Interview: Tlaotlon

An interview I conducted with Jeremy Coubrough aka Tlaotlon for The 405 in February 2015

"When I was thinking about making Natural Devices, I was thinking about when people say my music is challenging, or that they don't get an emotional resonance from it," reflects Melbourne-based New Zealand musician and producer Jeremy Coubrough. "That's not really what I wanted them to get or hear.  I wasn't pissed off about it, but it did make me think that it would be good for me to clarify what the project was about, both for myself and the listener." Better known in fringe music circles as Tlaotlon, Jeremy is chain-smoking outside a cafe in Wellington (the capital city of New Zealand) while recovering from performing at a loft rave the night before. Between drags, and sips of strong coffee, he offers up thoughts on his psychedelica and cyberpunk informed techno music, and its place within "the world of virtual life technology and handheld media devices." His eleventh release since 2011, Natural Devices sees Jeremy refining and polishing the syncopated man/machine rhythms and virtual reality soundworlds of his past singles, EPs and albums.

As part of this development, he decided to make use of more conventional musical language in his composition process, or as his album title suggests, Natural Devices. "What makes people engage more with a song?" Jeremy muses. "It's the techniques of songwriting and composition. They're devices. As a composer, you want the listener to feel this or hear that, and the way you signify that in popular music is with a breakdown, bridge or a rise and a drop. To me, this isn't really talked about in music, but you're manipulating someone's emotional response. With music people can get caught up in this idea that the performer is intuitive and magic, but they're not. Even people who write intuitively are at the same time making a very conscious decision to use this technique or device to drum up a particular reaction."

Having studied music when he was younger, and played in live bands since his teens, Jeremy was very aware of the above set of processes. While he wanted to employ them, he needed to find a way that made sense within Tlaotlon. "I thought if I'm going to use melodic material, what interests me?" "I couldn't help but think about notification sounds, alerts, alarms and all these other attention grabbing noises that permeate modern life." Rationalising that these sonic artefacts could serve the same function as a pop hook, Jeremy set about finding ways to put them to work, in the process creating a secondary technological read on the album title. "It's about getting your attention and then fulfilling your expectation of what that alert is meant to be for," he elaborates. "It made perfect sense as a way to draw the world and the broader environment of now into the music."

Throughout the eight songs on Natural Devices, Jeremy takes these devices and shapes them into hypnotic melodies and textures, letting loose-limbed percussion patterns circle in and out of each other around a heartbeat bass drum pulse that falls on every beat. As a listening experience, it's captivating and special. For the creator, however, it's a crowning achievement within the initial set of goals he established Tlaotlon with in the late 2000s. At the time busy playing in bands, Jeremy had been wary of electronic music production for several years due to, as he puts it, "...the data entry feeling of doing electronic music on a computer." When regional dance sounds like kudoro and footwork started to make their way out of Angola and Chicago respectively, he was captivated, but not as captivated as he wanted to be. "I was hearing some really interesting dance music again," Jeremy says. "This stuff was getting closer to what I wanted to hear in dance music, but I still had problems and issues with it. I thought I'd put a critical lens on it and make some stuff again to try and address these issues for myself."

His biggest issue was with the metronomic rhythmic-grid club music continued to operate within. Having discovered techno in his teens, while he understood this frame within the history of dance music, he felt something needed to change. "The rhythms of techno made perfect sense at the time they were first made," he reflects. "Detroit had the automotive industry and the idea of the factory assembly-line seemed to influence the music of the working class. In Berlin, you cross that with the spectre of fascism and their military history, the sound of enforced order and stomping boots. Then when you add in the burgeoning utopian vision of the internet and the potential power of code and anonymity, 4/4 slamming 808 and 909 beats makes perfect sense. The cultural landscape has changed, and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use super digital equipment, but I wanted my structures and forms to be analogue. I wanted them to have more in common with the way forces work inreal or virtual environments. Gusts of wind, waves of data, swarms of pop-ups or insects, replicating viruses, globs of accumulated data -  that was what made sense to me. I wanted, and still want to, invert the traditional rhythmic and functional mode of techno. I'm not saying this is how all techno should sound from this point; I just want to know what my contribution to it is, and what it could be." Across the album, he realises this digital naturalism, in the process opening new doors for those willing to follow; or better yet, find doorways of their own.

Released earlier this month via his own World Memory Records, Natural Devices arrives in an era of increasing fragmentation and widescreen openness within club music. For Jeremy, it's a fitting time to be doing what he does. "I feel like you can put anything on the table, and people will be receptive to it," he enthuses. "There is almost no centrifugal force anymore; everything is just happening in all these directions. Once you find your way into what is going on, there is so much great stuff to listen to right now. A lot of my favourite music of the last decade has come out over the last two years. That feels really significant to me."

Natural Devices is available now in digital download and cassette tape formats via World Memory Records here.