neruda’s “So That You Will Hear Me” that I sing on that track. So on Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, it’s partly an evolution of that idea: what if I bookended this with pop music rather than poetry? But it also came about sort of accidentally, because after I was done with Synth Tests, I made a challenge to myself: could I take these tools that I’ve used to make ambient music and make pop music with it? I spent like a month constructing this really elaborate cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” and I was really happy with the way it turned out; I think it’s one of the most perfect parts of that album. But it wasn’t originally planned to be part of an album. It was just going to be a standalone little experiment. And then as I continued recording ambient and electronic stuff, I ended up accumulating enough stuff to make a record out of it. So I thought, “How can I make some sort of counterpoint to that Fleetwood Mac cover?” So I decided to make a dual-sided album, kind of like an LP, where the first half would be fairly pleasant and uplifting songs, and the second half would be more haunting and dark-toned tracks. So the pop counterpoint that felt right for that was the BonIver song “666 ʇ,” which is in a major key and is kind of inspiring-sounding, but it has a lot of lyrical and aesthetic signifiers that have occult associations. So in that record, I do a lot of referencing and playing with the idea of ghosts and hauntings, and that song felt like an appropriate capper. I’m also very inspired by people like Bon Iver and Thom Yorke, who have broken out of the confines of indie rock music to create a more multi-faceted, electronic sound, which I think is part of what I have done as a musician, so I wanted to pay homage to [Justin Vernon] in that way.

M: Yeah, it’s almost an inverse of the rock trope of the “pivot-to-electronic” album, like Kid A or whatever. Still talking about Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, in your liner notes, you also talk about the relationship between the old and the new; you mentioned sonically the duality of the album, but it seems like you had an almost philosophical bent to that duality, too. You have the two songs with lyrics on that album because they’re from Bon Iver and Fleetwood Mac, but to what extent do you think ambient music can bear that meaning? Because when we think of other forms of music, we look at the lyrics to tell us what it means, and that’s not there in ambient music.

A: Yeah, it’s kind of like you’re making abstract art. Abstract painting can have socio-political undertones to it, but it can be very hard to pinpoint what exactly those are.

M: I think Andy Warhol said at one point that what was more important about art was what was written about art [ed. note: cannot confirm that Warhol actually said this], and I can definitely understand that with artists like the guy who does the paintings of different colored squares [Piet Mondrian]. And you read what kind of philosophical aims those guys had, and you nod your head and go, “Yeah, that’s interesting.”

A: But would I have gotten there on my own?

M: Right. And maybe that’s not important? The fact that you have an aesthetic experience can be enough, maybe. I think a lot of artists would say that. But you have the written piece on your album that seems to indicate that you did have something in mind beyond just an aesthetic experience.

A: With music, you have the benefit of liner notes. An album I think about a lot is The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond ThisWorld. Have you listened to that album?

M: I haven’t.

A: Really, really good album. The Caretaker is an electronic musician who makes sample-based music, and all the samples come from 1920s-era 78 rpm jazz records that are so old that when you play them, there’s so much crackle and pop that you’re hearing more crackle and pop than music at some points. He makes these extended electronic-ambient tracks out of them, and as you go from the beginning to the end of the album, you hear less signal and more noise. His liner notes talk about how this album is meant to be an approximation of what it’s like to live with Alzheimer’s, how your memories fade and become blurred into one another. The same thing is true for William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops; he talks about those in relation to the fact that the first one was made on 9/11. He claims he was actually listening to the first one as he saw the towers coming down in New York City. When you have that extra-textual stuff, it can add meaning to music that maybe a listener wouldn’t inherently find meaning in. Aside from those extra-textuals, you just have the tone or associations with the melodies. Like, for example, in Synth Tests, I have a song that quotes the score from Twin Peaks, and I’m kind of drawing a comparison there. But you also have song titles that can add some sort of a meaning to music that might not be there initially. One of the songs that gave me the idea to frame Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits in the way that I did is the song “Smarm,” which is the second-to-last track on the album (I ended up sequencing that album differently than Synth Tests; it’s not just put in the order that I made them, but it’s meant to have a structural integrity to it). I made that song after watching a random YouTube video from an alt-light asshole gamer-boy, and I was just so mad at his tone of voice in making that video that I was like, “I want to express the way I’m feeling right now musically and make something that has a nasally whine to it.” So I ended up making “Smarm.” Then later on in the process of making that album, I made a counterpoint to it called, “Snark.” So just through the tone and titles of those two tracks, I was trying to express something about the discourse of the moment.

