How do you make music, Headcleaner?
Dave Williams, aka Headcleaner, is a gigging Leeds-based techno musician having a release out back in 2000 on Rephlex. That there’s just one release is an indicator of his fondness for live music: The shows are built around one device - a large, yellow, (more than half home-made) Eurorack format analogue modular synth. It’s pre-patched and ridden live, and his sets are, partly by necessity, always fully improvised. That being the case, and even though his music certainly embodies the unpredictability of modulars, what’s most surprising is how danceable it is. It’s something at odds with the ‘swarm-of-bees-music’ stigma that analogue modulars can get associated with, but Headcleaner has designed his system for a specific purpose, and he performs it very well.
Question One: How do you make music - ie. what are your strategies, methods and thought processes (as you write) and why do they work for you?
I don’t write music as a piece very often, only when people ask for it. I’m very much about live performance and as such I dont write music at all, I let the machine do that - I just guide it along using standard tricks of arrangement in dance music and just whacking whatever sequence happens to be running. It’s amazing really that it works, but I think with the kind of wonky atonal techno I lean towards it’s doable, or at least get-away-with-able!
At the moment I have my drum section which is fairly simple: the snare is on a separate constant 8-step sequence to keep things ticking along, and the bass drum goes at whatever 8/7/5/3 step loop, and hats doing whatever really, again they’re just there to keep things ticking. The synth parts are the thing really though. I have 4 at the moment to flick between (plus a sampler for vocal stabs). Each is 1 or 2 oscillators going into a filter or VCA. I have 6 separate 8-step sequencers which I have at pretty much random settings, plus a couple of gate combiners and CV mixers. From one sequencer I always patch the gates to one part and the cv to a different one, this gives a lot of interlacing overstep timings and gives some correlation between the parts. For the sequencers, I have them all set to different reset points/step lengths - so using a 6 step gate sequence for a 7 step CV pattern and vice versa for example…
