We welcome up and comer Bostock into our podcast series after his recent stand out EP release “Remembrall / Midnight Sinner.”
For people who don’t know you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I grew up in a little town in the country UK based, although I spent a lot of time as a kid in London, travelling to see family members who are all mostly originally from Lewisham and have always wanted to live in a city, the hustle and bustle, the energy, all the lives that are so inextricably linked: I knew that I wanted to be around that.
Throughout various points in my childhood my dad was a doorman and was asked to do security at various which meant staying above them at on weekends. Strangely the thuds from below never bothered me, I ended up finding them comforting, maybe because mum was always playing some new ministry of sound compilation, and definitely fostered my love for electronic music.
Fast forward a few years was able to move to London where I have been working on my sound and creative processes and have never looked back since. And thank you so much for having me on!
How did you get your interest in electronic music? How did you get started?
My first memories I have clearly was MTV being on a lot as a kid. I remember that I would rather choose to watch the seemingly endless rota of music videos than watch kid’s film’s and vividly remember hearing all of those great 90’s hits by Stardust or Sneaker Pimps and apparently I used to run around in circles nonstop when The Prodigy came on. When I was about 10 I used to tape songs from the radio I liked onto my grandads tape recorder and play it back, then re record over it and just mess around with the function settings. First proper electronic bit of kit I ever got was a Korg KP3 which I used to spend hours glitching out sounds or just playing with the sample bank feature around when I was about 14. Have recently clocked that I was sampling all along and had no clue that it would become one of my favourite parts of music production that I know and love!
First track I ever made and properly released was “A Quest” , made on dodgy copy of Ableton back in 2018 which was my first public foray and was a whitelabel which used this amazing sample from the classic A Tribe Called Quest’s song “Like it like that” that I flipped.
What’s the most important factor in producing a Bostock record? What sound are you pushing?
Something tangible or experimental at the least. I grew up on 90’s electronic music from Classic Deep House to Speed Garage but also a lot a lot a lot of Hip-Hop and feel that just as hip-hop can tell as beautiful and deep a story as a published novel, I believe electronic music can also. But then there are those moments where you just make something that shakes the room or gets the head banging, if I can capture even just a fraction of what I felt and try and translate that into a track, I will be satisfied with the final cut. Trying to push a more different experimental type of deep house, something that blends multiple genres and next year will start on some more collaborative works with the likes of dANNY TRASH, working to fuse electronic with hip-hop, soul, rock – anything that gives us that feeling.
What have you been doing with your time in lock down?
Plotting and planning aha. Lockdown has been strange, being limited in travelling physically it forces you to travel virtually or even spiritually and I’m grateful that I can escape to music as it really is like running away to another world. Checking on friends and making sure they are okay and working on the craft mostly! I’ve been saving also to get more hardware to be able to create more sounds, a DAW is a brilliant workstation but sometimes you just can’t beat a bit of analogue production and am learning how to use more serious hardware.
How do you work in the studio? How do you lay down a track?
It generally begins with a feeling or an emotion, I will remember a memory or scene and it creates a vivid scene in my head, sometimes with characters, and I will try out a few drum racks or maybe start with a sample and just try and let it grow by itself. Usually start in Ableton always mainly worked with just digital, mostly DAW creation, but after a literal 11-year obsession thanks to Swedish House Mafia, managed to finally get a OP-1 Synthesizer which is so intuitive to use, great for chopping up samples or generating strange synth patterns that you just couldn’t of found yourself and am learning new functions about it every day!
I’m a massive believer in Chaos Theory and almost like auto-writing phenomena sometimes just letting go of the original thought and being random makes something that whilst it could be massively different from the original, is something that is original and unique. I always keep the original idea for resampling for later though.
Tell us a bit about how your new EP came about, any insight into the production?
So It took about 3 months in total to finish, that includes the music video too. I made it all on Ableton using digital samples and then utilised the OP-1 for some live playing of the synth sounds which were then re-processed live in Ableton all using the stock plugins. What they give you right out the box is so effective you just must tweak It a little. If you know it, I am a “a bit warmer” fan till the day I die. My ADHD means that I quite often end up thinking in images and that is why the music video was so fun to shoot and edit, a collection of clips I had shot over the past year which I then edited and synced to match the tone and feel of Midnight Sinner. For me I wanted it to be more like a point in time that I can look back on and see where my sound developed and the video features some of my friends who are also musicians and it is an amazing feeling to be able to mark a point in your past with a video or audio and say “Yes that me. I was doing that back then.”
Can you clue us into any unknown talent that inspires you? That we might not have heard of?
Some artistes that inspire me that I know personally are the likes would be VIC, JOEJAS, Summer Alone, Dejivhs, dANNY TRASH and many many others, all have such a unique sound and up the only way for them I know it.
Electronic would-be K-Hand, WK7, Stones Taro, Lurka, Posthuman, San Tino, Najs, cybashawty or Leon Anibaldi- Pinty is doing some real interesting bits with house at the moment. Anyone involved with Air and Electricity also. They are a brilliant hip-hop events collective ran by one of my mates Antonio, and pre corona they put on the best shows featuring the best underground talent who I was the DJ for, their stories and the sheer passion everyone has always rubs off on me and the atmosphere and energy is genuinely incredible.
What can you tell us about the scene of your city? What will be coming back in 2021 hopefully!
The scene is honestly beautiful. The people you meet on a night out or at a person’s house or even on the side of a street, you can immediately tell whether they are involved and once that connections made; its pretty hard to break. People look after each other, treat each other with respect and it does not matter where you come from north, south, east west; everyone comes together just to enjoy the music and have a good time all whilst being safe.
What’s next for you in 2021??
Hopefully, a lot more shows! I cannot wait till I can get out there on the decks again nothing can beat that feeling of pleasing a crowd and If shows are not a possibility you can expect a few more projects at the very least. Am working on a physical exhibition that will hopefully be ready this year, coronavirus allowing, and have got some tracks in the bag that I cannot wait to share.