M: Did you go about making “Snark” as an intentional counterpoint, or is that something that you arrived at later, realizing it as the counterpoint?

A: I made it as a counterpoint. Before I started recording, I had a point in mind that I wanted it to sound like and play off of the other song, which was just symptomatic of how that album is different from Synth Tests: a lot of it was premeditated and written, as opposed to me playing around and half-improvising.

M: Who would you say you’re making music for? I think you said earlier [before we started recording] that you feel like you are the person who listens to your music the most—are you just making stuff to entertain yourself?

A: I mean, I think I make music that could potentially appeal to a lot of folks who listen to the kind of electronic, ambient music that I listen to. Now, whether or not they’re going to hear it, because of the no-budget marketing scale that I’m working on, is another question altogether.

M: There’s a lot of ambient music out there.

A: There’s so much. So unless you’re spelunking through Bandcamp and listening to everything you possibly can, you’re probably not going to come across my music. So, I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from people who have heard it, so I don’t necessarily know what people who like my music are looking for. So I’m mostly making it for myself (what is something that I want to do or make?), and aside from that, the only feedback I’ve gotten is feedback from friends whom I’ve intentionally shown my music to, some of which have enjoyed it. Some of them you know: my movie friends Lydia, Cam, Nathan, and Dylan—Dylan is my biggest listener. Anytime I make something, I send it to him, and he usually gives me some kind of feedback, and I make future alterations or tweaks catering to what seems to be working. It’s a very small circle of people who are my de-facto audience as it exists right now.

M: Do you enjoy that smallness? I remember listening to an interview with Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour, about after that band released the song “Money” and they blew up commercially, and he talked about how after that, the band missed the days when their concerts were quieter and more intimate, rather than having a large crowd clamoring for something they’d already heard on the radio. Do you like the size audience that you have?

A: No matter how big my audience got, there would still be an isolated, bedroom quality to making and releasing this music, just because the max audience for any ambient artist is so small. We kind of live the exception because we live in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Big Ears [Music Festival] happens, and somehow an ambient musician can draw huge crowds, but anywhere else in the world, I don’t think that many ambient artists can generate much more than just a small cult following. Maybe the biggest name in ambient music might be someone like Tim Hecker, and I don’t see Tim Hecker as a rock star.

M: There’s Brian Eno, I guess, although I guess he’s more popular as a producer now than for his work as an ambient artist. Aphex Twin had some MTV stuff—wasn’t “Windowlicker” on MTV?

A: That’s true, and he’s a guy who straddles the line of ambient and electronic, which is something that I think I do, too, but he’s so good at the electronic side of things that I think the stuff of his that has the widest appeal is almost dance music.

M: Do you have any interest in making dance music?

A: I would love to, but there are certain technical, material limitations on that for me right now. In order to make dance music, you need to have a big MIDI controller with a bunch of samples you can trigger all at once. You also need to have access to a program like Ableton Live, which allows you to store up this library of samples. These are all things that are fairly expensive. I am coasting off a tax return from three years ago; I have one synthesizer and some guitar equipment that I use in my ambient music from time to time, and I’m just trying to see how many different things I can make from those raw materials.

M: You mentioned your “movie friends” earlier—you’ve made music for a film, right?

A: I have made music for two short films that are out, and I’m currently in the process of making music for another short film that will be coming out, hopefully next month, fingers crossed. The first one I made was for a short film called “The Cabin” by my friend Dylan. I don’t think it’s available anywhere, but I’m really proud of that score I made, which is like one continuous 11-minute track. That was my first foray into making electronic, ambient music.

M: So pre-Synth Tests?

A: Pre-Synth Tests, pre-me having a synthesizer. That was just me using the “musical typing” feature on Garage Band, and I was able to make some stuff that I was pretty happy with. The second short that I did a score for—well, I really just contributed to the score; I wasn’t the exclusive composer for that. It was a short film called “Deja in Wonderland.” It was originally three very small shorts that were eventually stitched together into one longer short film. I have a track that plays in the first chapter and a track that plays in the third chapter. The story of that is my friend Deja getting out of college and not knowing what to do with her life, and so she puts her life into an Alice in Wonderland narrative. The beginning is her falling down the rabbit hole, and the end is her in a much darker place, and so I was making tracks that matched those two moods. Those tracks ended up being on Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits and giving me the idea to split the album down the middle and have the light tracks on the front half and the darker tracks in the back end. That is where the split happens; track 5 is called “Deja’s Balloon,” which is the track I did for the first chapter of the film, and track 6 is called “Deja’s Spider,” which is an extended version of the track I did for the third chapter. I’m making another thing for her now that I’m really excited about. I don’t think it’s quite as ambitious musically as what I did on my first two records, but it is tailor-made for this short film, which is so much more ambitious for her. It is kind of a neon-soaked slow-cinema thriller set in a rideshare context in downtown Nashville, so what I’m doing is a lot more drone-y and a lot more laced with stingers, because it’s a horror short. So, very different from music I’m used to making, but I’m very excited for people to see that short; it’s going to be awesome, and I’ll be putting out my score as an EP that should be less than 15 minutes, and that should be out next month [ed. note: since this interview was conducted in June, that would be July].

M: So for this most recent film, you mentioned making music that interacted with the film elements. For the other pieces you made, were you mostly working independent of the filmmaking process?

A: Sort of. With Dylan’s short, “The Cabin,” I had the whole film before I started making the music, so I was breaking it up into chapters mentally and making passages that went with different scenes. That’s the same process I’m going through right now with this new short, which is called “ETA.” The newest Garage Band actually has a really cool feature where you can plug in a movie and let the movie play while you’re composing and recording. So when I’m recording now, I’m also watching what I’m composing for. But with the other score, “Deja in Wonderland,” she was sending me ideas and snippets and photos, and I was composing around those, and she was giving me lots of feedback. So I would just keep making sketches until I came up with something that she thought she could edit to, and in that case, it was more like the music and movie were being constructed in tandem with one another.

M: I was going to ask you what you’re working on next, but I guess that’s it, right?

A: Yep. I want to work on another record, but it will not be a thing that I work on this year. Usually, I make a record over the summer, and this summer, I’m pretty busy with that score as well as a video essay project I’m working on for Cinematary [ed. note: the video has since come out, and you can watch it here], so I don’t think I’m going to get a big chunk of it done this summer like I have in the past. But it’s definitely a thing on the horizon. I’ll probably go back to the process I used on Synth Tests and Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits—making individual tracks and seeing how they coalesce into a larger whole later on down the line. If I had to guess, it will probably come out early to mid 2020. But who knows.

M: Election music.

A: Election music. Maybe that will be the theme next time.

M: Maybe you can make titles that will be inappropriately appropriated by politicians, like Bruce Springsteen.

A: Exactly.

M: What are you listening to these days?

A: I’m listening to more pop music than anything else. As you know, you and I did a teaching project last year where we taught a unit structured around the music of Jay-Z and Taylor Swift, and doing that project has gotten me into Taylor Swift and gotten me more interested in listening to the other pop stars that I enjoy, like Carly Rae Jepsen and Hailey Steinfeld and people like that, as well as Beyoncé’s concert film and the soundtrack that got put out for that, HOMECOMING. So I feel like I’m listening to a lot of pop divas more than anything else at the moment—other than the ambient electronic music that I’m always listening to when I’m working or going to sleep. That’s kind of a mainstay.

M: So your last album was “haunted by pop music.” Do you think all this listening will bleed into your music in any way?

A: I don’t know. I think there’s a technical limitation. I can only make music that sounds so much like pop. That “Landslide” cover is about as close as I think I can get to making legit pop music. With the Bon Iver cover, I was trying to make a pop song into a drone track. You can definitely tell that there’s a verse and a chorus there, but it all sort of bleeds into each other. I think I’m more comfortable in that mode. “Landslide” took so long to make, and I don’t think that is my wheelhouse. But I can’t help but be influenced by the structure and melody of pop music in whatever I make.

M: It is the era of the DJ in pop music.

A: That’s true.

M: I have one more question to ask. Obviously your music is on Bandcamp, and you communicate a lot with people via the internet. The internet and electronic music are really closely intertwined.

A: Aphex Twin would not exist without file sharing.

M: Yeah, exactly. And you as an artist probably would not exist as an entity without the internet and Bandcamp. What are your feelings on the role of the internet in your music and your distribution? Is this just a necessary thing that you do, or are you actually interested in the internet as a medium for music?

A: My answers for this are pretty much the standard answers you’ll hear from about anybody. There are gifts and curses to the internet being a music-distributing landscape. It democratizes music, because anyone can upload their stuff—i.e. me—but it also makes there be so much of it that you can’t get your music heard, and you can’t find the music that you might otherwise be into because there’s just so much out there. In terms of how I feel about the internet as a platform, there’s a reason I’ve chosen to take the route of Bandcamp to release my music, because I think that Spotify and Apple are both pretty nefarious companies when it comes to the way they treat artists (ed. note: in fact, since this interview, Spotify has stopped allowing artiststo upload their own music directly); Bandcamp is really the only platform that allows for the artist to actually be compensated however they would like to be compensated, whether they are fine giving it away for free or they want a specific amount of money to distribute physical copies or whatever. I have recently changed my setting on Bandcamp from being a pay-what-you-want artist to being an artist where all of my music costs money to buy. Both of my records now cost $7. I’ve gotten maybe three or four purchases total, so that has put a limitation on how many people are listening to my music, because it seems like there’s a paywall, even though you can stream it on the page if you want to. But I also think that when all music is given away for free—i.e. Spotify or Soundcloud or the pay-what-you-want artists on Bandcamp—music is essentially valueless, and the audience doesn’t necessarily feel that what they have access to actually has tangible value. Whereas if you actually pay money, you’re more likely to actually listen to it. Putting a numerical dollar amount on my music has sort of functioned as a way to make my music appear more valuable, whether or not that has actually been the case. I think I don’t have an audience because people aren’t likely to stumble across my music. My music doesn’t have any marketing push behind it, so the only way you’re going to hear about it is if you are my friend personally or you follow me on Twitter and you happen to see one of my tweets pushing my album.

M: You don’t want to go the Soulja Boy / Lil Nas X route of relentlessly self-promoting?

A: Relentlessly hacking and meme-ing my way to popularity? Again, I think there is a low ceiling for how popular any ambient electronic artist can get, even if I was to try to game the system that way. So I’m pretty resigned at the moment to making music for myself and being happy with whoever stumbles across my way who happens to appreciate the music. I’m really doing this as a creative outlet for myself more than anything else. But I do put a lot of thought into the presentation of my music: the track titles and album artwork and the construction of albums. So I want it to be listened to and engaged with, but I’ve accepted my fate that there’s only so much I can do to make that happen.

You can listen to / buy Andrew's music at his Bandcamp page.